By Luis Alberto Ambroggio

Translated by Yvette Neisser

 

 

LIGHT AT THE END

 

If your feet were to tread on smoke

triumphing sadly over melancholy,

if your hands, for example, were to construct

golden palaces that vanish,

if your bread had only

the alchemy of a desire,

if your mother were an armless shadow,

your lover perhaps a dead man,

if all the days encircling you

were to shine bitterly on the ashes,

if the future of your eyes at daybreak

were tinted by the menacing half-light,

I don’t know if you would exist

or if anyone could exist in such agony.

 

Looking at you, looking at me,

I convince myself that smoke is not to be played with.

 

If light, on the other hand, were to kiss us

and absorb us completely

the way lovers absorb each other

we would greet each dawn with song.

 

Did God create light

or did he create darkness?

 

 

 

THREE BLUE MOVEMENTS

 

and a ghost

 

To rob an instant

from the hummingbird is enough

to immortalize the air.

 

The moist fascination of wind

caresses otherness as if it were

the soft mirror of sabers.

 

Light penetrates the forest

with the lust of a joyful river.

Night encloses a great distance

 

and a duende.

 

 

  

 

ARS POETICA

 

By Luis Alberto Ambroggio

Translated by Yvette Neisser

         

“..poets do not describe a rose,

create her…”

(Vicente Huidobro)

 

 

Seduce me as you let me conquer the mystery of your blossom

and if I linger over a petal until exhausted from sweetness and fatigue

wrap me in your softness with the magic of your hands and silks.

 

Drink my copious rain and sing it with the luster of your green eyes.

Ignite your colors, open the fervor of your wings, so that I may be reborn

as a creature of air at the very summit of your sky.

 

And while my body grows to fill your corolla and your desire,

moisten my flight, with your voice, with your sap, my preferred lips.

You know, love, that I have yet to write my best lines.