two poems by julio cortázar You Begin With Magic
The nation of the palm of your hand, how I’ve hounded its rivers and been lost in its dunes in search of the reddest fountain of mercury that would summon with its ancient gong, there above the moon of your lips, your rising smile.
Peloponnesus of ivory and bronze your hand’s minute map, a puddle for these lips that pursue each timeline.
I smell the sand, I hear its jackals, there are moorings and bonfires in your hand, there are traps, lonely midnight bars with exhausted pianists and you, yourself, pulled close to your voice that tears through the darkness a vague column of milk and vanilla.
Everything is born in your hand, saffron planisphere and aged rum, and then it moves forth, climbs, deceives, and tempests, pinkish navel, lips withdrawn, feeling, suddenly it’s Sergio and his guitar, it is that wounded summer girl that gave us that flower on a street corner with an aloof “I must.”
I’ll tell you of the trip, you, half awake, I’ll lift up the Portolan chart, stealthily, I’ll tell you in the fog that coos in your throat of the games of chance that dragged us through backrooms to drunken sailors, to girls just passing through, who form the alphabet of this language, the gesture with which you surrender, bending, murmuring a fountain among bell towers.
There, where at last I drink.
