#nevernotpostneruda

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[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.

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We must sit on the rim

of the well of darkness

and fish for fallen light

with patience. ~ Pablo Neruda

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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.

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[lupovecchio]

Walking Around— Pablo Neruda

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 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.

I don’t want so much misery.

I don’t want to go on as a root and a tomb,

alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,

half frozen, dying of grief.

That’s why Monday, when it sees me coming

with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline,

and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,

and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the night.

And it pushes me into certain corners, into some moist houses,

into hospitals where the bones fly out the window,

into shoeshops that smell like vinegar,

and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.

There are sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines

hanging over the doors of houses that I hate,

and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot,

there are mirrors
that ought to have wept from shame and terror,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical cords.

I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes,

my rage, forgetting everything,

I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic shops,

and courtyards with washing hanging from the line:

underwear, towels and shirts from which slow

dirty tears are falling.