BIOGRAPHY FOR THE USE OF THE BIRDS

I was born in the century of the death of the rose
when the motor had already driven out the angels.
Quito watched the last stagecoach roll,
and at its passing the trees ran by in good order,
and the hedges and houses of the new parishes,
on the threshold of the country
where slow cows were ruminating the silence
and the wind spurred its swift horses.

My mother, clothed in the setting sun,
put away her youth in a deep guitar,
and only on certain evenings would she show it to her children,
sheathed in music, light, and words.
I loved the water-writing of the rain,
the yellow gnats from the apple tree,
and the toads that would sound from time to time
their bulging wooden bells.

The great sail of the air maneuvered endlessly.
The mountain range was a shoreline of the sky.
The storm would come, and at the roll of its drum
its drenched regiments would charge;
but then the sun with its golden patrols
would bring back translucent peace to the fields.

I would watch men clasp the barley,
horsemen sink into the sky,
and the wagons filled with lowing oxen
go down to the coast fragrant with mangoes.

The valley was there with its farms
where dawn touched off its trickle of roosters,
and westward was the land where the sugarcane
rippled its peaceful banner, and the cacao
held close in a coffer its secret fortune,
and the pineapple girded on its fragrant cuirasse,
the naked banana its tunic of silk.

All has gone now, in sequent waves,
like the futile cyphers of the foam.
The years go leisurely entangling their lichens,
and memory is scarcely a water-lily
showing on the surface timidly
its drowned face.
The guitar is only a coffin for songs,
and die head-wounded cock laments.
All the angels of the earth have emigrated,
even the dark angel of the cacao tree.