The whole night long I have slept with you next to the sea, on the island. You were wild and gentle between pleasure and dreams, between fire and water.
Perhaps very late our dreams were united in the heights or in the depths, op high like branches moved by the same wind, down below like red roots touching each other.
Perhaps your dream broke away from mine and searched for me across the darkness of the sea as before when you did not yet exist, when without noticing you I sailed right past you, and your eyes searched for those things which now —bread, wine, love and anger— I give you by the handful because you are the goblet that was waiting for the gifts of my life.
I have slept with you the whole night long, while the dark earth turns with the living and the dead, and when I awoke suddenly in the middle of the darkness my arm was round your waist. Neither night nor our dreams could separate us.
I have slept with you and when I awoke your mouth coming out of your dream gave me the taste of the earth, of sea-water, of seaweed, from the depths of your life, and I received your kiss moistened by the dawn as if it came to me from the sea which encircles us.
La noche en la isla
Toda la noche he dormido contigo junto al mar, en la isla. Salvaje y dulce eras entre el placer y el sueño, entre el fuego y el agua.
Tal vez muy tarde nuestros sueños se unieron en lo alto o en el fondo, arriba como ramas que un mismo viento mueve, abajo como rojas raíces que se tocan.
Tai vez tu sueño se separó del mío y por el mar oscuro me buscaba como antes cuando aún no existías, cuando sin divisarte navegué por tu lado, y tus ojos buscaban lo que ahora —pan, vino, amor y cólera— te doy a manos llenas porque tú eres la copa que esperaba los dones de mi vida.
He dormido contigo toda la noche mientras la oscura tierra gira con vivos y con muertos, y al despertar de pronto en medio de la sombra mi brazo rodeaba tu cintura. Ni la noche, ni el sueño pudieron separarnos.
He dormido contigo y al despertar tu boca salida de tu sueño me dio el sabor de tierra, de agua marina, de algas, del fondo de tu vida, y recibí tu beso mojado por la aurora como si me llegara del mar que nos rodea.
"This is the task I always charge my poems with: there must be something (a way of life for instance) the speakers within the poems are not afraid to lose in the name of feeling whole and human. It’s also why I am drawn to the lyric mode. Within the lyric mode, a problem or question becomes the engine behind the poem; the motor that keeps the machine of the poem chugging along."
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"When I first saw the bandelette in the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, in Paris’s Marais district, I immediately experienced one of those Rilkean “bursts,” for here was an object, that in its ornate yet near-transparent being, invoked so much of the social, cultural and historic struggles of the Jews which are writ large across and infuse the whole of Western culture from earliest times through the rise of Christianity and the Church fathers, on up to the Shoah."
