Your Childhood in Menton



                                                 Yes, your childhood: already fable of                                                               fountains.

                                                                                        Jorge Guillen


Yes, your childhood:  already fable of fountains.
The train and the woman who fills the sky.
Your elusive solitude in hotels
and your pure mask of another sign.
It’s the childhood of the sea and your silence
where wise glass shattered.
It’s your rigid ignorance where my torso
was limited by fire.
Norm of love I gave you, man of Apollo,
cry of the alienated nightingale,
but, pasture in ruins, you grow thin
in brief indecisive dreams.
Thought opposed, yesterday’s light,
indexes and signals of chance.
Your waist of sand without calm
attends only tracks that don’t rise.
But I have to search in corners
your tepid soul without you who isn’t understood,
with the pain of Apollo detained
where I’ve broken the mask you wear.
There, lion, there, fury of the sky,
I will leave you to graze in my cheeks;
there, blue horse of my madness,
pulse of nebula and the minute hand.
I have to search for scorpion rocks
and the dresses of your mother girl,
cry of midnight and cloth torn
that quits the moon of the dead man’s temple.
Yes, your childhood:  already fable of fountains.
Strange soul of my hollow of veins,
I have to search out the small one without roots.
Love of forever, love, love of never!
Oh, yes! I love. Love, love!  Let me be.
Don’t cover my mouth those who look for
ears of corn in Saturn by the snow
or that castrate animals in the sky,
clinic and jungle of anatomy.
Love, love, love. Childhood of the sea.
Your tepid soul without you who isn’t understood.
Love, love, flight of the doe
by the chest without end of its whiteness.
And your childhood, love, and your childhood.
The train and the woman who fills the sky.
Not you, nor I, nor the air, nor the leaves.
Yes, your childhood: already fable of fountains.


Federico Garcia Lorca