A Stroll

I

I've strolled through La Quinta de los Molinos.
I've gone back to wander in its light at the hour of the Angelus
with the Giraldilla between two crosses
and her spear pitted against the arrow of Ochosi, the hunter.
The ivy begins there. There the ivy ends.
La Quinta de los Molinos has invented a present for me:
the gift of contemplating it.
Here the path does not end.
It begins again.
This is the route of my memory.

II

I wandered, imprisoned and astray,
and so I came to discover these paths.
With scarcely a stop, faced with a clearing,
there is a lintel of water and a seaswell of grass
that I must negotiate.
There's a path that leads to La Quinta de los Molinos.
There's an area of columns and mirrors
where indoors and outdoors converge.
I could go out to the indoors. I could come in to the outdoors.
There is so much life and so much death at the tip of the mirrors. . . .
I wandered, imprisoned and astray,
but in the center of each marble,
alone and lost,
breathes the soul of a poppy,
alone and lost,
the simple soul of a poppy,
alone and lost, lost and alone,
while I roam on, imprisoned and astray,
alone and lost, lost and alone,
along the path that leads to La Quinta de los Molinos.

III

Perhaps it's just a dream
or a mere palace in my memory,
placed into the time of some other dream.
There I had something. Might have had something. Something I have lost
and to search for something I have come
to this distant point of recollection.
What I had, what I have lost,
what I have come back here to find
in this unforgettable Quinta without end or borders,
has been hidden in an abyss underground,
in a darkened labyrinth of the southern seas.
That is my game: a fleeting script and its permanent oblivion;
a portable flood, a hurricane,
a squall from the heavens;
a dream through which I travel,
counting on the time
that was given to me yesterday
and given to me today,
that was given to me forever and tomorrow:
the time for eyes wide open
faced with the immense and sunken Quinta de los Molinos.

IV

     To Luis Felipe Alegre
Other manners of time
send me flying towards the meadows of Medinaceli.
A few stones, rather brief and rather toneless,
form a cloister for endless sleep.
What time is this,
sending me into the wind of mills,
the mill of winds,
while it makes a tranquil dance alight
on the very tip of a waning moon
illuminated by the nighttime of those meadows
but never, ever the meadows or the main plaza of Medinaceli,
only the damp trees of Tallapiedra
whose crowns are beating the rhythm
of an indelible, gentle, volatile cloud of soot
that the wind is sweeping all along Alameda de Paula
and pushing indoors, inside the thick walls,
towards the soft, sudden flanks of La Quinta de los Molinos.