Being Born in the Woods
When the rice withdraws from the earth
the grains of its flour,
when the wheat hardens its little hip-joints and lifts its face of a thousand hands,
I make my way to the grove where the woman and the man embrace,
to touch the innumerable sea
of what continues.
I am not a brother of the implement carried on the tide
as in a cradle of embattled mother-of-pearl:
I do not tremble in the territory of the dying garbage,
I do not wake at the shock of the dark
that is frightened by the hoarse leaf-stalks of the sudden bell,
I cannot be, I am not the traveller
under whose shoes the last remnants of the wind throb
and the waves come back rigid out of time to die.
I carry in my hand the dove that sleeps recumbent in the seed
and in its dense ferment of lime and blood
August lives,
raised out of its deep goblet the month lives:
with my hand I encircle the new shadow of the wing that is growing:
the root and the feather that will form the thicket of tomorrow.
The immense growth of the drop, and the eyelid yearning to be open
never diminish, neither beside the balcony of iron hands
nor in the maritime winter of the abandoned, nor in my late footstep:
for I was born in order to be born, to contain the steps
of all that approaches, of all that beats on my breast like a new trembling heart.
Lives resting beside my clothes like parallel doves
or contained in my own existence and in my lawless sound
in order to return to being, to lay hold on the air denuded of its leaf
and on the moist birth of the soil in the wreath: how long
can I return and be, how long can the odour
of the most deeply buried flowers, of the waves most finely
pulverized on the high rocks, preserve in me their homeland
where they can return to be fury and perfume?
How long will the hand of the woods in the rain
come close to me with all its needles
to weave the high kisses of the foliage?
Again
I listen to the approach, like that of a fire in smoke,
of the birth of the light full of petals
from the ash of earth,
and dividing the ground
into a river of wheat ears the sun reaches my mouth
like an old buried tear that has become seed again.
Translation by W.S.Merwin
Tercrera Residencia 1935-45 (1947)
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