Who knows what is going on on the other side of each hour?
—Juan Ramón Jiménez
NOTES
Hands in Stone, Basin and Range, Oregon country. (Photos Douglas Beauchamp)
Poem, below, Who Knows What Is Going On by Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958), Nobel Prize in Literature 1956. (Trans Robert Bly)
Who knows what is going on on the other side of each hour?
How many times the sunrise was
there, behind a mountain!
How many times the brilliant cloud piling up far off
was already a golden body full of thunder!
This rose was poison.
That sword gave life.
I was thinking of a flowery meadow
at the end of a road,
and found myself in the slough.
I was thinking of the greatness of what was human,
and found myself in the divine.
