Cernuda Tellier Anyone's Guess

A father son poem I have always liked.

Though, because my housekeeping is sloppy sometimes, I did not write down the poet. I think it is Luis Cernuda, or Jorge Tellier. Sorry.

The Never-Ending Tale
for my son

Sea and sky, indefatigable powers,
concur beneath the clearing light.
Only I, in the afternoon, am weary.

This intense blue imposes itself on all,
a blue arched toward its own calm,
just beginning to form
variations of the sea-spray.
Vague-bodied clouds
await the festival of twilight.
My eyes scan what they have always loved,
a vision even more seductive now,
fragile beneath the shadows
that lean across my gaze toward darkness.
If the years have given me their riches
yet they pile up their numbers
and the current that carries me
hurriedly toward my end
seems swifter.

It does not matter. The light counts,
ceaselessly recounts an adventure,
and does not end, does not end:
there is no conclusion.
The adventure of a sun and some men.
Extinguished finally,
lost as a sky closes over them.
The sky is immortal.
He is happy to whom it has fallen
to spend his ephemeral days—
like those of the yellowing leaves—
on this planet.
Am I more than a leaf
on a rustling tree?
A common destiny—
the only one?--unites us on the crust
of a planet always astir,
all of us caught up
in the motion that leads us
toward … is there perhaps no purpose?

The world which in me is waning
continues before me, intact
in its cool, fabulous air.

An open balcony,
a hidden shadow by the wall
along a street, in a summer doze,
streets, cities, fields, skies, infinite
lights … and man
with his terrible power,
and in the midst of the din,
among innumerable convulsive troubles,
the everyday miracle of an orchestra.

Memory cannot contain even one life.

Circles of friendships,
spirits who do not touch
history, or public,
woman, love, children,
our existence consummated fully
among good and evil.

In how many directions
does gratitude spill?
The compass rose unfolds.

Friends! The globe
flourishes with dialogues:
extraordinary flora
(mingling with the jungle
that is never destroyed)
among the diminutive histories
that preserve without dates
those supreme, most humble, instants.
The root of my being has kept them
to form the one I am. Richer,
full of breath, I give thanks.
Man among men,
sun among stars—
spinning round some consciousness?

I look back. Oblivion has blurred
so much of what I was!
Memory conceals its treasures.
How can one say good-bye,
a final good-bye, to the world?
And no one takes leave of himself,
except in the drama of suicide.
Being dead is nothing.
Dying is merely sad.
It will grieve me to leave you—
you who will go on here—
and to have no part in your life.
The tale does not end.
Only he who tells you the tale comes to an end.