All Passion Concluded - Mirta Rosenberg

Caprices of light
through the top chink
of the shutters
                         and the heat,
the cold like lime and the sun,
that isn’t being
                          and is
in other arms
that would give the same.

                                   There is
the light that fills the jug,
the inner red that has overflowed
with emptiness. Is that it?
                                             It is
the style, better said,
of the hole that defers to continence,
the ruling given by an inside where
                                                         – if wanted –
for a moment the world enters
and believes in ways
of becoming stony-hearted.

Thus
it trembles. With the changing
light. And with the leaves
making meshwork in the wind.
                                                  Outside that
will there be nothing? Not even embrace
to hold it?

              It endures
that which dies.
There remain familiar
drawers with the clothing that has become
strange, personal sateens and blemishes
                                                                   of hurts
that hurt no more.
                             In corners
of the flesh, no more in use,
the satiety of power
                                  to be detained.

It is passion or the step
between two voids, the atrocity
that leaves intact the heart
                                           behind the hard core
of the person invented
for the world.
                    And no one
loves what is not known: this site
has ceased to be
                           lit up
                                  because now
the sombre places are the centre.

                                                  All
passion concluded
                      is emotion
made clear. To shift
the chair into the sun to remake
the yesterday gone
                                and see how beautifully
they ripen,
the peaches of this year.

---

Mirta Rosenberg (born 1951) Argentina
Translated by Julie Wark
Source: Poetry International