Ode to a Pair of Socks

Maru Mota brought me a pair of socks that she knitted with her shepherdess hands, two socks soft as rabbits.

I put my feet into them as into two cases knitted with threads of twilight and sheeps wool.

Wild socks, my feet were two wool fish, two big sharks of ultramarine crossed by a golden braid, two giant blackbirds, two cannons: my feet were honored in this way by these heavenly socks.

They were so beautiful that for the first time my feet seemed to me unacceptable like two decrepit firemen, firemen unworthy of that embroidered fire, of those shining socks.

Anyway

I resisted the sharp temptation to save them the way schoolboys keep lightning bugs, the way scholars collect rare books,

I resisted the mad impulse to put them in a golden cage and each day to feed them birdseed and the meat of a rosy melon.

Like explorers in the forest who give up the finest young deer to the roasting spit and eat it with regret,

I stretched out my feet and put on the lovely socks and then my shoes.

And this is the moral of my ode: beauty is twice beautiful and goodness is doubly good when it concerns two wool socks in winter.