The Table
By Ana Luísa Amaral
Translated By Margaret Jull Costa
My country
is this room opening onto the balcony,
it is also the balcony with its flowers
that come and go over the months, and that seem to me
luminous even when they turn the color
of a sad wind
My country
is the white cloth covering me, the dishes placed on me
each day, the arms that lean on me,
even the water in which I nearly drowned,
spilled absentmindedly by the hand that poured it
over my body, a clumsy,
thoughtless hand
I came to know it early on,
my country that is,
when it was still the perfumed landscape
of various timbers, my sisters all, of the sawmill,
its air filled with tiny filaments and sweetly
scented dust, the fingers that then chose me,
a broad piece of wood, and stroked and caressed me
with planes, varnish, polish
that was already my country: a prairie of insects,
white winds, the living sap that ran
in my veins, the water I drank to survive,
and that protected me
May the hand that rests on me
here, now,
remember this our shared condition:
we came from the same realm, and to that same realm
we will go, she and me:
the atoms that shaped and made me
could so easily have been hers
