I don’t need time to know what you are like:
we knew each other like lightning.
Who would try to know you in what you don’t say,
or in those words with which you don’t say it?
Whoever seeks you in the life you are living,
has only illusions about you,
pretexts in which you hide.
To follow behind you in what you’ve already done,
to add action to smile, years to names,
is to come to lose you.
Not I.
I came upon you in the storm.
I knew you, abruptly,
in that brutal tearing apart of dusk and light,
in which the depth that escapes
from day and night is revealed.
I saw you, you saw me,
and now, stripped of all uncertainty,
of history, of the past,
you, amazon on a lightning bolt,
pulsating from your recent unexpected arrival,
you are so ancient to me,
I’ve known for so very long,
that I close my eyes in your love,
and I walk unerringly in my blindness,
asking nothing of that slow sure light
with which people know letters
and forms and figure sums
and believe they know who you are,
my invisible one.

—Pedro Salinas, from “The Voice I Owe to You”