Enrique Lihn

  

Hothouse

What has become of us now? Were we caught off guard that night, in the woods forever
with rusty wellwater seeping in our dreams or did we pick up the old familiar path
that evening
and was it a bit late for us in the garden, a bit night near the hothouse
our nostrils, our hands smeared with woods, hands stained with rust from the wellmouth,
the smart in our burning ears, the corpus delicti clapped on our ears:
the bite, the trace of a harmless insect?

Or did we really get lost in the woods? This might be a clearing in the dream:
we're only there the way a bittersweet memory of the children returns
late at night, when everyone at a painful family gathering has tried
and couldn't keep it shut in the playroom upstairs. Because this
talking garden would no doubt tell us something if we were awake.
But between it and us (we've sworn like perjurers to our real age)
the years rise up, smeared with the air that enters the hothouse through all its
broken panes,
glazing our view of night in the invincible woods.

And there's nobody out there, they'd all say that if we asked loud enough; and
if they heard us asking; or if they agreed
to take up this absurd questions. Nobody but the scattered reflection of all those
faces
in the unbroken panes, smeared with nobody.

The leaves say nothing that isn't clear in the leaves. Memory
says nothing that is not a memory. Only fever speaks about
what speaks in it with another voice each time. Only fever
is different from the self it talks of.
And there's nobody out there

But what has become of us now?

─Translated from the Spanish by John Felstiner