Alliance (Sonata)




From dusty glances fallen to earth
or from silent leaves buried underground.
From metals without light, with the void,
with the absence of the day dead from a blow.
In the height of the hands the dazzling of butterflies,
the extracting of butterflies with an endless light.

You kept this trail of light, of broken beings
abandoned by the sun, darkening, hurled at churches.
Stained with glances, with an object of bees,
your material an unexpected flame in flight
precedes and follows the day and its family of gold.

The days lying in wait cross in secrecy
but fall inside your voice of light.
Oh guardians of love, in your rest
I melted my dream, my quiet attitude.

With your body of timid number, extended at once
toward the quantities that define the earth,
behind the battle of the white days of space

and cold, of slow death and withered stimulants,
I feel your lap burning and the passage of your kisses
forging fresh swallows in my dreams.

At times the destiny of your tears ascends
like age toward my forehead, over there
where waves are beating, destroying themselves with death:
its movement is humid, dispirited, final.


Pablo Neruda

                              The Dead Angels




Search, search for them:
in the insomnia of forgotten pipes,
in the river beds interrupted by the silence of debris.
Not far from the puddles incapable of guarding a cloud,
some eyes lost,
a broken ring
or a trampled star.
Because I have seen them:
in that momentous trash that appears
      in a mist.
Because I have touched them:
in the remote earth of a morbid brick,
they have come to the nothing from a tower or a wagon.
Nothing beyond the chimneys which collapse
or those tenacious leaves that you stamp on with your shoes.

In all of this.
Even more in that vagrant kindling that is consumed without
     fire,
in those buried absences that suffer broken down furniture,
at a small distance from the names and signs
that cool down in the walls.

Search.  Search for them:
below the drop of wax that buries the word
       of a book
or the signature on the corners of cards
that brings rolling in the dust
Near the helmet lost by a bottle,
by a sole missing in the snow,
a shaving knife discarded at the border
      of a cliff


Rafael Alberti

                           Circular Poems


     

                                     I



The specter known for its tempests like a fevered
     horse
Arbitrarily contributes its swiftness in the eyes
     of twilight
We are hemmed in by remorse
The attack of remorse with the voice of night and dying
     wolves
Alerts us somnambulant struck down your sophistry arriving
     too late
Cultivator of metamorphosis in dark rooms
Like restraining the messenger fire of the multitude
And gathering together forgotten acts on the road
A woman can submit her clandestine adventures
Angered by the invasion of clouds in her life
Beautiful as the favorites of history
The warning of the inevitable guillotine
Nothing will change in her projects
On the contrary death makes a medal for her
     disconsolate head
And the visit of the great beyond
Awards her in advance a balanced step
While she moves away without undoing the knots
     of her past





                                  II



Strike down the wolves in mist who visit;
The creeping metamorphosis of the fiery crowd
 The sophistry of the storm blocked in by stars
The lashed in remorse by turns a memory
That diminishes day by day its swiftness

The clandestine specter is alert in its path
Arbitrarily disconsolate
Somnambulant horse filled with twilight
Like the warnings of history
Fevered messenger of the future submitted to a room

The great favorite gathers the inevitable medals
Invasion of spiteful adventures
Refrain the incontinent attack of the secluded woman
And her step balanced by means of a moribund emptiness



Vicente Huidobro

Una Chica




Desde su altura nos mira con ojos humedos,
triste y cansada
se va para las orillas del bosque
llevando flores y hierba
nos quiere?
es imposible saberlo
guarda sus sentimientos
en el pecho con manos duras
diciendo solo lo que puede dejar atras
lo que no es
aun mas importante
Ella es un fantasma
con ojos salvajes,
pelo rizado
el color del fuego
Ella se balancea sobre el rio
pasando por las rocas agudas
sus pies cicatrizados
y sangrando un liquido
potente y raro,
le rezo a ella
esta nina misteriosa
con su dominio por la naturaleza
la sabiduria de los ancianos en su ser
esta princesita de corazon enorme
cuerpo del aire
donde iba yo siguiendola . . .

                      Over the Same Earth





    The severity of the world, serge,
the dress of a beloved woman,
the path of ants over a very handsome body,
will not impede that cough in kissed soil,
while below the clouds navigate subtle birds.

     Memory like a thread or saliva,
the ungrateful honey mixed up with an ankle,
this light serpent that encrusts in you its love
like two letters over a despised skin.
That slow ascent from rosy twilight,
growing from scales in the viscous cold,
the rubbing of an independent lip
in the humid earth,
when the small snake looks,
looks, looks at the eyes,
at that nubile dove who beats up front its wings.

The night is just a dress.
It’s not worth rejecting reeds claiming that they deal in teeth,
or sorrows whose lack of roots is whiteness,
nor that in the bog they are words undone,
the mastications after love,
when at last the bodies separate.
It’s not worth asserting that the moon can equal the brilliance of a
    somewhat useless dress,
or that it’s better than such burning nakedness,
-- if the frog sings saying that green is green
and that fingernails soften in the mud
then the entire world is a gravity of corneas.

    Enough then to sit on an a steep rock.

    Or enough of this, leaning on an elbow we’ve claimed
          since yesterday,
listening hand on cheek,
the promise of joy sung intimately by a fish.
that voice, not of reeds,
which from a bottle
emits sad algae  -- something that resembles a tired mirror.

    Listening to that music
one understands that the woods may change their place,
that soon the heart barters with a mountain
or that simply one extends an arm to tap twilight’s
    crystal.

    Everything is easy
it’s easy to lighten the sinister hour
taking up the form of an harmonica,
or that useless puppet who on the bank of a river
will never achieve copying its song,
or of that unused comb
that enters the fresh grass
not claiming to confuse itself with Spring,
by knowing that it’s useless.

    It would be better to raise oneself up, and abandon one’s arms
      for two large flowers,
embarking on the westward road,
to see if there one proves what is already known,
that night and day are not of black and white,
but that the same mouth that sleeps amid rocks,
with alternating breaths
is not the kiss or he who doesn’t kiss,
but rather the dust that rains over the sorrowful earth.



Vicente Aleixandre

                    Of What Country




Of what country are you,
Asleep between realities like parched mouths,
Life of incited dreams,
And the mourning that you exhibit by the avenue
      of monuments,
Where forgotten gods and goddesses
Raise non-existent arms or marble glances.

The old woman spins in her ashen garden;
Patio walls, marshes, crepuscular howls,
Ivy, cambric, there they hardened,
Watching those fugitive wheels
At which the clay raised a menacing fist.

The country is a name;
It is your equal, newly born, you come
From the north, the south, the fog, the lights;
Your destiny will be to listen to what they say
The shadows inclined toward the cradle.

One hand will give the power of the smile,
Another will give spiteful tears,
Another the experienced knife,
Another the desire that corrupts, forming beneath life
A lake of pallid things,
Where serpents surge, water lilies, insects, maladies,
Tainting the lips, the most pure.

You will not be able to kiss with innocence,
Nor to live such realities you cry with inexhaustible
      tongue.
Let go, let go, tattered in rags of stars;
You will die in good time.



Luis Cernuda

                           Like Skin




Window orphan with habitual hairs,
Cries of wind,
Atrocious landscape amid crystal rock,
Prostituting living mirrors,
Flowers clamoring in shouts
Their innocence prior to obesity.

Those caves of venomous lights
Destroy desires, the sleeping ones;
Lights like cleaved tongues
Penetrating bone to arrive at flesh,
Without knowing that in depth there is no depth,
There is nothing, only a scream,
A scream, another desire
Over a trap of vicious poppies.

In a world of wire
Where forgetting flies under ground,
In a world of anguish,
Yellowed alcohol,
Feverish feathers,
Rage climbing to a sky of shame,
One day the arrow will surge again
To abandon fate
When a star dies like autumn to forget
       its shadow.



Luis Cernuda

         The Man Who Coughs and Sneezes



At times when someone sneezes
the sky appears to be filled with rats
It isn’t a nightmare it’s a truthful heat
      biting our skin
a darkness not of rain but of silence
not of silence but of beasts who run about invading
      the air in which we live
The man who stops sneezing has an abandoned
      mine in each eye
An ivory cloud of smoke arises from the whiteness
      of his shirt
His lungs are the attic in which the rats
make their city their music and their moon
Behind every door drums make dry the atmosphere
with  their intermittent beats, coffin beats
It is there in long nights of work their petroleum lamp
the bread covered in ash and the threatening
       orange whirlpools
The sky is filled with rats
The trees have disappeared
When we incline our forehead sleep leaves there
       an unusual scar



Fayad Jamis