from Vertical Poetry

FROM VERTICAL POETRY I Roberto Juarroz translated by W. S. Merwin It shouldn't be possible to sleep without keeping beside you a voice to wake yourself up with. It shouldn't be possible to sleep without keeping beside you your own voice to wake yourself up with. It shouldn't be possible to sleep without waking just at the moment when sleep meets those open eyes that don't need sleep any more. Our hands deceive us too. The truth is we don't have any hands which is why we lose everything, stone or life. We don't have any hands. And the ambiguous antecedents of God have no way of hiding this floating stump in which we flow out, in which maybe everything flows out. Where is the heart I am calling? Heart become eyelid of an eye on its way to where I am. 32 · The Missouri Review The eye is not here yet and already I can see. Before there is a heart I am made of beating. I am calling in an open doorway. I am calling from inside. My face is looking at me out of the dust. I don't know out of what I'm looking at it, but there is growing between us like a ruined curtain the naked distance, the distance nobody will occupy. With my mouth in one hand and my death in the other I question the silence. I draw marks on it, I demand guarantees for the shout, I calculate its dose of reply. Something like a large sad animal comes then to strip itself naked in my voice but discovers that it was naked already. Meanwhile, one of my hands has been left empty. But I will never know which. Roberto Juarroz The Missouri Review · 33 ...