Carlos Barbarito

The dead are not like us. Suspended
in the midday still, they miss
satiety and thirst. They wane,
yet stay. Their eyes are set aside,
...

The rock grows like the plant grows,
it feels the cold, the heat, fear,
cries out, shouts, laughs.
What can we believe, what measurement can we use,
...

He cuts into immobile matter,
useless echo of an ancient, arduous love
amid roots. He cuts
like one who feels pity
...

It does not matter in what language one writes.
All language is foreign, incomprehensible.
Every word, as soon as pronounced,
flees far away, where nothing or nobody can reach it.
...

This is my life, the leaf seems to say
as it falls from the branch
or the stone that rolls down the hillside.
Not much: no faith
...

Laughter beyond the wall.
They are two, maybe three. They play
In the water, splash and laugh.
They must be naked, wet
...

Nothing grows except the grass.
Nothing leaps into sight except some stone
and what the stone contains and protects.
...

What is the measure, the table,
the outline? In the shadow, instinct;
in the light, rust
that migrates from cable to cable.
...

The dream flees the dream,
nothing can hold it, neither
rope, nor magnet, nothing. And this remains,
wood that burns and smokes, alone.
...

Against a wind that breaks,
some are suspended by a thread over earth
...

A bird comes to the most distant and solitary shore.
It drinks a little of the water
that becomes turbid with sand
and then resumes its flight,
...