PATAGONIAN LANDSCAPES

1. DESOLATION

The seafoam, endless, thick, so I couldn’t find
the line where the sea dashed its wave at me.
The land I came to doesn’t have spring:
it has its long night, in which I find no mother.

The wind at my house makes its round of laments
and howling; breaks, like a mirror, my shout.
And in the white prairies, the infinite horizon,
I gaze at the dying of immense sorrowful sunsets.

What to call her, she who has come
so far that only the dead have gone further?
The dead, so alone, study an ocean hushed and grow stiff,
frozen the arms of the dead, in the arms of those they love.

The ships whose sails fly white in the harbor
come from lands where my loved ones never have been;
their bright-eyed men don’t know my rivers
and bring forth pale fruits without the light of my orchards.

And the question that rises in my throat
upon seeing them pass, falls, conquered:
they speak strange tongues and are not moved
by the words that my ancient mother sings in lands of gold.

I watch the snow as if the dust of graves;
I watch the mist form and grow like death throes,
and so as not to go mad I don’t count the seconds,
because the long night now so lonely begins.

I watch the entraptured prairie, gather to me its pain,
I that came to see the mortal lands.
The snow is the semblance that appears in my mirror;
its whiteness will ever be, ever under the heavens!

Ever, she, grandly silent, like the lofty gaze
of God upon me; ever her bridal wreath laid over my house;
ever, like a fate that never fades nor comes to pass,
she will descend to cover me, terrible and ecstatic.