If anyone in a previous century had worked
on the combination of essences as light as the air
and thought of obtaining from his barely predicted combination
an essence capable of returning
to whoever passed by, through reading or a slight aspiration,
the simulation of beauty
condensed in words or exhalations,
just a glimpse but so powerful, forever opening
his nostrils to a new reality,
so ancient and persistent, for so many and so few,
it is true, hardly contained
in the cipher of a few verses, or poison.
 
If it were true then that the majority - scarce - hardly breathed,
by chance or grace, the very first notes,
those that are called words, those that fade away first
leaving nothing in the nose which is the mind, are soon forgotten,
its sense lost forever, those which afterwards
return in a casual phrase without knowing,
in the mirage of a vision deemed their own but is somebody else's.
 
If others, less numerous, succeed in tasting or believe they do,
the centre where the sense "resides,” hardly
the first one of an army of meanings
contained in a condemnatory mouthful of understanding in the world,
and don't know that all their further mistakes
will be engendered by that reading and a glimpse of something deeper
that will forever confine them in a false jail
where their lives will start to liquefy,
no less cheated by the appearance
of perfume, of the attractive second deceit
as alert as a spider, as reliable as a rifle.
 
And deeper, in the notes which are said to come from the heart,
a profound epiphany in ambush, launching its nets
beyond what perfume may capture,
and gather the sense or the words in the night.
 
Who can go any farther without returning
with a transformed member, with a new organ,
forever changed by the peeping into what exists
outside, so lacking color and word as well?
The problem then is walking without being seen by the world
with that living prosthesis, that new portion of oneself.
Poetry is a perfume where limbo, hell and heaven
every day contend for something new
that fortune displays over the world.
(Believing what these three latter verses say
is opening your eyes with the fatal flask, unclosed).