RANDOM OBSERVATIONS: November 2010

Pablo Neruda

- poems –

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

Pablo Neruda was born in Parall, Chile. He studied in Santiago in the twenties. From 1927 to 1945 he was the Chilean consul in Rangoon, in Java,and then in Barcelona. He joined the communist Party after the Second World War. Between 1970 and 1973 he served in Allende’s Chilean Government as ambassador to Paris. He died shortly after the coup that ended the Allende Government.

Gautama Christ

The names of God and especially those of His representative

Who is called Jesus or Christ according to holy books and

someone's mouth

These names have been used, worn out and left

On the shores of rivers of of human lives

Like the empty shells of a mollusk.

However when we touch these sacred but exhausted

Names, these wounded scattered petals

Which have come out of the oceans of love and fear

Something still remains, a sip of water,

A rainbow footprint that still shimmers in the light.

While the names of God were used

By the best and the worst, by the clean and the dirty

By the white and the black, by bloody murderers

And by victims flaming gold with napalm

While Nixon with his hands

Of Cain blessed those whom he condemned to death,

While fewer and fewer divine footprints were found

on the beach

People began to study colors,

The future of honey, the sign of uranium

They looked with anxiety and hope for the possibilities

Of killing themselves or not killing themselves, of organizing

themselves into a fabric

Of going further on, of breaking through limits without stopping

What we came across in these blood thirsty times

With their smoke of burning trash, their dead ashes

As we weren't able to stop looking

We often stopped to look at the names of God

We lifted them with tenderness because they reminded us

Of our ancestors, of the first people, those who said the prayers

Those who discovered the hymn that united them in misfortune

And now seeing the empty fragments which sheltered those

ancient people

We feel those smooth substances,

Worn out and used up by good and by evil.

A Dog Has Died

My dog has died.

I buried him in the garden

next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I'll join him right there,

but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,

his bad manners and his cold nose,

and I, the materialist, who never believed

in any promised heaven in the sky

for any human being,

I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.

Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom

where my dog waits for my arrival

waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth,

of having lost a companion

who was never servile.

His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine

withholding its authority,

was the friendship of a star, aloof,

with no more intimacy than was called for,

with no exaggerations:

he never climbed all over my clothes

filling me full of his hair or his mange,

he never rubbed up against my knee

like other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,

paying me the attention I need,

the attention required

to make a vain person like me understand

that, being a dog, he was wasting time,

but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,

he'd keep on gazing at me

with a look that reserved for me alone

all his sweet and shaggy life,

always near me, never troubling me,

and asking nothing.

Ai, how many times have I envied his tail

as we walked together on the shores of the sea

in the lonely winter of Isla Negra

where the wintering birds filled the sky

and my hairy dog was jumping about

full of the voltage of the sea's movement:

my wandering dog, sniffing away

with his golden tail held high,

face to face with the ocean's spray.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,

as only dogs know how to be happy

with only the autonomy

of their shameless spirit.

There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,

and we don't now and never did lie to each other.

So now he's gone and I buried him,

and that's all there is to it.

A Song of Despair

The memory of you emerges from the night around me.

The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.

Deserted like the dwarves at dawn.

It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one!

Cold flower heads are raining over my heart.

Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked.

In you the wars and the flights accumulated.

From you the wings of the song birds rose.

You swallowed everything, like distance.

Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank!

It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss.

The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse.

Pilot's dread, fury of blind driver,

turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank!

In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded.

Lost discoverer, in you everything sank!

You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire,

sadness stunned you, in you everything sank!

I made the wall of shadow draw back,

beyond desire and act, I walked on.

Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost,

I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you.

Like a jar you housed infinite tenderness.

and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar.

There was the black solitude of the islands,

and there, woman of love, your arms took me in.

There was thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.

There were grief and ruins, and you were the miracle.

Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me

in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms!

How terrible and brief my desire was to you!

How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid.

Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs,

still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds.

Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs,

oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies.

Oh the mad coupling of hope and force

in which we merged and despaired.

And the tenderness, light as water and as flour.

And the word scarcely begun on the lips.

This was my destiny and in it was my voyage of my longing,

and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank!

Oh pit of debris, everything fell into you,

what sorrow did you not express, in what sorrow are you not drowned!

From billow to billow you still called and sang.

Standing like a sailor in the prow of a vessel.

You still flowered in songs, you still brike the currents.

Oh pit of debris, open and bitter well.

Pale blind diver, luckless slinger,

lost discoverer, in you everything sank!

It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour

which the night fastens to all the timetables.

The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore.

Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate.

Deserted like the wharves at dawn.

Only tremulous shadow twists in my hands.

Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything.

It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one!

If You Forget Me

I want you to know

one thing.

You know how this is:

if I look

at the crystal moon, at the red branch

of the slow autumn at my window,

if I touch

near the fire

the impalpable ash

or the wrinkled body of the log,

everything carries me to you,

as if everything that exists,

aromas, light, metals,

were little boats

that sail

toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,

if little by little you stop loving me

I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly

you forget me

do not look for me,

for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,

the wind of banners

that passes through my life,

and you decide

to leave me at the shore

of the heart where I have roots,

remember

that on that day,

at that hour,

I shall lift my arms

and my roots will set off

to seek another land.

But

if each day,

each hour,

you feel that you are destined for me

with implacable sweetness,

if each day a flower

climbs up to your lips to seek me,

ah my love, ah my own,

in me all that fire is repeated,

in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,

my love feeds on your love, beloved,

and as long as you live it will be in your arms

without leaving mine.

Saddest Poem

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.

Write, for instance: "The night is full of stars,

and the stars, blue, shiver in the distance."

The night wind whirls in the sky and sings.

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.

I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

On nights like this, I held her in my arms.

I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her.

How could I not have loved her large, still eyes?

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.

To think I don't have her. To feel that I've lost her.

To hear the immense night, more immense without her.

And the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.

What does it matter that my love couldn't keep her.

The night is full of stars and she is not with me.

That's all. Far away, someone sings. Far away.

My soul is lost without her.

As if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.

My heart searches for her and she is not with me.

The same night that whitens the same trees.

We, we who were, we are the same no longer.

I no longer love her, true, but how much I loved her.

My voice searched the wind to touch her ear.

Someone else's. She will be someone else's. As she once

belonged to my kisses.

Her voice, her light body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her.

Love is so short and oblivion so long.

Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,

my soul is lost without her.

Although this may be the last pain she causes me,

and this may be the last poem I write for her.

I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You by

I do not love you except because I love you;

I go from loving to not loving you,

From waiting to not waiting for you

My heart moves from cold to fire.

I love you only because it's you the one I love;

I hate you deeply, and hating you

Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you

Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Maybe January light will consume

My heart with its cruel

Ray, stealing my key to true calm.

In this part of the story I am the one who

Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,

Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.

Absence

I have scarcely left you

When you go in me, crystalline,

Or trembling,

Or uneasy, wounded by me

Or overwhelmed with love, as

when your eyes

Close upon the gift of life

That without cease I give you.

My love,

We have found each other

Thirsty and we have

Drunk up all the water and the

Blood,

We found each other

Hungry

And we bit each other

As fire bites,

Leaving wounds in us.

But wait for me,

Keep for me your sweetness.

I will give you too

A rose.

Always

I am not jealous

of what came before me.

Come with a man

on your shoulders,

come with a hundred men in your hair,

come with a thousand men between your breasts and your feet,

come like a river

full of drowned men

which flows down to the wild sea,

to the eternal surf, to Time!

Bring them all

to where I am waiting for you;

we shall always be alone,

we shall always be you and I

alone on earth,

to start our life!

Bird

It was passed from one bird to another,

the whole gift of the day.

The day went from flute to flute,

went dressed in vegetation,

in flights which opened a tunnel

through the wind would pass

to where birds were breaking open

the dense blue air -

and there, night came in.

When I returned from so many journeys,

I stayed suspended and green

between sun and geography -

I saw how wings worked,

how perfumes are transmitted

by feathery telegraph,

and from above I saw the path,

the springs and the roof tiles,

the fishermen at their trades,

the trousers of the foam;

I saw it all from my green sky.

I had no more alphabet

than the swallows in their courses,

the tiny, shining water

of the small bird on fire

which dances out of the pollen.

Drunk as Drunk

Drunk as drunk on turpentine

From your open kisses,

Your wet body wedged

Between my wet body and the strake

Of our boat that is made of flowers,

Feasted, we guide it - our fingers

Like tallows adorned with yellow metal -

Over the sky's hot rim,

The day's last breath in our sails.

Pinned by the sun between solstice

And equinox, drowsy and tangled together

We drifted for months and woke

With the bitter taste of land on our lips,

Eyelids all sticky, and we longed for lime

And the sound of a rope

Lowering a bucket down its well. Then,

We came by night to the Fortunate Isles,

And lay like fish

Under the net of our kisses.

Death Alone

There are lone cemeteries,

tombs full of soundless bones,

the heart threading a tunnel,

a dark, dark tunnel :

like a wreck we die to the very core,

as if drowning at the heart

or collapsing inwards from skin to soul.

There are corpses,

clammy slabs for feet,

there is death in the bones,

like a pure sound,

a bark without its dog,

out of certain bells, certain tombs

swelling in this humidity like lament or rain.

I see, when alone at times,

coffins under sail

setting out with the pale dead, women in their dead braids,

bakers as white as angels,

thoughtful girls married to notaries,

coffins ascending the vertical river of the dead,

the wine-dark river to its source,

with their sails swollen with the sound of death,

filled with the silent noise of death.

Death is drawn to sound

like a slipper without a foot, a suit without its wearer,

comes to knock with a ring, stoneless and fingerless,

comes to shout without a mouth, a tongue, without a throat.

Nevertheless its footsteps sound

and its clothes echo, hushed like a tree.

I do not know, I am ignorant, I hardly see

but it seems to me that its song has the colour of wet violets,

violets well used to the earth,

since the face of death is green,

and the gaze of death green

with the etched moisture of a violet's leaf

and its grave colour of exasperated winter.

But death goes about the earth also, riding a broom

lapping the ground in search of the dead -

death is in the broom,

it is the tongue of death looking for the dead,

the needle of death looking for the thread.

Death lies in our beds :

in the lazy mattresses, the black blankets,

lives a full stretch and then suddenly blows,

blows sound unknown filling out the sheets

and there are beds sailing into a harbour

where death is waiting, dressed as an admiral.

Cat's Dream

How neatly a cat sleeps,

sleeps with its paws and its posture,

sleeps with its wicked claws,

and with its unfeeling blood,

sleeps with all the rings--

a series of burnt circles--

which have formed the odd geology

of its sand-colored tail.

I should like to sleep like a cat,

with all the fur of time,

with a tongue rough as flint,

with the dry sex of fire;

and after speaking to no one,

stretch myself over the world,

over roofs and landscapes,

with a passionate desire

to hunt the rats in my dreams.

I have seen how the cat asleep

would undulate, how the night

flowed through it like dark water;

and at times, it was going to fall

or possibly plunge into

the bare deserted snowdrifts.

Sometimes it grew so much in sleep

like a tiger's great-grandfather,

and would leap in the darkness over

rooftops, clouds and volcanoes.

Sleep, sleep cat of the night,

with episcopal ceremony

and your stone-carved moustache.

Take care of all our dreams;

control the obscurity

of our slumbering prowess

with your relentless heart

and the great ruff of your tail.

Clenched Soul

We have lost even this twilight.

No one saw us this evening hand in hand

while the blue night dropped on the world.

I have seen from my window

the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.

Sometimes a piece of sun

burned like a coin in my hand.

I remembered you with my soul clenched

in that sadness of mine that you know.

Where were you then?

Who else was there?

Saying what?

Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly

when I am sad and feel you are far away?

The book fell that always closed at twilight

and my blue sweater rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.

Always, always you recede through the evenings

toward the twilight erasing statues.

Enigmas

You've asked me what the lobster is weaving there with

his golden feet?

I reply, the ocean knows this.

You say, what is the ascidia waiting for in its transparent

bell? What is it waiting for?

I tell you it is waiting for time, like you.

You ask me whom the Macrocystis alga hugs in its arms?

Study, study it, at a certain hour, in a certain sea I know.

You question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal,

and I reply by describing

how the sea unicorn with the harpoon in it dies.

You enquire about the kingfisher's feathers,

which tremble in the pure springs of the southern tides?

Or you've found in the cards a new question touching on

the crystal architecture

of the sea anemone, and you'll deal that to me now?

You want to understand the electric nature of the ocean

spines?

The armored stalactite that breaks as it walks?

The hook of the angler fish, the music stretched out

in the deep places like a thread in the water?

I want to tell you the ocean knows this, that life in its

jewel boxes

is endless as the sand, impossible to count, pure,

and among the blood-colored grapes time has made the

petal

hard and shiny, made the jellyfish full of light

and untied its knot, letting its musical threads fall

from a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl.

I am nothing but the empty net which has gone on ahead

of human eyes, dead in those darknesses,

of fingers accustomed to the triangle, longitudes

on the timid globe of an orange.

I walked around as you do, investigating

the endless star,

and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked,

the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind.

Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks

All those men were there inside,

when she came in totally naked.

They had been drinking: they began to spit.

Newly come from the river, she knew nothing.

She was a mermaid who had lost her way.

The insults flowed down her gleaming flesh.

Obscenities drowned her golden breasts.

Not knowing tears, she did not weep tears.

Not knowing clothes, she did not have clothes.

They blackened her with burnt corks and cigarette stubs,

and rolled around laughing on the tavern floor.

She did not speak because she had no speech.

Her eyes were the colour of distant love,

her twin arms were made of white topaz.

Her lips moved, silent, in a coral light,

and suddenly she went out by that door.

Entering the river she was cleaned,

shining like a white stone in the rain,

and without looking back she swam again

swam towards emptiness, swam towards death.

From – Twenty Poems of Love

I can write the saddest lines tonight.

Write for example: ‘The night is fractured

and they shiver, blue, those stars, in the distance’

The night wind turns in the sky and sings.

I can write the saddest lines tonight.

I loved her, sometimes she loved me too.

On nights like these I held her in my arms.

I kissed her greatly under the infinite sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.

How could I not have loved her huge, still eyes.

I can write the saddest lines tonight.

To think I don’t have her, to feel I have lost her.

Hear the vast night, vaster without her.

Lines fall on the soul like dew on the grass.

What does it matter that I couldn’t keep her.

The night is fractured and she is not with me.

That is all. Someone sings far off. Far off,

my soul is not content to have lost her.

As though to reach her, my sight looks for her.

My heart looks for her: she is not with me

The same night whitens, in the same branches.

We, from that time, we are not the same.

I don’t love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.

My voice tried to find the breeze to reach her.

Another’s kisses on her, like my kisses.

Her voice, her bright body, infinite eyes.

I don’t love her, that’s certain, but perhaps I love her.

Love is brief: forgetting lasts so long.

Since, on these nights, I held her in my arms,

my soul is not content to have lost her.

Though this is the last pain she will make me suffer,

and these are the last lines I will write for her.

Gentleman Alone

The young maricones and the horny muchachas,

The big fat widows delirious from insomnia,

The young wives thirty hours' pregnant,

And the hoarse tomcats that cross my garden at night,

Like a collar of palpitating sexual oysters

Surround my solitary home,

Enemies of my soul,

Conspirators in pajamas

Who exchange deep kisses for passwords.

Radiant summer brings out the lovers

In melancholy regiments,

Fat and thin and happy and sad couples;

Under the elegant coconut palms, near the ocean and moon,

There is a continual life of pants and panties,

A hum from the fondling of silk stockings,

And women's breasts that glisten like eyes.

The salary man, after a while,

After the week's tedium, and the novels read in bed at night,

Has decisively fucked his neighbor,

And now takes her to the miserable movies,

Where the heroes are horses or passionate princes,

And he caresses her legs covered with sweet down

With his ardent and sweaty palms that smell like cigarettes.

The night of the hunter and the night of the husband

Come together like bed sheets and bury me,

And the hours after lunch, when the students and priests are masturbating,

And the animals mount each other openly,

And the bees smell of blood, and the flies buzz cholerically,

And cousins play strange games with cousins,

And doctors glower at the husband of the young patient,

And the early morning in which the professor, without a thought,

Pays his conjugal debt and eats breakfast,

And to top it all off, the adulterers, who love each other truly

On beds big and tall as ships:

So, eternally,

This twisted and breathing forest crushes me

With gigantic flowers like mouth and teeth

And black roots like fingernails and shoes.

Lost in the forest...

Lost in the forest, I broke off a dark twig

and lifted its whisper to my thirsty lips:

maybe it was the voice of the rain crying,

a cracked bell, or a torn heart.

Something from far off it seemed

deep and secret to me, hidden by the earth,

a shout muffled by huge autumns,

by the moist half-open darkness of the leaves.

Wakening from the dreaming forest there, the hazel-sprig

sang under my tongue, its drifting fragrance

climbed up through my conscious mind

as if suddenly the roots I had left behind

cried out to me, the land I had lost with my childhood---

and I stopped, wounded by the wandering scent.

Love

What's wrong with you, with us,

what's happening to us?

Ah our love is a harsh cord

that binds us wounding us

and if we want

to leave our wound,

to separate,

it makes a new knot for us and condemns us

to drain our blood and burn together.

What's wrong with you? I look at you

and I find nothing in you but two eyes

like all eyes, a mouth

lost among a thousand mouths that I have kissed, more beautiful,

a body just like those that have slipped

beneath my body without leaving any memory.

And how empty you went through the world

like a wheat-colored jar

without air, without sound, without substance!

I vainly sought in you

depth for my arms

that dig, without cease, beneath the earth:

beneath your skin, beneath your eyes,

nothing,

beneath your double breast scarcely

raised

a current of crystalline order

that does not know why it flows singing.

Why, why, why,

my love, why?

Nothing But Death

There are cemeteries that are lonely,

graves full of bones that do not make a sound,

the heart moving through a tunnel,

in it darkness, darkness, darkness,

like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves,

as though we were drowning inside our hearts,

as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.

And there are corpses,

feet made of cold and sticky clay,

death is inside the bones,

like a barking where there are no dogs,

coming out from bells somewhere, from graves somewhere,

growing in the damp air like tears of rain.

Sometimes I see alone

coffins under sail,

embarking with the pale dead, with women that have dead hair,

with bakers who are as white as angels,

and pensive young girls married to notary publics,

caskets sailing up the vertical river of the dead,

the river of dark purple,

moving upstream with sails filled out by the sound of death,

filled by the sound of death which is silence.

Death arrives among all that sound

like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it,

comes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it, with no

finger in it,

comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, with no

throat.

Nevertheless its steps can be heard

and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree.

I'm not sure, I understand only a little, I can hardly see,

but it seems to me that its singing has the color of damp violets,

of violets that are at home in the earth,

because the face of death is green,

and the look death gives is green,

with the penetrating dampness of a violet leaf

and the somber color of embittered winter.

But death also goes through the world dressed as a broom,

lapping the floor, looking for dead bodies,

death is inside the broom,

the broom is the tongue of death looking for corpses,

it is the needle of death looking for thread.

Death is inside the folding cots:

it spends its life sleeping on the slow mattresses,

in the black blankets, and suddenly breathes out:

it blows out a mournful sound that swells the sheets,

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