"To a cat" by Jorge Luis Borges
No mirrors are quieter
no more furtive the adventurous dawn;
you are, in the moonlight, that panther
who is given to us spotted from afar.
By an indecipherable work of a divine
decree, we seek you in vain;
more remote than the Ganges and West,
yours is the solitude, yours the secret.
Your haunch allows the lingering
caress of my hand. You have accepted,
from eternity that is already forgotten,
the love of the apprehensive hand.
You are in another time. You are the owner
of a closed ambience like a dream.
"Coveted, prohibited" by Jaime Sabines
Coveted, prohibited
close to me, one step away, sorceress.
Offering yourself with your eyes to those who pass,
looking at you, mature, overflowing,
asking for your body to be their tomb.
malignant young, virgin
ignited, closed
I'm watching and loving you,
Your blood in turmoil,
your head spinning and climbing,
your horizontal body on grapes and smoke.
You're perfect, desired.
I love you and your mother when you are together.
She is still beautiful and has
what you do not know.
I can't decide who I prefer
when she fixes your dress
and let you go in search for love.
"Art" by Julián del Casal
When life, as immense burden,
Weighs about the tired spirit
And before the last God drifts burned
The latter grain of fragrant incense;
When we taste, with intense eagerness,
From all bitter poisoned fruit
And boredom, with masked face,
Confronts us on the vast road;
The great soul, lonely and pure
Despised by the petty reality,
Finds in art ignored bliss,
As the halcyon, in cold obscure night,
Seeking asylum in the mossy rock
Inundating the blue sea of silver waves.
"Pupa" by José Asunción Silva
When the girl, still sick
went out one morning
and walked with hesitating steps
the neighboring mountain,
she brought between a bouquet of wild flowers
hidden a chrysalis,
placed in her room, close to
the little white bed...
.................................................................
A few days later, at the moment
when she expired,
and everybody saw her, with their eyes
clouded by tears,
at the time of her death, we felt
the faint sound of wings
and we saw escape, flying away through
the old window
opening onto the garden, a small
golden butterfly...
.................................................................
I looked for the insect's prison,
now empty, with a quick view;
As I saw it, I watched the dead girl's
withered and pale forehead,
and I thought if upon leaving her sad jail
the winged butterfly,
would find light and immense space,
the campestral emanations,
as they leave the prison that holds them
what would their souls find?
"Oblivion" by Idea Vilariño
When a soft mouth sleeping mouth kisses
as dying then,
sometimes when it reaches beyond the lips
and the eyelids fall full of desire
quietly consenting like the air,
the skin with its silky warmth asks for nights
and the kissed mouth
in its ineffable pleasure asks for nights, too.
Ah, silent nights, of soft dark moons,
long nights, sumptuous, crossed by pigeons
in an air made out of hands, love, given tenderness,
nights like ships...
It is then, in high passion, when the one who kisses
knows ah, too much, without respite, and sees that now
the world becomes a distant miracle
opening deep summers on lips,
abdicated by his conscience,
that he is finally forgotten in a kiss
and a passionate wind undresses his temples,
it is then, kissing, that eyelids descend,
and the air shudders with a hint of life,
and what is not air
also quivers, the ardent beam of the hair,
the velvet of the voice now, and, sometimes,
the illusion populated by suspended deaths.
