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Ode to Venice Before the Sea of Theaters (from Arde el mar, 1966)   The false cups, the poison, and the skull Of the theaters García Lorca   The sea has its mechanics as love has its symbols With what racket the red curtain rises Or in this proscenium above an empty stage Sounds a rumor of statues, iris fronds, cutlasses, Doves that descend and softly alight A chessboard of verdure, composed of cravats The blight on my cheek recollects time past And in my heart seethes a droplet of lead My hand was to my breast, the clock corroborates The reason for the clouds and the stiffening of their sails A rising tide, roses on tightropes Over the voltaic arc of Venice’s night That year of my lost youth, Marble on the Dogana, as Pound has remarked And the table of a casket in the density of the canals Go on, much further, deep inside the night, Over the ducal tapestry, shadows interwoven, Princes or nereids laid waste by time What purity, a nude or an ephebe deceased In the boundless halls of clouded reminiscence Was I there? Must I believe I was he, And he the suffering impaling my flesh? How fragile I was then, and why                                                             Is it true You differ, snowflakes, in the snowcapped park, The one that today harbors your love on its face Or the one that died there in Venice of beauty? The live stones speak of a memory present As the vein impels its conduits of blood, It comes, leaves, returns to the planet, And life thus expands in the silence of tenters, The past is affirmed at this uncertain hour So much have I written, so much I wrote then I don’t know If it was worth it or is You, for whom My life is more certain, and you others, Who hear in my verse a discrepant sphere, will know its signet or art Speak it, you, or speak it, you others, and sweetly, perchance, Beguile my sorrow Night, night in Venice Five years now, how so long? I am Who I was then, I know how