With All Respect





    Trees, women and children
they are all the same:  Depth.
The voices, the caresses, the tidiness, the joy,
this knowing that at the end we are all each other.
Yes!  The ten fingers that I watch.

    Now the Sun is not horrendous like a well-placed cheek;
It isn’t a gown, or a voiceless lantern.
Nor is it the response you hear with bent knee,
or that difficulty of touching the borders with the whitest
     of eyes.
It is now the Sun the truth, the clarity, the constancy.
You chat with the mountain,
you exchange it for your heart:
You can follow stepping lightly.
The fish eye if we arrive at the river
 is just, the image of the joy that God prepares for us,
the ardent kiss that breaks our bones.

    Yes.  At the end it is life.  Oh, what egglike beauty
this spacious gift the valley builds for us,
this limitation where you can lean your head
to hear the best music, that of distant planets.

    Let us go quickly,
let us approach the bonfire.
Your petaled hands and mine of shells,
these delicious improvisations that we reveal to ourselves,
they are worthy for burning, for keeping confidence
    in tomorrow,
so the conversation can go on ignoring the dress.
I ignore the gown.  And you?
Dressed in three-hundred robes or hemp,
enveloped in my most vulgar gowns,
I conserve the dignity of the aurora and the bragging of the naked.

  If you caress me I will believe a storm
        is brewing  
and I will ask if the rays are of seven colors.
Or at best I will be thinking in the air
and in this light breeze that ruffles the defenseless skin.

    With the tip of my foot I don’t laugh,
better that I conserve my dignity,
and if I move across the stage I do so like a master,
like the most unwary little ant.

     And so by morning or afternoon
when the crowds arrive I salute with a gesture,
and I don’t reveal my heel because that is a vulgarity.
And so, I smile at them, I offer them my hand,
I let go a thought, an iridescent butterfly,
while I seal my protest turning into manure.



Vicente Aleixandre