Anyone who doesn't read Cortázar is doomed. Not to read him is a serious invisible disease which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who has never tasted peaches. He would quietly become sadder… and, probably, little by little, he would lose his hair.

Dictionary, let one hand
of your thousand hands, one
of your thousand emeralds,
a
single drop
of your virginal springs,
one grain
from your magnanimous granaries,
fall
as the perfect moment
upon my lips,
onto the tip of my pen,
into my inkwell.
From the depths of your
dense and reverberating jungle
grant me,
at the moment it is needed,
a single birdsong, the luxury
of one bee,
one splinter
of your ancient wood perfumed
by an eternity of jasmine,
one syllable,
one tremor, one sound,
one seed:
I am of the earth and with words I sing.

fans upon
whose feathers
love has scattered
its blossoms…

You can say anything you want, yessir, but it's the words that sing, they soar and descend… I bow to them… I love them, I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down… I love words so much… The unexpected ones… The ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly, they drop… Vowels I love… They glitter like colored stones, they leap like silver fish, they are foam, thread, metal, dew… I run after certain words… They are so beautiful that I want to fit them all into my poem… I catch them in midflight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives… And then I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them, I let them go… I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves… Everything exists in the word… An idea goes through a complete change because one word shifted its place, or because another settled down like a spoiled little thing inside a phrase that was not expecting her but obeys her… They have shadow, transparence, weight, feathers, hair, and everything they gathered from so much rolling down the river, from so much wandering from country to country, from being roots so long… They are very ancient and very new… They live in the bier, hidden away, and in the budding flower…

Why do leaves commit suicide
when they feel yellow?

Do uncried tears wait in small lakes?
Or are they invisible rivers who run to sadness?

And at whom does rice smile
with infinitely many white teeth?

At what does the watermelon laugh,
when it is being murdered?

Where are the vineyards of iron
from where the meteor falls?

Why does the hat of night
fly so full of holes?