San Miguel, by Federico García Lorca

Granada
A Diego Buigas de Dalmau

You can see them from the railings,
on the mountain, mountain, mountain,
mules and mule-shaped shadows,
laden with sunflowers.

They walk the shaded slope,
their eyes with night-fog clouded.
In the salt air's corners
the daybreak creaks around them.

White mules cross the sky,
their quicksilver eyes shrouded,
one encore for the night's heart
in the still dawn hour.
And you dare not touch the water,
for the air's so cold around it.
The mad, uncovered water
on the mountain, mountain, mountain.

*

San Miguel, arrayed in lace
in the bedroom of his tower,
shows his exquisite legs
with the lamplight wrapped around them.

Domesticated angel
with an apostolic outline,
feathered like a nightingale,
sweetly feigning outrage.
Miguel sings in the glass;
a youth of nights three thousand.
The sweet smell of cologne
this far off from the flowers.

*

The waves dance on the beach
to the verandas' roundel.
The reeds give way to voices
among the moon's houses.
Along come women eating
the seeds of the sunflowers;
their buttocks, copper planets;
their skirts, the night sky clouded.
Along come noble knights
and ladies of sad countenance,
dark-eyed for the nightingales
of spring and how they sounded.

And the Bishop of Manila,
saffron-blind and poor, pronounces
a Mass, half male, half female,
double-edged and doubly mounted.

*

Miguel stirs not a limb
in the bedroom of his tower,
his skirts of little mirrors
glittering around him.

San Miguel, king of balloons,
odd numbers, lonely towers,
and a Berber caravan
full of argument and shouting.