Sea in the Earth




   No, don’t clamor for that hasty joy
that is latent when the dark music doesn’t vary,
when the dark stream passes indecipherable
like a river that scorns its landscape.

   Happiness doesn’t consist in the wringing of hands
while the world vacillates on its axis,
while light turned to paper
senses that a wind ruffles it smiling.

   Maybe the clamorous sea that in a shoe
will attempt to accommodate itself
   one night,
the infinite sea that wanted to be a dew,
that claimed to rest on a sleeping flower,
that wanted to awaken like a fresh tear.

   The resonant sea turned into a spear
lays in the dryness like a drowning fish,
clamors for that water that could be a kiss,
that could be a chest that rends and drowns.

   But the dry moon doesn’t respond to the reflection
   of pallid scales.
Death is a contraction of a glassy pupil,
it’s the impossibility of agitating arms,
of raising to the sky a cry that will wound.

   Death is the silence in dust, in memory,
it’s grimly stirring a language not of man,
it’s sensing that salt curdles coldly in veins
like an intensely white tree in a fish.

   And so joy, the dark joy of dying,
of understanding that the world is a grain that will dissolve,
that was born for a divine water,
for that immense sea that lays over dust.

  Joy will consist in undoing the minuscule,
in transforming into a sharp thorn,
rest of an ocean that like the light departed,
grain of sand that was a gigantic chest
that exited the throat lying here like a sob.


Vicente Aleixandre