Jaime Sabines, The Loving Ones

The loving ones say nothing. 

Love is the finest of silences, 

the one that trembles the most and is hardest to bear. 

The loving ones are looking for something. 

The loving ones are the ones who abandon, 

the ones who change, who forget. 

Their hearts tell them that they will never find. 

They don't find, they're just looking. 

The loving ones wander around like crazy people 

because they're alone, alone, 

surrendering, giving themselves to each moment, 

crying because they don't save love. 

They worry about love. The lovers 

live for the day, it's the best they can do, it's all they know. 

They're going away all the time, 

all the time, going somewhere else. 

They hope, 

not for anything in particular, they just hope. 

They know that whatever it is they will not find it. 

Love is the perpetual deferment, 

always the next step, the other, the other. 

The lovers are the insatiable ones, 

the ones who must always, fortunately, be alone. 

The loving ones are the serpent in the story. 

They have snakes instead of arms. 

The veins in their necks swell 

like snakes too, suffocating them. 

The loving ones can't sleep 

because if they do the worms eat them up. 

They open their eyes in the dark 

and terror falls into them. 

They find scorpions under the sheets 

and their bed floats as though on a lake. 

The loving ones are crazy, only crazy 

with no God and no Devil. 

The loving ones come out of their caves 

trembling, starving, 

chasing phantoms. 

They laugh at those who know all about it, 

who love forever, truly, 

at those who believe in love as an inexhaustible lamp. 

The loving ones play at picking up water, 

tattooing smoke, at staying where they are. 

They play the long sad game of love. 

None of them will give up. 

The loving ones are ashamed to reach any agreement. 

Empty, but empty from one rib to another, 

death ferments them behind the eyes, 

and on they go, they weep toward morning 

in the trains, and the roosters wake into sorrow. 

Sometimes a scent of newborn earth reaches them, 

of women sleeping with a hand on their sex, contented, 

of gentle streams, and kitchens. 

The loving ones start singing between their lips 

a song that is never learned. 

And they go on crying, crying 

the beautiful life.