Nuri’s Reviews > Memory in My Hands: The Love Poetry of Pedro Salinas- Translated with an Introduction by Ruth Katz Crispin > Status Update

Let the fires go out,
let the lips all stop,
let voices never
again say, "I love you"! Let
a great silence reign,
a round quietness,
to avoid the disaster
which lips seeking each other
would bring to this sum
of successes which is the earth!

the final destiny
of man : his skeleton.
Love, love, love.
Because who has ever known
if it creates or consumes?
And whether when it burns us
it's exalting us to flake,
or willing us to be ashes?
That's why the world, feeble today,
fears it more than anyone.
And we have to put the notice out
to all lovers
that life is
at the brink of rupturing
if they keep on kissing
the way they kissed before.

...that lightning bolt of "you" and of "I",
of "You love me" and "I love you"
can never penetrate,
all the pain of the first and second person, which separates
two people forever
in grammars and in the world.

The dead who never kissed
don't know the razor's edge
of separation.
Separating is
two mouths that move apart
against their destiny
of kissing forever.

P.193 (A Reason For Love)

I rock myself in the weariness
and in it you hold me and I hold you,
even if you aren't there.
And if the flame should go out
of the clumsy spirit where it still lives the past
in the light of memory
the faithful body remembers,
it holds a vigil not to forget, and it's that palpable
fatigue which saves
what the exhausted spirit abandons.

Days and kisses
walk around bewildered:
they don't end up where they promised to.
But to love
you have to embark on all
the projects that go by,
without asking them a thing,
full, full of faith
in the error
that yesterday, today, tomorrow, cannot feel to come.