Lesser Life

Flight from reality.

Farther still: flight from fantasy.
Farther than anything: flight from oneself,
flight from flight, exile
without water or words, the voluntary
loss of love and memory,
the echo
no longer linked to the call, and the call getting slurred,
the hand larger and larger, shapeless,
gone, all gestures finally impossible,
if not futile,
the song gratuitous, color cleansed
of all color, with no arm moving or fingernail growing.
But not death.
Life, in its irreducible form,
without embellishment or melodic commentary,
life aspired to like peace when we're weary
(not death),
minimal, essential life; a beginning; a sleep;
less than earth, without warmth; without science or irony;
the least cruel thing we can desire: life
in which air isn't breathed, but let it wrap me;
no wearing down of tissues; absence of tissues;
confusion between morning and afternoon, with no more pain,
since time's no longer sectioned off; time
elided, subdued.
Not what's dead or eternal or divine,
just what lives: tiny, quiet, indifferent,
solitary life.
That's what I seek.

--Carlos Drummond De Andrade 
Translated by Richard Zenith