Edita’s Reviews > Memory in My Hands: The Love Poetry of Pedro Salinas- Translated with an Introduction by Ruth Katz Crispin > Status Update

The weight of a stone between the hands
tastes of time.
In a stone lies
the patience of the world, slowly ripened.
The incalculable sum
of days and nights, sun and water
which it took to form this hard and awkward shape
that can’t caress and keeps us company
with only its weight, darkly.

Tell me, do you remember the dreams,
when they were there,
before us?

Thinking about you tonight
wasn’t thinking of you with my thought,
just me, from myself. The wide world
was thinking of you with me, thoroughly.

The great dream of the field, of the stars,
with the sea silent, the grasses invisible,
dry perfumes their only presence,
all of it,
from Aldebaran to the crickets, thinking of you.

And separation isn’t the moment
when arms, or voices,
say goodbye with material signs.
It’s before, it’s after.
If hands are clasped, if you embrace,
it’s never to move apart,
it’s because the heart feels blindly
that the only possible way of being together
is a long, clear farewell.
And that the goodbye is the surest thing.

My questions sinking
with the light into nothingness,
silent,
so that you will answer
with equivocal stars;
and then, newborn
with the dawn, startling
in its newness, apprehensive
of asking the same things
I was asking yesterday,
which the night answered
only halfway, starburst.
Between years and life,
what an anguished dialogue!

And still I wait for your voice:
coming down from telescopes,
from the star,
through mirrors, through tunnels,
through leap years
it could come. From anywhere.
From a marvel, absolutely.
Because if you should call me
—if you called me, if only you would call me!—
it would be from a miracle,
unrecognized, unseen.