What Is Found There

If only you would touch my heart,

if only you were to put your mouth to my heart,

your delicate mouth, your teeth,

if you were to put your tongue like a red arrow

there where my dusty heart is heating,

if you were to blow on my heart near the sea, weeping,

it would make a dark noise, like the drowsy sound of

train wheels,

like the indecision of waters,

like autumn in full leaf,

like blood,

with a noise of damp flames burning the sky,

with a sound like dreams or branches or the rain,

or foghorns in some dismal port,

if you were to blow on my heart near the sea,

like a white ghost,

in th spume of the wave,

in the middle of the wind,

like a ghost unleashed, at the seashore, weeping.

Like a long absence, like a sudden hell,

the sea doles out the sound of the heart,

raining, darkening at sundown, on a lonely coast:

no question that night falls

and its mournful blue of the flags of shipwrecks

peoples itself with planets of throaty silver. Read more…

Pablo Neruda, Robert Hass

It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie houses
dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt
steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.

The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse sobs.
The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool.
The only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens,
no more goods, no spectacles, no elevators.

It so happens that I am sick of my feet and my nails
and my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I am sick of being a man.

Still it would be marvelous
to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,
or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.
It would be great
to go through the streets with a green knife
letting out yells until I died of the cold.

I don’t want to go on being a root in the dark,
insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,
taking in and thinking, eating every day. Read more…

Pablo Neruda

Mara Mori brought me
a pair of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder’s hands,
two socks as soft as rabbits.
I slipped my feet into them
as if they were two cases
knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin,
Violent socks,
my feet were two fish made of wool,
two long sharks
sea blue, shot through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons,
my feet were honored in this way
by these heavenly socks.
They were so handsome for the first time
my feet seemed to me unacceptable
like two decrepit firemen,
firemen unworthy of that woven fire,
of those glowing socks.
Read more…

Pablo Neruda