The Dawn's Debility
The day of the luckless, the pale day peers out
with a chill and piercing smell, with its forces gray,
without rattles, the dawn oozing everywhere:
it is a shipwreck in a void, surrounded by tears.
Because the moist, silent shadow departed from so many places,
from so many vain cavilings, so many earthly places
where it must have occupied even the design of the roots,
from so many sharp and self-defending shapes.
I weep amid invasion, among confusion,
among the swelling taste, lending an ear
to the pure circulation, to the increase,
making pathless way for what arrives,
what comes forth dressed in chains and carnations,
I dream, enduring my mortal remains.
There is nothing precipitous, or gay, or proud in form,
everything appears, taking shape with obvious poverty,
the light of the earth comes from its eyelids
not like the stroke of a bell but rather like tears:
the texture of the day, its feeble canvas,
serves as a bandage for the patients, serves to make signs
in a farewell, behind the absence:
it is the color that wants only to replace,
to cover, swallow, conquer, make distances.
I am alone among rickety substances,
the rain falls upon me and it seems like me,
like me with its madness, alone in the dead world,
rejected as it falls, and without persistent shape.
[pablo.neruda]
