Three Poems by Jaime Gil de Biedma

A BODY IS A MAN’S BEST FRIEND

The hours aren’t over, not yet,
and tomorrow’s as far away
as a reef I can barely make out.

                                  You don’t notice
how thickly time is growing in this room
with the lamp glowing, how the chill
is outside licking at the window panes . . . .
How quickly, little creature, you fell asleep
in my bed tonight with the easy nobility
born of necessity while I studied you.

So good night then.
                                  That quiet country
bordered by your body’s contours
makes me want to die remembering life,
or to stay up —
exhausted and excited — until dawn.

Alone with old age while you sleep
like someone who’s never read a book,
funny little creature: so human —
much more sincere than in my arms —
because a perfect stranger.


DE VITA BEATA

In an antique land where nothing works,
something like Spain between two civil
wars, in a village next to the sea,
here with a house and few possessions
and no memory at all: neither reading,
suffering, writing nor paying bills,
and living on like a bankrupt count
among the ruins of my intelligence.


DURING THE INVASION

The morning paper lies open on
the tablecloth. Sunlight glints in
the glasses. A workday, I eat lunch
in a small restaurant.

Most of us fall silent. Someone’s speaking
in indistinct tones — talk especially saddened
by how things are always happening
and drag on forever, or end in disaster.

I imagine it’s dawn around now in the Ciénaga,
everything uncertain, no pause in the fighting
and in the news I search for a little hope
that doesn’t come from Miami

O Cuba in the fleeting tropical dawn
when the sun’s not hot and the air clear:
may your land sprout tanks, your shattered sky
turn gray with the wings of your planes!

The sugar-cane people, the streetcar man,
the folks in restaurants are with you
and all of us today who search the world over
for a little hope that doesn’t come from Miami.


Translated from the Spanish by James Nolan.


Poems reprinted from If Only For A Moment (I’ll Never Be Young Again) with the permission of the publisher Fonograf Editions.