you will leave light imposed on everything
while your mother and I move toward agony.
I speak, and my heart escapes in my breath.
If I could not say how full of love I am, I would drown.
I perfume your room with lavender and resin.
You are dawn, my wife. I am the middle of the day.
III. Child of Light and Shadow
Woven in the dawn, engraved, two honeycombs
can’t hold back the honey from their nipples.
Your breasts in the dawn: maternal springs
that struggle, that rush with white effusions.
Your veins have overflowed, my wife, like the moon,
till they flood the house your savor fills.
And it is as if you oozed from a village of beehives,
you, a whole beehive of foaming milk.
As if your blood were all sweetness,
busy bees filtering through your pores.
I hear a commotion of milk, of flooding, of the marriage
beside you, overrun with resounding abundance.
Abundant woman: I bury myself in your womb.
Your plentiful womb will be my grave.
If my bones burned with iron flame
they would see that I carry your image engraved there.
We are forged together forever in our child:
a fusion our greedy desires long for—
our two branches in one bough of time, and blood;
our two sheaves in one bundle of caresses, and hair.
The dead, burning with frozen fire,
throb stubbornly inside the living:
a child is coming to take up the fields and house
that you and I are leaving, though we stay close by.
We will make this child a generative support,
and he will make final matter of our flesh:
where his hands and breath set down his soul,
propellers will whirl, crops will prosper.
Loose fragment of our own two fragments,
he will make sure that this life is not discarded;
of our two mouths he will make one sword,
and of our four arms, two eternal arms.
I do not love you alone: I love you in your ancestors,
and in all who will descend from your womb tomorrow.
Because the human race has been given as my heritage
the child’s family will be the human race.
With love in our care, asleep and awake,
we will always be kissing in our deep child.
Kissing each other, our dead are kissing,
the first inhabitants of the world are kissing.
To My Son
You refused to close your eyes, my dead one,
and they are open to the sky like two swallows:
your coloring, June-crowned, is now dew
drifting to certain places where it is morning.
Today is like a day inside the earth; it’s dark,
as if inside the earth, rainy, deserted,
damp, sunless as the corpse I will be one day,
like the earth under which I must bury you.
Since you died, mornings, robbed
of your fiery solar eyes, do not breathe.
October storms against our windows.
You cleared autumn’s path. You turned the seas night-dark.
The sun, your sole rival, devoured you
deep as the distant shadow that set you ablaze;
light knocked you down, bore you down,
swallowed you; and it is as if you were never born.
Ten months in light, with the sky making its rounds,
the dead sun, blackened, entombed, eclipsed.
Without passing through daytime, your hair faded;
your flesh drew toward evening, with dawn just at hand.
The dove, facing east, asked after you.
A newborn body needs the dawn, and happiness,
my little child who knew only laughter, so much
that certain flowers die with your smile.
Gone, gone, gone like the swallow,
the summer bird that flees a life touched by frost:
like the swallow who, just opening his delicate wings,
has them clipped, is stranded by what is hostile to flight.
Flower, incapable of growing sharp teeth,
of attaining the tiniest hint of ferocity.
Life like the leaf of newly formed lips,
a leaf that falls just as it starts to utter itself.
The sea’s councils were worthless to you...
I’ve just come to stab the tender sun a little,
to bury a slice of bread in oblivion,
to toss into a few eyes a little handful of nothing.
Green, red, brown; green, blue, gold;
life’s latent colors, gardens,
the insides of flowers destined for your feet,
and gloomy blacks, grave stiff whites.
Woman over in the corner: see, it’s day now.
(Oh, eyes that never set in the dawn!)
But in your womb, in your eyes, my wife,
desolate night keeps falling.
The World Is as It Appears
The world is as it appears
before my five senses,
and before yours, which are
the borders of my own.
The others’ world
is not ours: not the same.
You are the body of water
that I am—we, together,
are the river
which as it grows deeper
is seen to run slower, clearer.
Images of life—
as soon as we receive them,
they receive us, delivered
jointly, in one rhythm.
But things form themselves
in our own delirium.
The air has the hugeness
of the heart I breathe,
and the sun is like the light
with which I challenge it.
Blind to the others,
dark, always remiss,
we always look inside,
we see from the most intimate places.
It takes work and love
to see these things with you;
to appear, like water
with sand, always one.
No one will see me completely.
Nor is anyone the way I see him.
We are something more than we see,
something less than we look into.
Some parts of the whole
pass unnoticed.
No one has seen us. We have seen
no one, blind as we are from seeing.
The Cemetery Lies Near
The cemetery lies near
where you and I are sleeping,
among blue nopals,
blue pitas, and children
who shout at the top of their lungs
if a corpse darkens the street.
From here to the cemetery everything
is blue, golden, clear.
Four steps away, the dead.
Four steps away, the living.
Clear, blue, and golden.
My son grows remote there.
Waltz of the Lovers Who Will Always Be Together
They never left the orchard of their arms,
and entwined themselves
in the red rosebush of their lips.
Hurricanes of spite tried
to separate them.
And sharpened axes
and terse lightning bolts.
Their pale hands
mounded up earth.
They took the measure of cliffs,
driven by the wind
between gaping mouths.
They moved deeper and deeper through
shipwrecks, in their bodies, in each other’s arms.
Hunted and sunk
by a great helplessness
of Novembers and Marches,
they saw themselves scattered
like weightless dust:
saw themselves scattered,
yet always in each other’s arms.
You Were Like the Young Fig Tree
You were like the young
fig tree by the cliffs.
And when I passed by
you filled the sierra with sound.
Like the young fig tree,
resplendent and blind.
You are like the fig tree.
The old fig tree.
I pass, and silence
and dry leaves greet me.
You are like the fig tree
that lightning struck old.
The Sun, the Rose, and the Child
The sun, the rose, and the child
were born as a single day’s flowers.
Those that come every day
are new suns, flowers, children.
Tomorrow, I won’t be myself:
my true self will be another.
And I will be no more than whatever
somebody wants to remember.
Next to the smallest thing,
a day’s flower is the greatest.
Light’s flower is lightning,
and the flower of an instant is time.
Among the flowers, you left.
Among the flowers, I stay.
The Grasses, the Nettles
The grasses, the nettles
keep growing in autumn,
softly, and with
lengthy tenderness.
Autumn, the savor
that separates things,
alienates and tows them along.
Rain falls on the roof
as on a coffin
while the grass grows
like a young wing.
The grasses, the nettles,
fed by the same sap.
Love Rose Up Between Us
Love rose up between us
like the moon between two palm trees
that never embraced.
The intimate murmur of the two bodies
surged toward a lullaby,
but the hoarse voice was torn out with pincers,
the lips were hard as stone.
The longing to encircle moved the flesh,
lit up the kindled bones,
but as they tried to stretch out, the arms
died in each other.
Love, the moon, passed between us
and devoured the solitary bodies.
And we are two ghosts who search for each other
and find ourselves far apart.
Humming Eyelashes
Humming eyelashes
of the canefields.
Drooping over man’s drowsiness
until his heart
is left calmed
and his mind at ease.
Smother the weapon’s voice,
don’t let it wake and spring
with hatred’s knife
throbbing between its teeth.
You see, sleeping, a man
is worth the whole earth.
All the Houses Are Eyes
All the houses are eyes
that glisten and lie in wait.
All the houses are mouths
that spit and gnash and kiss.
All the houses are arms
that shove, and fold over on themselves.
Out of every house come
whiffs of darkness and the woods.
In all of them, the uproar
of unsatisfied blood.
With a shout, all the houses
attack each other and turn out all the people.
With a shout, all the houses grow calm,
and multiply, and wait.
In the Depths of Man
In the depths of man,
unruly water.
In the clearest water,
I want to see life.
In the depths of man,
unruly water.
In the clearest water,
shadow with no outlet.
In the depths of man,
unruly water.
The Last Corner
The last thing, and the first:
a corner for the largest sun,
a tomb for this life
where your eyes do not go.
I would like to stretch out there
to fall out of love.
I want it near the olive tree,
I feel it in the street,
it sinks down in corners
where the trees are sinking.
It seeps into and deepens
the intensity of my blood.
Flesh of my movement,
bones of mortal rhythms,
I am dying so I can catch my breath
over the things you do.
Heart, between two stones
anxious to crush it,
you drown in all the things you want
like a sea between two seas.
I drown in all the things I want,
yet it isn’t possible to drown myself.
What did I do to make them put
so much jail in my life?
Your hair, where black
has suffered through ages
of the most solid,
the most thrilling blackness:
I go over and over your ageless
black hair till I pull myself up
to the first blackness
of your eyes and your ancestors;
to the corner of thick hair
where you flashed like lightning.
Ay, the corner of your womb;
the alley of your flesh:
the blind alley
of my death agony one afternoon.
Gunpowder and love
march through the cities
dazzling, stirring
the population of the blood.
The orange tree tastes of life.
The olive tree tastes of time,
and caught between their clamoring
my heart debates.
The last thing, and the first:
a shipwrecked corner, pool
of spittle confined
to its riverbed of love.
Siesta that has darkened
the sun of damp places.
I would like to stretch out there
to fall out of love.
After love, the earth.
After the earth, no one.
To Sing
The house is a dovecote
and the bed is a bed of jasmines.
The door is wide open
to the whole world.
The child: your motherly heart
grown large.
In these rooms:
everything that has blossomed.
The child makes you into a garden,
and you, my wife, make the child into
a room full of jasmine,
a dovecote of rose.
Around your skin
I bind and unbind my own.
You exude a noontime
of honey: a noon.
Who entered this house
and took it from the desert?
I remember:
I am somebody, and he has died.
Roundest light comes
to the whitest almond trees.
Life, and light digs deeply down
among the dead men and the gullies.
The future is prosperous,
like those horizons
of pure porphyry and marble
where mountains breathe.
The house, kindled
by kissing and love’s shadow, burns.
Life can’t go on
more deeply, more charged than this.
Mute and overflowing, milk
illuminates your bones.
And the house, with child and kisses,
is flooded with it.
You, y
our abundant womb,
the child and the dove.
My wife, over your husband
the sea’s passage resounds.
Before Hatred
I am a kiss, a shadow with a shadow.
A kiss, pain in pain.
For having fallen in love,
heartless heart,
with things, with creation’s
shadowless breath.
Thirsting, with water in the distance,
but thirst everywhere.
My heart in a cup
where I drink it down,
and no one else drinks it down.
No one knows its taste.
Hatred. Life. So much hatred,
just for love!
It is impossible to caress you
with hands that have kindled
the greatest desire,
the most heated longing.
Many wings, much flight
is pulled down by them today;
chains that cuff the veins
and clamp them with malice.
For love, life. Shot down,
irretrievable bird.
Just for hated love,
just for love!
Love, you are the vault up there,
and I am always below
with no light other than these yearnings,
no other illumination.
Look at me chained down here,
spat upon, with no warmth
for my feet, in the fiercest
sudden darkness,
taking bread and knife
like a good worker.
And sometimes just the knife,
just for love!
Everything that stands for
swallows, ascent,
clarity, breadth, air,
definite space, sun,
a fluttering horizon—
buried in a corner.
Thickness, sea, desert,
blood, rolling mountain:
my soul’s free will
cries out in passion,
marches past my body
without pausing—
no, spreads out everywhere,
just for love!
Because caught here in the sad
garland of chains,
constantly at the jailer’s pleasure,
at the execution wall,
by the watchtower,
I am uplifted. Happy. Free.
Uplifted. Happy. Free. Free,
just for love!
There is no jail for man.
They can’t shackle me, no.
This world of chains
is small and foreign to me.
Who locks up a smile?
Who walls in a voice?
There you are in the distance, alone
as death. You, and I.
There you are in the distance.
In your arms, you feel my imprisonment.
Miguel Hernandez Page 4