Memory
If I were weak, if
I yielded to your song a single instant,
I could nevermore
free myself from your nets
and I would struggle,
motionless at your center,
for the centuries or the hours I still have left.
I hear you in the distance,
you talk
of things that are also distant,
but I do not listen,
I shut my ears,
and I look at the sea, the sky, the gulls,
with all my attention fixed upon their flight,
with all my soul upon their adventure.
You do not have the strength to stop me,
but
each time that I hear you despite myself,
I waver
and I feel
a need to lie down
upon the white sand of the beach
and weep, listening to your stories
that begin in a thousand different ways
only to end
always
the same way:
"man, alone, facing the sea, at last..."
- Angel Gonzalez, "Memory," collected in "Harsh World" and Other Poems, trans. Donald D. Walsh, Princeton University Press, 1977, p. 57.
