that you can’t drown doves in cold snow,
who know nothing, if not innocence.
The animal is a huge influence on me,
a beast roars through all my strength, my passions.
Sometimes I have to make the greatest effort
to calm the voice of the lion in me.
I am proud to own the animal in my life,
but in the animal, the human persists.
And I look for my body as the purest thing
to nest in such a jungle, with its basic courage.
Through hunger, man re-enters the labyrinth
where life is lived, sinister and alone.
The beast turns up again, recaptures its instincts,
its bristling paws, its animus, its tail.
Learning and wisdom are thrown out,
your mask is removed, the skin of culture,
the eyes of science, the recent crust
of knowledge that reveals and procures things.
Then you know only evil, extermination.
You invent gases, launch ruinous ideas,
return to the cloven hoof, regress to the kingdom
of the fang, and move toward the eaters.
You train the beast, clutch the ladle,
ready for anybody who comes near the table.
Then I see over the whole world only a troop
of tigers, and the sorry sight aches in my eyes.
I haven’t opened my soul to so much tiger,
adopted so much of the jackal, that the wine I feel,
the bread, the day, the hunger isn’t shared
with other hungers fed nobly into my mouth.
Help me to be a man: don’t let me be a beast,
starving, enraged, forever cornered.
A common animal, with working blood,
I give you the humanity that this song foretells.
First Song
The field has retreated,
seeing man’s
convulsive charge.
What an abyss is laid bare
between the olive tree and man!
The animal who sings,
the animal who knows
how to weep and grow roots,
has remembered his claws.
Claws that he dressed up
in gentleness and flowers
but which, in the end, he bares
in all his cruelty.
They crackle on my hands:
Keep away from them, boy.
Or I will plunge them
into your little body.
I’ve regressed into a tiger.
Keep away or I’ll tear you apart.
These days, love is death,
and man lies in ambush for man.
Soldiers and the Snow
December has frozen the double-edged
breath it blows from frozen skies
like a dry fire unraveling in threads,
like a great ruin storming down on the soldiers.
Snow where horses have left their hoofprints
is a lonesome place where grief galloped away.
Snow for ripped hooves, mangled claws,
heaven’s wickedness, absolute contempt.
Snow snaps, hews, slashes through
like the awful blow of a bloodshot and trifling stone ax.
Snow plunges, storms down like the melting embrace
of canyons and wings, solitude and snow.
This belligerence, split off from winter’s core,
this raw hunger, so tired of being hungry and cold,
threatens the unclothed with an undying grudge
that is white, fatal, starving, mute, and dark.
It wants to fan forges, hatred, flames,
it wants to stop up the seas, and bury love.
It goes around heaving up huge diaphanous barriers,
tongue-tied statues, and feisty slivers of glass.
I wish the hearts of wool in all the shops
and textile mills would spool over,
and cover bodies that kindle each morning
with voices and glances, with feet and rifles:
Clothes for corpses that might go naked,
dressed in nothing more than frost and ice,
in withered stone that repels the hard beaks,
the ghastly pecking, the ghastly flying-off.
Clothes for corpses that dumbly battle
the snowiest onslaughts with the reddest bones.
Because these soldiers have sun-fired bones,
because they are roaring fires with footsteps and eyes.
Cold lurches on, death is stripped of its leaves,
the uproar is mute, but I listen to it; it storms down.
On white snow, life is red and red;
it makes snow steam, seeds the snow with fire.
Soldiers are so much like rock crystals
that only fire, only flame shapes them,
and they fight with icy cheekbones, with their mouths,
and turn whatever they attack into memories of ash.
The Wounded Man
I
The wounded stretch across the battlefields.
And from the long length of these fighters’ bodies
a wheatfield of warm fountains springs up,
spreading into raucous jets.
Blood always rains upside down, toward the sky.
And wounds make sounds, just like conch shells
when the rapidity of flight is in them,
the essence of waves.
Blood smells like the sea, tastes like the sea, and the wine cellar.
The wine cellar of the sea, of hardy wine, breaks open
where the wounded man, shivering, goes under,
blossoms, and finds himself.
I am wounded. Look at me: I need more lives.
The one I have is too small for the consignment
of blood that I want to give up through my wounds.
Tell me who has not been wounded.
My life is a wound with a happy childhood.
Ay, the poor man who is not wounded, who never feels
wounded by life, never rests in life,
happily wounded!
If a man goes cheerfully to hospitals,
they change into gardens of half-opened wounds,
of flowering oleanders in front of the operating room
with its bloodstained doors.
II
I bleed for freedom, I fight, I survive.
For freedom I give my eyes and hands,
like a generous and captive tree of flesh,
to the surgeons.
For freedom I feel more hearts
in me than grains of sand: my veins give up foam,
and I enter the hospitals, I enter the bandages
as if they were lilies.
For freedom I sever myself, with bullets,
from those who dumped her statue into the mud.
And I sever myself from my feet, my arms,
my house—from everything.
Because where these empty eye-sockets dawn
she will put two stones that see the future,
and make new arms and new legs grow
from the pruned flesh.
The body’s relics that I give up in each wound
will bud again in autumnless flutterings of sap.
Because I am like the cropped tree, and I bud again:
because I still have life.
Letter
The pigeon-house of letters
begins its impossible flight
from the shaky tables
on which memory leans,
the weight of absence,
the heart, the silence.
I hear the ruffling of letters
sailing toward their centers.
Wherever I go, the women,
the men I meet,
are wounded by absence,
worn out by time.
Letters, stories, letters;
postcards, dreams,
bits of tenderness
tossed into the sky,
launched from blood to blood,
from longing to longing.
Although my loving body
is under earth now,
write to me on earth
so I can write to you.
Old letters, old envelopes
grow quiet in the corner,
the color of age
pressed into the writing.
The letters perish there,
filled with shivering.
The ink suffers death throes,
the loose sheets weaken,
and the paper fills with holes
like a crowded cemetery full
of passions gone by
and loves yet to come.
Although my loving body
is under earth now,
write to me on earth
so I can write to you.
When I start to write you
the inkwells stir,
the cold black inkwells
blush and tremble,
and a bright human warmth
rises from the dark depths.
When I start to write you
my bones are ready to write you:
I write with the indelible
ink of my love.
There goes my warm letter,
a dove forged in fire,
its two wings folded
and the address in the center:
A bird that homes in only
on your body, your hands, and your eyes,
the space around your breath,
for its nest and air and sky.
And you will stay naked there
inside your feelings,
without clothes on, so you can feel
it all against your breast.
Although my loving body
is under earth now,
write to me on earth
so I can write to you.
Yesterday, a letter was left
abandoned, unclaimed,
flying past the eyes
of someone who had lost his body.
Letters that stay alive
talk to the dead.
Wistful paper, nearly human,
with no eyes to see it.
While the eye-teeth keep growing,
I feel the small voice
in your letter more and more
as a great shout.
It comes to me while I sleep,
if I don’t stay awake.
And my wounds will become
spilling inkwells,
trembling mouths
that recall your kisses,
and they will repeat,
in an unheard-of voice: I love you.
Train of the Wounded
Silence, wrecked in the silence
of shut mouths in the night.
It never stops being silent, or gets there.
It talks the strangled language of the dead.
Silence.
Open the roads of deep cotton,
muzzle the wheels, the clocks,
hold back the voice of the sea, of the dove:
stir up the night of dreams.
Silence.
The drenched train of flowing blood,
the fragile train of bleeding men,
the silent, painful, pale
hushed train of suffering.
Silence.
Train of the mounting death pallor:
the pallor that dresses the head,
the “ah!,” the voice, the heart, the clay,
the heart of those who got hurt badly.
Silence.
They spill legs, arms, eyes,
they leave them all through this train.
They pass, leaving behind a bitter trail,
a second Milky Way with limbs for stars.
Silence.
Hoarse train, disheartened, blood-red, depressed:
coal in death throes, smoke in sighs,
the engine sighs like a mother,
moves on like endless discouragement.
Silence.
The outstretched mother would like to stop
deep in a tunnel, to lie down and sob.
There are no other stations to be met,
just the hospital, or maybe the breast.
To live, a little is enough.
A man can fit into a corner of flesh.
Just one finger, one slice of wing
can lift the whole body into total flight.
Silence.
Stop the train of dying that never
completes its crossing through night.
Even the horse is left shoeless,
its hooves, and its breath, buried in sand.
July 18, 1936–July 18, 1938
Blood, not hail, pounds at my temples.
Two years of blood: two floods.
Blood, circulating like the sun, swallowing everything
until the balconies are left drowned and empty.
Blood, the finest of all treasures.
Blood, which stored up its gifts for love.
See it churning up oceans, surprising trains,
breaking down bulls as it heartens lions.
Time is blood. Time pumps through my veins.
And here with the clock and dawn, I am more than wounded,
and I hear blood collisions of every kind.
Blood, where death itself could scarcely bathe:
Excited brilliance that has not grown pale
because my eyes, for a thousand years, have sheltered it.
Last Song
Painted, not empty:
my house is painted
the color of the great
passions and tragedies.
It will come back from the weeping
where it was carried
with its deserted table,
its tottering bed.
Kisses will bloom
on the pillows.
And wrapped around the bodies
the sheet will raise
its intense vine,
nocturnal and perfumed.
Hatred dies down
past the window.
The claw will be gentle.
Leave me this hope.
Last Poems from Prison (1939–1941)
INCLUDING POEMS FROM
Songs and Ballads of Absence
(Cancionero y romancero de ausencias, 1958)
Child of Light and Shadow
I. Child of Shadow
You are night, my wife: night at the peak
of its lunar, feminine power.
You are midnight: culminating shadow
where dreams culminate, where love culminates.
Forged by the day, my burning heart
bears the sun’s huge imprint wherever you want
with a solar impulse, supreme light,
climax of mornings and nights.
I will fall across your body when night
spreads its greedy magnetic lust and power.
A febrile astral sadness seizes me,
inflames my bones with a chill.
The night air disturbs your breasts,
disturbs and capsizes bodies with a shock.
Like a storm of maddened beds
it eclipses couples, makes them a solid block.
The night is lit like a mute bonfire
of mineral flame and dark assaults.
All around, shadow throbs, as if it were
the diffusing souls of wells and wine.
Now shadow is the closed nest, incandescent,
visible blindness fixed on those in love;
now it provokes the closed embrace, blindly,
now it gathers, in its caves, whatever light spills.
Shadow begs for, it craves bodies that interlace,
kisses that form constellations of pro
longed lightning,
angry beaten mouths that rip the flesh,
lullabies that compose music from their mute lethargy.
It begs us both to throw ourselves onto the blanket,
throw ourselves over the moon and out into life.
It begs us both to burn, melting in our throats
the trembling earth with the whole firmament.
The child is in a shadow that collects morning stars,
love, marrow, moon, clear darknesses.
He springs from their leisure, and their empty places,
from their lonely, snuffed-out cities.
The child is in shadow: he has sprouted from shadow,
and stars begin their sowing at his origin,
a milky sap, a warm throbbing flow
that binds his bones to dreams and women.
That shadow is shifting its sidereal forces,
that shadow is spreading its starry shade,
capsizing couples and making them married.
You are night, my wife. I am the middle of the day.
II. Child of Light
You are dawn, my wife: the first penumbra,
your face lets in the half-closed hours.
Committed to brilliance, but half-closed, your body
produces light. Your entrails forge the rising sun.
Center of brightness, the great hour awaits you
on the threshold of a fire itself on fire:
I wait for you, bent like wheat to the threshing floor,
arranging our house in the center of the light.
The dark wells’ generous night sinks
into wells where it has taken root.
And you open yourself to radiant childbirth,
between walls, breached, as you are, like stone matrices.
Childbirth’s great hour, the roundest hour:
clocks burst, hearing you howl,
all the world’s doors, and dawn’s, fly open,
and the sun is born in your womb, its nest.
At first the child was shadow and cloth, sewn
by your deep hands from your heart’s depths.
With shadows and cloth he anticipated his life,
with the shadows and clothing of human seed.
Shadows and clothes, deserted, with nobody in them,
have been filled with a squalling boy, a movement
that throws the doors of our house wide open
and occupies, shouting, a luminous spot.
Ay, life! What beautiful grief so near death!
Shadows and cloth gave the life of the child you name.
Men wear shadows and cloth all over the world.
And they always leave shadows behind: cloth and shadow.
You are dawn’s child, noon’s child.
And in our care, asleep, awake, with love,