Above the White Waters of Disappearance

Elizabeth Schön (Caracas, 1921-2007)




The sunken leaf on the sidewalk
is direct cultivation to what we're transiting








To grip the real
its own and original
until staying amid solitude, wind
and that taste of waters
born of the heart
as if one day's breeze
yesterday
and yet another day
today
were the same river
that blood's other, the skin
with soft eyes
sweetly following change








Confidence
if the heart approaches another
and listens to a beating almost as
its very own
The heart
drawn in by previous links
recalls the sunrise
that gave her the farm
with meanderings and the shores
from which to oversee the body's descent
facing the sun's wire fence
and beside the hands wrapped
in the breeze of the bee we couldn't hold








Time and its cup of burdens
filled with our round harvest
like the wind as it drifts on desolate plains
The instant is unknown
when the face will escape
and the bird will intern itself
among the white waters of disappearance








For shadow the sun diminishes routes
man traverses them
until finding that space
of a white rose above the book's ink
bound to another for shadow
which, without any pressure
penetrates the fates' dark mushrooms








The sea does not depart
from its first, abysmal cavity
Man loves the roundness of the face
with shadows trailing him
The fruit lives
inside the cycle's humid stamen
same as that cedar inseparable from blood
with which we'll one day
enter when the body is diluted
to jump inside disappearance's dark cliff








In the flesh-colored gate of the furrows
the splendor of a sun likewise tuned to
the unceasing thread of death
Love goes, touches, continues
until the root rises if someone walks
after the bird's plant
seeking forested waterfalls, thick oaks
ignoring the unseen lintels
of the last depth
already happening quickly and complete








The spaces, the airs, the bodies
do not eliminate the cosmos
The light shakes
City
Beds
The book's pages slip
they close within day
disappear in night's hardness
The end relies on the instant
within the available thread
of the word death
and the word river








Man gathers his shadow
puts it where earth sustains its dwellings
without frightening the bees
or coveting shields, coats of arms
Above the horizon, solitude:
clod that won't bend
because the bird always rises
looking for its original place
The soul otherwise
enters that blue's whiteness
with the last hydrangea's door








Death:
stone that carries off when it punctures us
the inseparable waters of the river we are








The voice does not speak
It lives in the waters' beehive
relinquishing its great untouchable wing
that flowed from the hands
when they could not sustain
Box of days
after its river scent has opened?




Elizabeth Schön, "Sobre las aguas blancas de la desaparición," Del río hondo aquí (Caracas: Editorial Diosa Blanca, 2000).