Topographies almost as a dictionary Poem by Ana Luisa Amaral

Re-learn the world
anew:
brief burst of sun revealed
in a swan,
a mermaid harmonising the universe

Only the wind succumbs
to the excess of light,
and only the wind,
a lute in blue,
slowly repeats the same sound:

It doesn't matter where I am
I don't need a traveller's
map

Your fingers marked
the subtlest route over my body
and their timeless
topographic curve
stayed there, like a smile, or the mouth
of a nameless river

It doesn't matter where I am:
this line of firs or pine trees
sloping softly,
lightly, towards the sea,
can be everything

It can even bring the swan
from the line above
and place it here, on this one,
now,
or disorganise one third
of the mermaid and turn her
into an island infused
with whatever peace

It doesn't matter where
I am

They say the Greeks
knew five ways to talk
of love.
We only know one, which cannot contain
the near paradox
of love being all we know of love
and nothing else

It would be good to have, in the verse,
all those ways, all those words
close at hand: a brief dictionary
that might know all inner
landscapes

Not to resist time

I don't know if the Greeks had several
ways to talk of death,
or even if love
has borrowed some of those ways
for its self-definition

There is literature that speaks of what is
upstream from love,
but it's not - eros, thanatos,
their connection, their being-between-
being

But all that is known
is repeated in the path of the mermaid,
her enigma
transfigured into the swan

They say the swan only sings
when it's dying.
But we need to organise the wind
so as to paint its speed
in a deeper blue

I ask the wind for a sound
an image
as bright and dazzled
as the ones I have
in front of me

No answer from the wind though,
implausible that it should speak

The route you marked remains,
however, and my body
recognises the touch
of your fingers

Where is that which is depicted
in verse,
in the midst of all this?

Where are all the words
hiding?
I know I need a new way,
a new word
for the frame, or the colour

learning through
seeing is
what I'm missing now

- only the sun is left,
shedding light on the very spot
where a traveller's map is useless
All else: invented
more than three thousand years
ago, among temples and stairways where
disobedient disciples sat

I resort to the lute,
- but only the verse speaks,
answering me

Rhyming lines, fiery
circles, fragments inundating
already written words

I stamp this sea, on all of them
and dream these are the words.
In the morning of this sun,
I see them thus,
knowing them for the time they hold,
almost sacred temples where I paint
the day in colours,
inherited from a thousand generations

In tradition of no travel,
they are the only
point of resistance

Everything else: an invention,
moulded and remoulded,
centuries multiplied a hundred
times

More than four thousand years
into this new era,
and nothing is new under
this sun

Perhaps only this
abyss.

On the map, do I disrupt
the precipice?

The trace of your fingers,
a route that nearly harbours mermaid,
lute, time,
on this route
- I suspend it

Translation by Ana Hudson