CAN YOU by Nicolas Guillen

Can You

                     For Lumir Civrny, in Prague

Can you sell me the air that passes through your fingers

and hits your face and undoes your hair?

Maybe you could sell me five dollars’ worth of wind,

or more, perhaps sell me a cyclone?

Maybe you would sell me

the thin air, the air

(not all of it) that sweeps

into your garden blossom on blossom

into your garden for the birds,

ten dollars of pure air.

                               

                                The air it turns and passes

                                with butterfly-like spins.

                                No one owns it,no one.

Can you sell me some sky,

the sky that’s blue at times,

or gray again at times,

a small part of your sky,

the one you bought – you think –with all the trees

of your orchard, as one who buys the ceiling with the house?

Can you sell me a dollar’s worth

of sky, two miles

of sky, a fragment of your sky,

whatever piece you can?

                                The sky is in the clouds.

                                The clouds are high, they pass.

                                No one owns them, no one.

Can you sell me some rain, the water

that has given you your tears and wets your tongue?

Can you sell me a dollar’s worth of water

from the spring, a pregnant cloud,

as soft and graceful as a lamb,

or even water fallen on the mountain,

or water gathered in the ponds

abandoned to the dogs,

or one league of the sea, a lake perhaps,

a hundred dollars’ worth of lake?

                                The water falls, it runs.

                                The water runs, it passes.

                                No one holds it, no one.

Can you sell me some land, the deep night

of the roots, the teeth of

dinosaurs and the scattered lime

of distant skeletons?

Can you sell me long since buried jungles,

                                birds now extinct,

fish fossilized, the sulphur

of volcanoes, a thousand million years

rising in spiral? Can you

sell me some land, can you

sell me some land, can you?

                                The land that’s yours is mine.

                                The feet of all walk on it.

                                No one owns it, no one.

                                                                                Nicolas Guillen