Last Night in Coyoacán / Última noche en Coyoacán – Vicente Quirarte (1954 – 2026)

Last Night in Coyoacán

For Concha Méndez

(Última noche en Coyoacán)

by Vicente Quirarte

Translated by Ernesto Priego

Forever in love,
and more alive than ever, he’d walk as if only passing through,
a ghost, after all, from another world,
stranger than the very stones beneath his feet.
He’d ask permission from the wind,
the blessing of the season in its turn,
but would not wait for night to fall,
heavy with clusters of perfume,
children’s cries and distant doughnuts,
to engulf completely the other night
which passes only through some men.

These fig trees say it fearlessly,
and these walls carry their white paint
beyond the soul and what can be seen:
he loved the stillness of this square
because here he could see himself
in other people’s faces,
who gave him back his solitude, silently,
like when one returns a morning greeting
knowing the lie has only just begun.

He’d open a newspaper,
read the news under a streetlamp,
news that might have nourished or flattered others.
He’d ignore the bustling night,
the night that drives us to find shelter in another body.
Perhaps he was waiting for the other night,
the one where name and time become the same.

He thought he’d signed on sand or wind,
certain that the sea at dusk
steals every footprint, every kiss.
But the sand did not forget his letters,
nor did the wind forget those it once embraced.
And so it blows, light and sorrowful, through the branches,
bearing on every leaf
the syllable of a name:

Luis Cernuda.

—

Translator’s note: The Spanish poet Luis Cernuda (1902-1963) spent the final years of his life in the Coyoacán neighbourhood of Mexico City, where, from 1953, lived in Tres Cruces No. 11, home of writer Concha Méndez (to whom Quirarte dedicated this poem). There, Cernuda died on 5 November 1963. He was buried the following day in the Panteón Jardín in Mexico City.