Caprichos

It’s getting dark in Huelva: sooty palm trees
and the train whistle’s darting
silver-white bats.

The streets have filled with people.
And the woman rushing through the crowd carefully weighs
the day’s last light on the scales of her eyes.

The office windows are open. You can still hear
the horse stamping inside.
The old horse with rubber-stamp hooves.

Only after midnight do the streets empty.
At last it’s blue in every office.

Up there in space:
trotting silently, glittering and black,
unseen and untethered,
its rider thrown,
a new constellation I call “The Horse.”

From Hemligheter på vägen (Secrets on the Way), 1958