Muerte sin Fin

Filled with myself, walled up in my skin 
by an inapprehensible god that is stifling me, 
deceived perhaps 
by his radiant atmosphere of light 
that hides my drained 
conscience, 
my wings broken into splinters of air, 
my listless groping through the mire; 
filled with myself—gorged—I discover my essence 
in the astonished image of water, 
that is only an unwithering cascade, 
a tumbling of angels fallen 
of their own accord in pure delight, 
that has nothing 
but a whitened face 
half sunken, already, like an agonized laugh 
in the thin sheets of the cloud 
and the mournful canticles of the sea— 
more aftertaste of salt or cumulus whiteness 
than lonely haste of foam pursued. 
Nevertheless—oh paradox—constrained 
by the rigor of the glass that clarifies it, 
the water takes shape. 
In the glass it sits, sinks deep and builds, 
attains a bitter age of silences 
and the graceful repose of a child smiling 
in death, that deflowers 
a beyond of disbanded 
birds. 
In the crystal snare that strangles it, 
there, as in the water of a mirror, 
it recognizes itself; 
bound there, drop with drop, 
the trope of foam withered in its throat. 
What intense nakedness of water, 
what water so strongly water, 
is dreaming in its iridescent sphere, 
already singing a thirst for rigid ice! 
But what a provident glass—also— 
that swells 
like a star ripe with grain, 
that flames in heroic promise 
like a heart inhabited by happiness, 
and that punctually yields up 
to the water 
a round transparent flower, 
a missile eye that attains heights 
and a window to luminous cries 
over that smoldering liberty 
oppressed by white fetters!