Climb up with me, American love.
Kiss the secret stones with me.
The torrential silver of the Urubamba
sends pollen flying to its yellow cup.
The empty vine goes flying,
the stony plant, the stiff garland
over the silent mountain gorge.
Come, miniscule life, between the wings
of the earth, while—crystal and cold, a buffeted air
dividing the clash of emeralds—
oh wild water you come down from the snow.
Love, love, until the sudden night,
from the Andes’ringing flintstone,
to the red knees of dawn,
study the blind child of the snow.
Oh Wilkamayu of resonant threads,
when you shatter your bands of thunder
into white spume, like wounded snow,
when your steep gale
sings and slashes arousing the sky,
what language do you bring to the ear
barely uprooted from your Andean foam?
Who seized the lightning of the cold
and left it chained on the heights,
split into its chilling tears,
shaken in its rapid swords,
beating its war-worn stamens,
borne on its warrior bed,
stormed in its rock-bound end?
What do your tormented flashings say?
Your secret insurgent lighting—did it
once travel thronging with words?
Who goes on crushing frozen syllables,
black languages, banners of gold,
bottomless mouths, throttled shouts,
in your slender arterial waters?
Who goes clipping floral eyelids
that come to gaze from the earth?
Who hurls the dead stalks down
that drop in your cascading hands
to thresh their threshed-out night
in geologic coal?
Who flings down the linking branch?
Who yet again buries farewells?
Love, love, do not touch the brink
or worship the sunken head:
let time extend full span
in its hall of broken wellsprings,
and between ramparts and rapid water
gather the air in the pass,
the wind’s parallel plating,
the blind channel of the cordillera,
the bitter greeting of the dew,
and climb through the denseness flower by flower,
trampling the serpent flung to earth.
In this cliff-hung region, stone and forest,
dust of green stars, jungle clarity,
Mantur breaks out like a living lake
or a new ledge of silence.
Come to my very being, to my own dawn,
up to the crowning solitude.
The dead realm lives on still.
And across the Sundial like a black ship
the ravening shadow of the condor cruises.