We were discussing you and I
about things of our huge world,
made of windows
behind which we have kept sufferings and joy,
like in an aquarium
that we deem isolated from what is
boiling, when its magma
explodes in everything we say:
man and woman
are two races which mingle
amidst their perpetual battle.
 
Farther away, do you remember? We were in the balcony
his unusual melody was bursting in april.
The old cricket, from a faraway flower-bed roared his music score,
in the already cold April
of the Southern hemisphere, his existing was unusual, unexpected:
his sexual symphony, a summer disturbance,
had nothing to do in the middle of a freezing evening
which abandoned in his eagle
that furious child who will always express desire.
 
In the flower-bed, razed by cold, he resisted,
like an obstinate bulb,
like a seed insisting on procreation,
becoming a father late in years
of minute larvae which had flooded the air
some months before,
when frost did not blur the windshield
of the tired man driving the bus
along a sleepy street.
Farther down, on the street,
someone shouts his rage, hunger and cold;
among the sounds of blowing horns
another one frantically crosses the street in his car
and a salesman recites
his mercenary palinode. In front of the cricket,
we silence our shame
for being almost old and not parents.
His unfortunate violin will never reach
a female: in the dampness of the flower-bed
entities more powerful than his ridiculous singing
will cut off the strings:
the mist of may,
the street wind that will sow another June
will demolish the untimely sound
of the enlarged scraping of his sides
worn-out by an unceasing desire.
When a momentary silence intercedes
for his hardly minute gracefulness, the stupid animal
will allow his humble splendor to be heard all along the street,
that very insistence
of another time simultaneous that we do not see,
we do not hear,
except for a cricket or other eternal thing
forever out of this well known,
calculated and daily world we inhabit.
 
Certainly time
is a river
pausing
at the banks of his singing.