AL MUSGO

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)

Reyezuelo listado

Reyezuelo sencillo

(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.