COWS IN THE SNOW
Are the desire of happiness.
The passer-by portraits them while he emembers the life
Of the poet he feels today, of
Him who ended up insane and lent
A secret title to the one who writes to him now.
Another poet – Englishman and Jesuit –
Compared the landscape to the skin of cows:
The shadows were spots
And the light, the white mistaken by the snow.
Cows in the snow
Are the gold that soaks up the misery of the world.
Someone has walked across the snow,
Someone looking for he knows not what.
(WALLACE STEVENS)
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Notice how the animal’s mass
Becomes pure air, how the white it steps on
Transforms it into the angel of good:
The wings are hoofs and heaven’s glory
is a moo.
The signs that intersect – a blackbird on the back?
Announce a wish
While nothingness surprises and a hope
Of something deceives us again.
Cows in the snow
Are all that came before us.
Is meekness their mistake
-There is no pastor nor whistle nor any music-
In that strange revelation of joy?
The year comes hard
And the eye rests on another eye
That only sees the fresh grass,
The one that shows with the smell of earth,
The one they eat without knowing where it comes from
So much joy, creatures that believe
In the eternal recurrence of the same.
My Claude Lorrain, my thinker of cows
That what will never be ours is there
All the rest is melancholy.