Frailty





This verse, an arabesque only
surrounding the essential element -- unreachable.
Summer clouds run away, birds fly past, vessels, waves,
and your face is almost a mirror where the uncertain movement plays,
woe! it has already played, and all became still, quantities and quantities
of sleep are layed upon the shattered land.
No longer the urge to explain, manifold words as in a ray
ascending, and the ghost that chooses, the eye that visits, the music
made out of refinements and refinements, the delicate structure
of a crystal possessed by a thousand limpid and fringid sighs: no more
than an arabesque, an arabesque only
is capable of embracing things, without reducing them.














- Carlos Drummond de Andrade