TO STONES


Brilliant sisters of the torrents that I find on the shore of the
Alpine lake: you are the stones loved by the rainbow and the azure
cold, on you falls the white salt which is licked up by the lambs, you
are mirrors whose light is iridescent as the pigeon's breast, you
have more eyes than the peacock, you are crystallized by fire and your
veins of snow have become eternal, you have been the companions of
primordial cataclysms, you were washed by the sea and then rocked by
it until the dove from the ark cooed with love at sight of you....

The gleaming grain of your flesh at times has the blue-veined
whiteness of a child's wrist, at times it has the golden coppery hue
of the thigh of a heavy and beautiful woman, sometimes it is silvered
with mica like a cheek in the sunlight, sometimes it is brown like the
complexion of those in whom the dead blondness of tobacco is blended
with the gold of the mandarin orange.

You are stones that have been broken by the heart of the torrent, you
have been dashed against each other and have been tossed about amid
the daphnes of the ravine, you have been whipped by hailstorms and
tempest, buried under the avalanche, uncovered by the sun, loosened by
the feet of the chamois, you are cold and beautiful but above all else
you are pure.

I know little of your sisters of the Indies: either of her whose
transparency rivals water gushing from marble, or of her who makes