To say you and I - Eduardo Milán

To say you and I is to enter the circus

there the lion, there the circle of monkeys,

on the flank a ballerina keeping time. The air

transports autumns from one place to another, the year

has no origin. The yellow daisy

shines in two eyes. Van Gogh’s ear

falls to the pavement like the sun: an innocent

slash interrupts the trilling of a bird. This is true

in the north. It may be false in the south. In effect

(or in the flight of a cormorant), of which bird do you speak?

Of the cormorant and its lingering flight above the heavens,

which takes on a purple tone, pure in the afternoon and in the night

God only knows. But to insist on you and I at this height

in the river, in the Nile where the weavers weave, is

to unravel the skein with some scissors, to stop hearing

the tumult of sound, that underbrush.

---

Eduardo Milán (born 1952) Uruguay

Translated by Patrick Madden & Steven Stewart, and by John Oliver Simon

The Selected Poems of Eduardo Milán, Edited by Antonio Ochoa, Shearsman Books, 2012