Xavier Villaurrutia (1903-1950)

Love Nocturne
                   To Manuel Rodríguez Lozano
The nothing that is heard in this cistern of shadow
I don’t know how my arms are not hurting
I pursue in your breathing  the pain of the crime
and you fall into the net that dream stretches out
You keep the name of your accomplice in your eyes
but I find your eyelashes harder than silence
and rather than share it you would kill the pleasure
of handing yourself over to sleep with closed eyes
I suffer feeling the pleasure with which your body searches
for a body that conquers you more than sleep
and I compare the fever of you hands
to my hands of ice
and the throbbing of your temples to my lost pulse
and the plaster of my thighs to the skin of yours
that shadow corrodes with incurable leprosy
I now know the sex of your mouth
and what the avarice of your armpit holds
and I curse the rumour that floods the labyrinth of your ear
on the pillow of froth
on the hard page of snow
Not the blood that flees from me as the arrow flies from the bow
but anger circulates through my arteries
yellow with fire half of the night
and all the words in the prison of my mouth
and a thirst that quenches in the mirror’s water
an identical thirst
From what night do I wake to this naked
night long and cruel night no longer night
beside your body deader than dead
that is not your body but its void
because the absence of your dream has killed death
and my coldness is so great that with a new heat
it opens my eyes where shadow is harder
and clearer and brighter than light itself
and it renews in me what has not been
and it is an unexpected pain even colder and more fiery
not being but that statue that awakens
in the bedroom of the world where everything has died.