Piedra de sol Time Quotes

Time is definitely not linear in "Piedra de sol"—this river that opens the poem is a good metaphor for the way time works for the speaker. It goes out, comes back, and is always arriving, just like how the speaker goes back into time and comes back, and his memories are always arriving in his brain.

Time often seems to be almost meaningless in this poem. Whether a day, a year, or a moment, nothing has much of an effect on the speaker's experience. This might be because he's already dead, or because time lost its meaning when he lost his lover. It's all the same to this dude.

Even while time whooshes past him (yes, time whooshes), the speaker is desperately trying to pin down an instant, a particular moment in time. And it's just as tough as grabbing at dollar bills in a wind machine.

Family generations are a good way to represent time—parents must be older than their children. But here, the roles are inverted in a way that shows us how wild time is in "Piedra de sol."

This line is important because it is one of the only pinned-down, specific moments in the whole poem. Think of it as a huge billboard with flashing lights and maybe even a siren that lets us know that something huge happened here. Because it's so short and so specific, it leaps out and forces you to pay attention.

The lovers in the poem (while they are making love) escape time, and they're free from its march toward death. It seems that even the most romantic of us are mortals, but it doesn't hurt to give this theory a try.