Come, Come You





There where the sea doesn’t beat
where sadness shakes its glassy mane.
where breath softly exhaled
isn’t a metal butterfly but an air.

    An air smooth and soft
where words are murmured as in an ear.
Where weak feathers resound
that in the pink ear are the love that insists.

      Who wants me?  Who says that love
       is a twisted axe,
an exhaustion that divides the body at the waist,
a painful arc where light passes
subtly, never touching anyone?

     The trees in the wood sing as if they were birds.
A huge arm encases the jungle like a creature.
A golden bird by a never ending light
searches lips from which it can flee its jail.

     But the sea doesn’t beat like a heart,
nor a glass or tresses of a distant rock
but does more than assuming the brightness of the sun without return.
Nor are the innumerable fish that populate other skies
more than the slow waters of a remote pupil.

    Then this forest, this speck of blood,
this bird that escapes from a chest,
this breath that exits half-opened lips,
this pair of butterflies that some day may love each other . . .

     This ear that first hears my words,
this flesh that I love with my airborne kisses,
this leather that I narrow as if it were a name,
this rain that falls over my large body,
this freshness of a sky in which some teeth smile,
in which some arms widen, in which a sun threatens,
in which a total music sings invading everything,
in which the carton, the cords, the false fabric,
the painful sackcloth, the world rejected,
takes its leave like a sea that roars without destiny.

   

Vicente Aleixandre