The Tea Cup Song

We put our hands next to the cup

not knowing that porcelain and bone

are close forms of the same substance.

My hand and the pearly cup

– if I temper lyricism with irony –

they are also related to pterosaurs.

The quiet afternoon fills the windowpanes.

The water drips from the spout with a noise,

blackbirds spy me on the dry trellis.

This is how tea often evokes:

my stone hand, serene afternoon,

look of blackbirds, light sound of spout.

Nature copies this painting

of the end of the afternoon that I painted for myself,

repay me for the poems I wrote to you

again giving me my verses live.

As if I deserved this landscape

Nature gives me what I gave her.

Yet somewhere, in a poem, I heard

turn the pulleys of the scenery,

in which the words represented

the landscape painting scene

on a constantly changing screen.

Only tea brings me my afternoon,

with the cup and my hand that are

the same piece of limestone.

Today the spout cools the water in the tank,

blackbirds descend from the trellis to the ground,

and the panes slowly darken.

The words move and reset

on its motionless axis of rotation

the space where this wicker table is

spins in the great nebulae.