Hey, let’s get away......by Pedro Salinas

Hey, let’s get away
from being so much you and so much me.
Leave your body asleep,
leave my body at your side,
leave them.

Leave your name and mine,
leave what pained us
and let us take a break
from ourselves, with ourselves;
Let us pretend that we were
one, but two others.

Already without the body or the name
let us try on forms,
beings, to see if we can live
better in something else.

Let us try on trees;
two trees that, even with
very separate trunks,
will look for each other on top,
find each other with their leaves,
brush each other with their flowers,

Let us try on waves
that run one over the other,
separate and playing,
until, in the warm sand
they stop being double.

And if you have any material left
let us go further. We can
be two silences, so together
that no one senses that this
surrounding silence
is double, because two voices
becoming quiet, they forged it
to hear each other better.

And if you want more, let us
be light,
you a ray, me another ray,
you one half, and me the other
of this light, that in order that it be
us, it needs us
and it contains us.

And still we can
flee further:
pretend that we no longer exist,
live
in a prenatal world
where being together is
to be immensely lost
one in another, indivisible,
like the sea and the sky, before
the Lord separated them.

And later you will see how happy
is the return to ourselves,
to find myself with you,
with me, with the pain,
with your voice and with my name.

You’ll see, you’ll see, what a miracle
it is to see each other, to touch each other,
you’ll see what a revelation
it is to see ourselves, to see ourselves again
in these homely faces
where the soul lived within us.
To pretend that we stopped
loving each other. How true
this love will always be to us!
What a partner
will be born, so happy,
so secure, of this goodbye!

~ Pedro Salinas
English Translation by Amber Wantman

Art by  Anthea Slade