Translated by Garth Greenwell and Idra Novey
Reading a Fourteenth-Century Poem Together
The instant
required for it to exist
isn’t the only place
it belongs.
It doesn’t confine itself
to its onion ring
around the world,
which it curdles in its curdling.
It dawns, it dusks,
and above all
it afternoons endlessly, with the fervent
spacious feeling
of a miniature.
Full of patience
and gratitude,
it makes room for an ordering
conscious of what’s impossible
to name,
with a single mirror
facing
the supreme perfection
of nothingness.
Luis Muñoz is the author of eight books of poems. One Moment, his debut North American collection, will be published in May 2026. He teaches at the University of Iowa, where he directs the MFA program in Spanish creative writing.
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