Rodin's Riders

Auguste Rodin's "Centaur"

To ride with and be ridden simultaneously;
pure, coeval, ride and rider:
the very stuff of synchronicity.  

Abandoning self-control, sweaty, 
animal and anima together, 
the longer they trot the more
their minds bloom away disarmingly, 

Then they gallop:

road, dirt;
orchards, colours;
stones, moons;
town, church;
hilltop, silence;
beach, breeze;

Halt! A break: 

a verdant picnic ensues, new smells,
sight scanning the surroundings,
a radar which will bleep only once 
to tell love to home in on the lover
thus beginning their face à face,
coeur à coeur: il faut courir.  

In the Desert

In the Desert
By Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen


Half of me horse of myself I rein you in
I quell you by spur and rein

So that you don’t lose yourself in dead cities
So that you don’t lose yourself
Not even in Babylonian trades
Not even in Nineveh’s bloody rivers

I point your snout to the clean desert
To the clean perfume of the desert
To its end to end solitude

Because of that I quell I struggle I rein you in
And the bridle cuts the spur hurts the rein holds you back

To be able to release you in the desert
Where we are not us two but only one oneself
In the clean desert and its perfume of luminaries
In the vast clean brightness of the desert
Within each poem
Light and fire lost but so close
Where we are not us two but only one oneself



__________

Translated by António Dinis Lopes from the original poem "No Deserto" as found in Geografia, ed. Ática, 1967

Photo by Jennifer Allison, "Alone"
One Street Shy