#neruda poems

[lupovecchio]

[lupovecchio]

Ode to a Naked Beauty

With chaste heart, and pure

eyes

I celebrate you, my beauty,

restraining my blood

so that the line

surges and follows

your contour,

and you bed yourself in my verse,

as in woodland, or wave-spume:

earth's perfume,

sea's music.

Nakedly beautiful,

whether it is your feet, arching

at a primal touch

of sound or breeze,

or your ears,

tiny spiral shells

from the splendour of America's oceans.

Your breasts also,

of equal fullness, overflowing

with the living light

and, yes,

winged

your eyelids of silken corn

that disclose

or enclose

the deep twin landscapes of your eyes.

The line of your back

separating you

falls away into paler regions

then surges

to the smooth hemispheres

of an apple,

and goes splitting

your loveliness

into two pillars

of burnt gold, pure alabaster,

to be lost in the twin clusters of your feet,

from which, once more, lifts and takes fire

the double tree of your symmetry:

flower of fire, open circle of candles,

swollen fruit raised

over the meeting of earth and ocean.

Your body - from what substances

agate, quartz, ears of wheat,

did it flow, was it gathered,

rising like bread

in the warmth,

and signalling hills

silvered,

valleys of a single petal, sweetnesses

of velvet depth,

until the pure, fine, form of woman

thickened

and rested there?

It is not so much light that falls

over the world

extended by your body

its suffocating snow,

as brightness, pouring itself out of you,

as if you were

burning inside.

Under your skin the moon is alive.

[lupovecchio]

[lupovecchio]

But I love your feet

only because they walked

upon the earth and upon

the wind and upon the waters,

until they found me.

Pablo Neruda

[lupovecchio]

[lupovecchio]

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.

[lupovecchio]

[lupovecchio]

Sonnet LXV – Pablo Neruda (I wait for you like a lonely house)

Matilde, where are you? Down here I noticed,

under my necktie and just above my heart,

a certain pang of grief between the ribs,

you were gone that quickly.

I needed the light of your energy,

I looked around, devouring hope.

I watched the void without you that is like a house,

nothing left but tragic windows.

Out of sheer taciturnity the ceiling listens

to the fall of the ancient leafless rain,

to feathers, to whatever the night imprisoned;

so I wait for you like a lonely house

till you will see me again and live in me.

Till then my windows ache.