The Hands | A poem by Vicente Aleixandre, 1898-1984

Jindřich Štyrský, Little Alabaster Hand, 1940

Look at your hand, how slowly it moves,
transparent, tangible, cut through with light,
beautiful, alive, almost human in the night.
With the moon’s reflection, with the pain in a cheek, with the
vagueness of dreams
look at how it grows as you raise your arm,
fruitless search for a lost darkness,
wing of light that moves across in silence
and feels that dark crypt with its flesh.

Your sorrow doesn’t phosphoresce, it hasn’t caught
the other wing’s hot heartbeat.
A flying hand being chased: a couple.
Sweet, dark and faded, you cross back and forth.

You are the calling of lovers, the signals
that silently appeal to one another in the dark.
Sky with rubbed-out stars, you give yourself,
like a warm field, to these noiseless wings.

Hands of lovers who have recently died,
hands full of life that fly after each other
and, when they collide and clasp, light up
a momentary moon over the world of men.

Vicente Aleixandre, 1898-1984
tr. Lewis Hyde