READER OF USELESS BOOKS

Reader of useless books
Look at your pot-belly
And your hands gnarled with arthritis.

What good were the hours spent
In the pursuit of beauty of words and paper?
It would have been better
To savour, now that death is haunting you,
The fragances she offered in her youth.

The toothless old woman will give no more herself
Than you yourself regretting now
The days and months of intercourse
With books and metaphors.

Traslated from Spanish by Rowena Hill