AL MUSGO, TO THE MOSS
Cómo llegaste a conocer todo aquello de lo que estás seguro
Cómo descubriste la oscuridad del verde
Desplegándose a la luz del día desde
Sus orígenes insondables como los tuyos
Cómo aprendiste a desplegar formas de agua
En suavidad por sí misma que permanece en un lugar
Y guardó algunas secretas cavidades donde quiera
Que estuviste pero que con tal bienvenida parecieron surgir
y con el tiempo
llegaste a ser como algunos creen
Un modelo para la mejilla y luego para el pecho
El reyezuelo sintió que conocía la mayoría de eso antes
De que hubiera pechos o mejillas e hizo
De pequeños trozos vivientes tuyos el globo de su nido
Como si aquello fuera el fin para el que habías crecido
W.S.
Merwin, from Present Company
(2005) published by Copper Canyon Press
(traducción Guillermo Ruiz)
(Walden, Spring)
[8] When the sun withdraws the sand ceases to flow, but in the morning the streams
will start once more and branch and branch again into a myriad of others. You
here see perchance how blood-vessels are formed. If you look closely you
observe that first there pushes forward from the thawing mass a stream of
softened sand with a drop-like point, like the ball of the finger, feeling its
way slowly and blindly downward, until at last with more heat and moisture, as
the sun gets higher, the most fluid portion, in its effort to obey the law to
which the most inert also yields, separates from the latter and forms for
itself a meandering channel or artery within that, in which is seen a little
silvery stream glancing like lightning from one stage of pulpy leaves or
branches to another, and ever and anon swallowed up in the sand. It is
wonderful how rapidly yet perfectly the sand organizes itself as it flows,
using the best material its mass affords to form the sharp edges of its
channel. Such are the sources of rivers. In the silicious matter which the
water deposits is perhaps the bony system, and in the still finer soil and
organic matter the fleshy fibre or cellular tissue. What is man but a mass of
thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed. The fingers
and toes flow to their extent from the thawing mass of the body. Who knows what
the human body would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven? Is not
the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be
regarded, fancifully, as a lichen, umbilicaria, on the side of the head,
with its lobe or drop. The lip — labium, from labor (?) — laps or
lapses from the sides of the cavernous mouth. The nose is a manifest congealed
drop or stalactite. The chin is a still larger drop, the confluent dripping of
the face. The cheeks are a slide from the brows into the valley of the face,
opposed and diffused by the cheek bones. Each rounded lobe of the vegetable
leaf, too, is a thick and now loitering drop, larger or smaller; the lobes are
the fingers of the leaf; and as many lobes as it has, in so many directions it
tends to flow, and more heat or other genial influences would have caused it to
flow yet farther.
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