W.S. Merwin

I love you at ten in the morning (tiếng Anh)

I love you at ten in the morning, at eleven, at twelve noon. I love you with my whole soul and whole body, sometimes, on rainy afternoons. But at two in the afternoon, or at three, when I start to think about the two of us, and you are thinking about dinner or the day’s work, or the amusements you don’t have, I start to hate you with a dull hatred, with half of the hatred that I reserve for myself.

Then I go back to loving you, when we go to bed and I feel that you are made for me, that in some way your knee and your belly are telling me that, that my hands are assuring me of that, and that there is nowhere I can come to or go to that is better than your body. The whole of you comes to meet me and for a moment we both disappear, we put ourselves into the mouth of God, until I tell you that I am hungry or sleepy.

Every day I love you and hate you irreparably. And there are days, besides, there are hours, in which I don’t know you, in which you are strange to me as somebody else’s wife. Men worry me, I worry about myself, my troubles bewilder me. Probably there is a long time when I don’t think about you at all. So you see. Who could love you less than I do, my love?

The pedestrian (tiếng Anh)

It’s said, it’s rumored, it’s asserted in the salons and at celebrations by somebody, or a number of people in the know, that Jaime Jabines is a great poet. Or at least a good poet. Or a decent poet, respectable. Or simply, but really, a poet.

The word reaches Jaime and it makes him happy. How wonderful! I’m a poet. I’m an important poet. I’m a great poet.

Convinced of it, he goes out into the street, or comes home. Convinced of it. But nobody in the street realized that he’s a poet, and even fewer at home.
Why don’t poets have a star on the forehead, or shine in some visible way; or have a ray coming out of the ears?

My God, Jaime said. I have to be Papa, or a husband, or work in a factory like anybody else, or walk, like anybody else. A pedestrian.

That’s it, Jaime said. I’m not a poet, I’m a pedestrian.

And at that he lies on the bed with the sweet happiness of contentment.

I am my body (tiếng Anh)

I am my body. And my body is sad and tired. I’m ready to sleep for a week, a month. Not to be disturbed.

I hope that when I open my eyes my children will have grown up and everything will be smiling.

I want to stop walking around barefoot in the cold. Cover me up with everything that’s warm, the sheets, the blankets, a few papers and keepsakes, and close the door to keep my solitude in.

I want to sleep for a month, a year, go to sleep. And if I talk in my sleep don’t pay any attention, if I say a name, if I complain, I want to be considered buried, so that there’s nothing for you to do until resurrection day.

Now I want to sleep for year, just sleep.

At midnight (tiếng Anh)

At midnight, at the last moment of August, I think sadly about the leaves that keep falling from the calendars. I feel that I am the tree of the calendars.

Everyday, my child, that goes away forever, leaves me asking: if someone who loses a parent is an orphan, if someone who has lost a wife is a widower, what is the world for someone who loses a child? What is the word for someone who loses time? And I myself am time, what is the word for me if I lose myself?

Day and night, not Monday or Tuesday, nor August or September, day and night are the only measure of our duration. To exist is to last, to open your eyes and close them.

Every night at this time, forever, I am the one who has lost the day (Even though I may feel, in the heart of this time, the dawn climbing, like the fruit in the branches of the peach tree.)

Old man at leisure (tiếng Anh)

Sacred or secular
manners and conventions
make no difference to him

Completely free
leaving it all to heaven
he seems a simpleton

No one catches
a glimpse inside
his mind

this old man
all by himself
between heaven and earth

I don’t know if for certain... (tiếng Anh)

I don’t know if for certain, but I imagine
that a man and a woman
fall in love one day,
little by little they come to be alone,
something in each heart tells them that they are alone,
alone on the earth they enter each other,
they go on killing each other.
It all happens in silence. The way
light happens in the eye.
Love unites bodies.
They go on filling each other with silence.

One day they wake up, over their arms.
Then they think they know the whole thing.
They see themselves naked and they know the whole thing.

(I’m not sure about this. I imagine it).

Daily space (tiếng Anh)

In the daily space
the shadow eats the orange
the orange throws itself into the river,
it’s not a river, it’s the sea
overflowing from my eye.

In the daily space
born out of the clock
I see hands not words,
late at night I dream up the woman,
I have the woman and the fish.

In the daily space
I forget the home the sea
I lose hunger memory
I kill myself uselessly
in the daily space.

Here I love you

Here I love you.
In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself.
The moon glows like phosphorous on the vagrant waters.
Days, all one kind, go chasing each other.

The snow unfurls in dancing figures.
A silver gull slips down from the west.
Sometimes a sail. High, high stars.

Oh the black cross of a ship.
Alone.
Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet.
Far away the sea sounds and resounds.
This is a port.
Here I love you.
Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain.
I love you still among these cold things.
Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels
that cross the sea towards no arrival.
I see myself forgotten like those old anchors.
The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there.
My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.
I love what I do not have. You are so far.
My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights.
But night comes and starts to sing to me.

The moon turns its clockwork dream.
The biggest stars look at me with your eyes.
And as I love you, the pines in the wind
want to sing your name with their leaves of wire.