Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Spanish Edition) (25 page)
Read Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Spanish Edition) Online
Authors: Antonio Machado
to José Ortega y Gasset
1
The eye you see is not
an eye because you see it.
It is eye because it sees you.
2
To converse
first ask,
then... listen.
3
All narcissism glows
as an ugly vice
and one by now old.
4
But seek in your mirror the other
who walks with you.
5
Between living and dream
there is a third way.
Guess it.
6
Now your Narcissus
can’t spot himself in the mirror
since he is the glass.
7
A new century? Still the same
flaming up the same forge?
And does water still race
in old pipes into a gorge?
8
Today is always still.
9
Sun in the Ram. My window
is open to the cold air.
O gossip of far water!
The twilight wakes the river.
10
In the ancient hamlet
—O wide towers with storks!—
the chatty noise dies out,
and in the solitary field
water sounds among the rocks.
11
Again I play my part
bound up with water,
yet water in the living
rock of my heart.
12
When water sounds, can you know
if it is water from a peak or valley,
a plaza, garden or from an orchard?
13
What I find astounds me:
leaves of garden balm
smell of ripe lemon.
14
Never lay out your frontier
or sharpen your profile.
That is all veneer.
15
Look for your counterpart
who always walks with you
and mostly is what you are not.
16
When spring comes
soar into flowers.
Don’t suck wax.
17
In my solitude
I have seen very clear things
that are not true.
18
Good are water and thirst,
good are shadow and sun;
the honey from rosemary,
the honey of a flowerless field.
19
At the border of the road
there is a stone fountain
and a small earthen jar
—gurgling—that no one moves.
20
Guess this riddle.
What is a fountain,
a jug and water?
21
I’ve seen people even
drink from mud puddles.
Thirst has its caprices.
22
Let there be but one symbol:
quod elixum est ne asato.
Don’t roast what’s been boiled.
23
Sing, sing, sing,
the cricket in its cage
next to its tomato.
24
Slowly shape a good letter.
Making things fine
means more than making them.
25
Anyhow.
Ah! anyhow,
it’s vital to liven your oars,
the snail told the greyhound.
26
At last some active men!
The puddle was dreaming
of its mosquitoes.
27
O empty skull!
To think it all took place
inside you, skull!
said a second Dr. Pandolfo.
28
Singers, leave
the clapping and cheers
to others.
29
Wake up, singers:
Let echoes end,
voices begin.
30
Don’t hunt for dissonance.
In the end nothing sounds bad
and people dance to any tune.
31
A wrestler over the hill.
Yesterday a prince,
tomorrow trash.
32
Brawler, boxer,
beat up the wind.
33
Anyhow.
Oh, anyhow,
You hang onto the fetish of waiting
for your quota of punches.
34
O rinnovarsi o perire...
It doesn’t sound good.
Navigare è necessario...
39
Better. Live to see.
35
A new cipher is ripening
and will snare its groupies.
An activist is as useless
as a rational being.
36
The poet doesn’t look
for the fundamental I
40
but the essential you.
37
A doctor said: “As old
as the world” means to be
learned, forgotten and buried
like Rameses’s mummy.
38
But the doctor didn’t know
that today is always still.
39
Find a mirror in someone,
but not for shaving
or dyeing your hair.
40
The eyes you sigh for,
get it straight,
eyes you see yourself in
are eyes because they see you.
41
“Now old words are heard.”
Well, sharpen your ears.
42
Christ teaches: love your neighbor
as yourself, yet never
forget the neighbor is someone else.
43
He said another truth:
Find the you who is never yours
and never can be.
44
Don’t despise words.
Poets, the world is noisy
and mute. Only God talks.
45
Everything for others?
Young man, fill your jar
so they will drink it up.
46
One lies more than can be counted
for lack of imagination.
Truth also is invented.
47
Authors, the scene ends
with one rule of theater:
In the beginning was the mask.
48
The worst of the gang
of scoundrels is one who forgets
his vocation as devil.
49
Did you say a half-truth?
They’ll say you lie twice
if you spill the other half.
50
To you I don’t allude
in my song, friend.
That you is me.
41
51
Give time to time.
For your cup to run over.
you must fill it first.
52
Hour of my heart.
The hour of a hope
and a despair.
53
Beyond living and dreaming
is what matters most:
coming awake.
54
His voice quivers when he sings.
Now they don’t hiss his lyrics,
they’re hissing his heart.
55
Now there were some who said:
Cogito ergo non sum.
42
What an exaggeration!
56
Gypsy talk.
“How are we doing, pal?”
“Circling down the shortcut.”
57
Some in despair
only heal with the rope,
others with seven words.
Faith is back in style.
58
I thought my fireplace dead
and stirred the ashes.
I burned my fingers.
59
He broke into a laugh!
A very serious man!
No one would guess it.
60
Let’s divvy the work.
The bad guys dip the arrow,
the good ones flex the bow.
61
Like don Sem Tob,
he dies his white hair
and more reasonably.
62
To find work for the wind
he sewed the tree’s dry leaves
with a double thread.
63
He felt the four winds
at the crossroads
of his thought.
64
Do you know the invisible
spinners of dreams?
Two of them: green hope
and grim fear.
They bet on who
spins more and more lightly,
she with a gold ball,
he with a black ball.
With the thread we are given
we weave when we weave.
65
Sow mallow
but don’t eat it,
said Pythagoras.
Answer the ax
—said the Buddha and the Christ!—
with your sandalwood aroma.
It’s good to remember
the old words
that come back and ring out.
66
Pay attention.
A solitary heart
is not a heart.
67
Bees, singers,
not to the honey but to flowers.
68
Every fool has the vice
of confusing worth and price.
69
He saw his shadow walking in dreams.
Good hunter of himself,
always lying in ambush.
70
He caught his bad man,
who on sunblue days
walks with his head down.
71
Give your poems double light,
reading them head on
and at an angle.
72
Don’t worry if it goes around
and slips from hand to hand:
out of gold is made a coin.
73
From an
Art of Table Manners,
lesson one:
You must not pick up the spoon
with the fork.
74
Lord Saint Jerome,
let go of that stone
you pound yourself with.
He bashed me with it.
75
Gypsy talk:
“For going around
take the middle road.
You’ll never get there.”
76
Your tongue sets the tone,
not too high nor too low.
Just stay with it.
77
Tartarin in Kant’s Königsberg!
With his cheek on his fist,
he managed to learn everything.
43
78
Melt gold in a smelting cup,
and engrave lyre and bow
not on a jewel but a coin.
79
In the Castilian ballad,
don’t look for harsh Spanish salt.
Poet, better than an old ballad
is the singing of young women.
They leave you with something
you can’t deny: a melody
of tracing song and story
of a yesterday that still is.
80
A concept pristine pure
is usually an empty husk.
Maybe it’s a red cauldron.
81
If it is good to live
it is better to dream,
and best of all,
Mother, to wake.
82
Not sun but a bell
when it wakes you
is the peak of morning.
83
What wit! In sad Hesperia,
44
the western promontory,
in this tired tail end
of Europe, ready to be skinned,
and in an ancient city
tiny like a thimble,
the little man smoking
and thinking, laughing as he thinks.
The high towers have fallen,
and in the trash can
lie the Kaiser’s crown
and the Czar’s head.
Baeza, 1919
84
Among the figs I am soft.
Among the rocks I am stone.
That’s bad!
85
Your truth? No, Truth,
and come with me to look for it.
Yours, you can keep it.
86
In my solitude
I have friends.
When I am with them
how remote they are!
87
O Guadalquivir!
I saw you born in Cazorla,
and die today in Sanlúcar.
A bubble of bright water,
under a green pine,
you were. How wonderful your sound!
Like me, near the sea,
river of brackish mud,
do you dream of your springs?
88
Baroque thought
paints shavings of fire.
It swells and complicates adornment.
89
Nevertheless.
Oh, nevertheless,
there’s always one true burning coal
in the blaze of the theater.
90
Are the leaves of sweet basil,
lavender and sage
now ashamed of their fragrance?
91
Ever on high, ever on high.
Renewal? From above.
The grease pole told the tree.
92
The tree said, Fear the ax,
O pole nailed in the ground.
For you, pruning is downfall.
93
What is truth? The river
that flows and passes by
where the boat and boatman
are also waves of water?
Or this sailor’s dream
always of shore and anchor?
94
I give advice, an old man’s vice:
never follow my advice.
95
Yet there is no reason
to disdain
advice that is confession.
96
Do you feel the new sap?
Take care, sapling,
that no one finds out.
97
Be careful that the dry pole
doesn’t hear about
your green eyes.
98
Your prophecy, poet.
“Tomorrow the dumb will speak
heart and stone.”
99
“But art?”
“It is pure game
that is the same as pure life
that is the same as pure fire.
You will see coal burn.”
39
“Either renew yourself or perish” and “Sailing is necessary” are Italian sayings found in Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938), an energetic writer, who later supported Mussolini during the Fascist regime.
40
Reference is again to Bergson’s “Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness.” See notes 20 and 22 on Bergson.
41
In keeping with love and the metaphysics of the mirrored world as fantasy and illusion, these ironic words parallel the wisdom and cunning of Walt Whitman in his “Song of Myself,” who is always seeking you, whose you and I are paradoxically the same in separation and union, and who ends “Song of Myself” with those paradoxes, saying, “If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles,” and concludes, saying, “I stop somewhere waiting for you.”
42
Machado turns “Je pense, donc je suis” of Descartes (who also quotes the Latin) into
Cogito ergo non sum,
meaning “I think, therefore I am not.”
43
Ironically, he links Alphonse Daudet’s Tartarin de Tarascon, who claims great trips he never made, to his hero Kant, who wrote his
Critique
without leaving his city of Königsberg.
