Juan Ramón Jiménez

The ship, solid and black, enters the clear blackness of the great harbor. Quiet and cold. —The people waiting are still asleep, dreaming, and warm, far away and still stretched out in this dream, perhaps . . . How real our watch is, beside the dream of doubt the others had! How sure it is, compared to their troubled dream about us! Quiet. Silence. Silence which in breaking up at dawn will speak differently.

They all are asleep, below. Above, awake, the helmsman and I. He, watching the compass needle, lord of the bodies, with their keys turned in the locks. I, with my eyes toward the infinite, guiding the open treasures of the souls.

What was it like, God of mine, what was it like? —Oh unfaithful heart, indecisive intelligence! Was it like the going by of the wind? Like the disappearance of the spring? As nimble, as changeable, as weightless as milkweed seeds in summer . . . Yes! Indefinite as a smile which is lost forever in a laugh . . . Arrogant in the air, just like a flag! Flag, smile, milkweed pod, swift spring in June, clear wind! . . . Your celebration was so wild, so sad! All of your changes ended up in nothing— remembrance, a blind bee of bitter things!— I don’t know what you were like, but you were!

February 3rd The sea with no waves we recognize, with no stations on its route, only water and moon, night after night! My thought goes back to the land, someone else’s land, belonging to the one going through it on trains at night, through the same place at the same hour as before . . . Remote mother, sleeping earth, powerful and faithful arms, the same quiet lap for all —tomb of eternal life with the same decorations freshened— earth, mother, always true to yourself, waiting for the sad gaze of the wandering eyes! My thought goes back to the land, —the olive groves at sunrise— outlined sharply in the white or golden or yellow moonlight, that look forward to the coming back of those humans who are neither its slaves nor its masters, but who love it anyway . . .

If I have created a world for you, in your place, god, you had to come to it confident, and you have come to it, to my refuge, because my whole world was nothing but my hope. I have been saving up my hope in language, in a spoken name, a written name; I had given a name to everything, and you have taken the place of all these names. Now I can hold back my movement inside the coal of my continual living and being, as the flame reins itself back inside the red coal, surrounded by air that is all blue fire; now I am my own sea that has been suddenly stopped somewhere, the sea I used to speak of, but not heavy, stiffened into waves of an awareness filled with light, and all of them moving upward, upward. All the names that I gave to the universe that I created again for you are now all turning into one name, into one god. The god who, in the end, is always the god created and recreated and recreated through grace and never through force. The God. The name drawn from the names.

I am not I. I am this one walking beside me whom I do not see, whom at times I manage to visit, and whom at other times I forget; who remains calm and silent while I talk, and forgives, gently, when I hate, who walks where I am not, who will remain standing when I die.

You are carrying me, full consciousness, god that has desires, all through the world. Here, in this third sea, I almost hear your voice: your voice, the wind, filling entirely all movements; eternal colors and eternal lights, sea colors and sea lights. Your voice full of white fire in the universe of water, the ship, the sky, marking out the roads with delight, engraving for me with a blazing light my firm orbit: a black body with the glowing diamond in its center.

You can see the face of everything, and it is white— plaster, nightmare, adobe, anemia, cold— turned to the east. Oh closeness to life! Hardness of life! Like something in the body that is animal—root, slag-ends— with the soul still not set well there— and mineral and vegetable! Sun standing stiffly against man, against the sow, the cabbages, the mud wall! —False joy, because you are merely in time, as they say, and not in the soul! The entire sky taken up by moist and steaming heaps, a horizon of dung piles. Sour remains, here and there, of the night. Slices of the green moon, half-eaten, crystal bits from false stars, plaster, the paper ripped off, still faintly sky-blue. The birds not really awake yet, in the raw moon, streetlight nearly out. Mob of beings and things! —A true sadness, because you are really deep in the soul, as they say, not in time at all!