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