Roberto Juarroz (1921 - 1995)

Sometimes my hands wake me up.
They're making or taking apart something without me
while I'm asleep,
something terribly human,
concrete like the back or pocket of a man.

I hear them from inside my sleep,
working out there,
but when I open my eyes they're still.
Just the same
I've thought that maybe I'm a man
because of what they do
with their gestures and not mine,
with their God and not mine,
with their death, if they die too.

I don't know how to make a man.
Maybe my hands make one while I'm asleep
and when it's finished
they wake me up altogether
and show it to me.

-------------------

Solitude calls me by every name
except mine.

Solitude even calls me sometimes by your name.

But other times
solitude calls me by its own name.

Maybe one day
I will be able to call solitude by my name
and then surely
it will have to answer me.

translated from the spanish by W.S. Merwin