Silvina Ocampo Poems

No one can pronounce your name.
I alone know the perfect inflection.
They lack the tenderness in which it flows
...

The waves, the seaweed, the widening wings,
the seashells rent and resonant,
...

Like a drink of water I gave shade
in summer. My sap captured
the gold of evening and the pale
...

When the dew descended yesterday,
amid future stamens and corollas,
I perished in a garden that presented
...

We go leaving ourselves in every direction,
in beds, in rooms, in fields, in seas, in cities,
and each one of those fragments
...

It would be useless to cover mirrors
so that the people inside don't get out
who have lodged there
...

Be careful with your imagination.
Someplace on earth it remains, all the time it follows us
little by little turning into crude or delicate reality
...

Dolphins don't play in the waves
as people think.
Dolphins fall asleep going down to the ocean floor.
What are they looking for? I don't know.
...

I who move like water
sinuously
like water I know
...

You didn't listen to the beating of a tree's heart,
couched against the trunk gazing upwards,
you didn't see the leaves moving
...