*

You’re right: it was strange to envision this city
from your city
(but I dodge pronouns
and I know possession doesn’t exist:
that light isn’t yours either,
this isn’t my rain
that brings down papier-mâché façades
with its felt breath.
A steep street falls from Sunday skies,
snapping off angel arms from a child’s grave
in Bonaval, washing out the colours of a flag in the foothills
where I hoisted my name with
a raging line from Cesário
and a poem from Borges’ Fervor de Buenos Aires.)

The sky of the Apocalypse,
the (peripatetic)
eye
of time.

*

Chrysalis of muzzled time
a sky-blown dream grows silently within you
shaping your wings
for the astonishment of light

a cache of amethysts
a cocooned waiting
you will unfold in myriads of instants
you will dance, drunk, beneath the sun

(powerful words, those of the shadow:
you will be ripped apart in some desolate hour
your light will be quenched in a dance of death
your gold dimmed)

*

We speak in incoherencies, so hostile and sweet.
Mask-words, neither yours nor mine.
Wall-words, gasping on the other side
like fish we’re unable to name…
our words.

But at night
my lips move once more along the mango’s scar.
It’s a sweet, golden apple in my grandparents’ orchard,
it’s childhood again.

I caress your hair with your mother’s touch
and pretend that I am she, a woman marabout,
and have powers against demons and spirits.

Never fear, my love: the skin never lies
and I prevail over the shiver of their fingertips
with mine on your waist.

I am the white leopardess
that, feigning lethargy, ransacks your lair
and shreds your sacred books to pieces.

Translated from Galician by Carys Evans-Corrales