THREE POEMS BY JOSÉ MANUEL CABALLERO BONALD:
WASTE OF TIME:
There's a great white bird,
nesting in the word time, a consecutive
loss of past historic,
and some surplus of fleetingness.
Other words interweave
in the word time, of the same stock:
The slow, perpetual sea, and its fathomless
wearing away, fate ever wandering,
and the astronomic light gap.
The one strategy best poised to defeat time
is to be able to waste it, and go unpunished.
I DO NOT KNOW FROM WHENCE YOU COME:
Now I remember the speakable river
that flowed below your name, the house in whose kingdom
the bitter day walked, meandering around the clear maternal walls.
I remember it all together, although, I don't know,
something escapes me, like a remnant
of light, like a sense of absence,
something that I forget and yet understand
that it is most decisive. And suddenly
I no longer know anything of yours.
THE DISQUIET OF THE PERFORMED DUTY:
Blessed he who, one morning,
suddenly
turns aside from the road he used to walk each day,
for years, until the irrevocable
district of duty.
So what made him digress:
The ineffective sameness of inertia,
taedium vitae repeatedly ongoing like a merciless
devastation, the dampened
distance between morons and their prisons?
Did he unwittingly choose the least
predictable, that's to say, the fairest way?
Blessed he who one day decided to retrace his life
until reaching one very unendorseable peace.