The Blurtso Chronicles Cien sonetos de amor by Pablo Neruda I Matilde, name of plant or stone or wine, name of all that’s born of the soil and lasts, word in whose growth bursts forth, in whose summer dawns the light of lemons. In that name wooden ships sail surrounded by tongues of marine-blue fire, and those letters are the water of a river that softens my calcified heart. Oh name uncovered beneath the vines like the door of an unknown tunnel that leads to the fragrance of the world! Oh invade me with your burning mouth, pierce me, if you like, with your nocturnal eyes, but let me sail in your name, and sleep there. II Love, how many roads to arrive at a kiss, what wayward solitude until your company! The trains continue to roll, alone in the rain. In Taltal even the spring does not dawn. But you and I, my love, are together, together from our clothes to our roots, together in autumn, in water, in hips, until we are only you, and only me, together. To think how many stones the river washed away, how much water was emptied by the Boroa, to think that separated by nations and trains you and I simply had to love each other, mixed among the rest, mixed among men and women, with the earth that plants and raises the carnations. III Bitter love, violet crowned with thorns, bramble raised among so much passion, lance of pains, blossom of rage, by what roads and in what way did you find my soul? Why did you precipitate your painful fire, suddenly, among the cold leaves of my path? Who taught you the steps that brought you here? What flower, what stone, what smoke exposed my home? The truth is the fearful night trembled, the dawn filled each cup with wine and the sun established its celestial presence, while cruel love ceaselessly circled, until, piercing me with swords and spines it opened in my heart a new and burning road. IV You will remember that precarious mountain gorge to which the palpitating aromas climbed, and from time to time a bird dressed in water and slowness; its winter suit. You will remember the gifts of the earth: stormy fragrance, clay of gold, herbs of the brush, crazy roots, magic thorns like swords. You will remember the bouquet you brought, bouquet of shadow and water with silence, bouquet like a stone with water spray. And that time was like never and always: let’s go there now where no one is waiting and enjoy together all that awaits. V Don’t let night, air, or dawn touch you, only the earth, the virtue of the branches, the apples that grow to the song of clear water, the wet earth and resin of your fragrant land. From Quinchamalí where they made your eyes to your feet created for me at the border you are the dark clay I know: in your hips I touch again the bread of life. Perhaps you didn’t know, Araucan lady, that when before loving you I forgot your kisses my heart continued remembering your mouth and I went like a wounded man through the streets until I understood I had encountered, my love, my country of kisses and volcanoes. In the forests, lost, I cut a dark branch and raised its thirsty whisper to my lips: perhaps it was the voice of the rain crying, a broken bell, or a sliced heart. Something that from far off seemed gravely obscure, covered with earth, a cry muted by immense autumns, by the half-open, humid shadow of leaves. But there, waking from its dreams in the forest, the hazel branch sang beneath my mouth and its wild aroma climbed through my senses as if the roots I had abandoned, the lost land of my youth, suddenly sought me, and I stopped, wounded by the wandering aroma. “Come with me” I said—without anyone knowing where and how my painful heart beat, and for me there was no carnation or barcarole, nothing but a wound opened by love. I repeated: come with me, as if I were dying, and no one saw the moon that bled in my mouth, no one saw the blood that rose in silence. Oh love, let’s forget that thorny star! For that reason when I heard your voice repeat “Come with me”—it was as if you unleashed pain, love, and the fury of imprisoned wine that rose from its sunken cellar, and once again I felt in my mouth the taste of blood, carnations, stone and fire. If it weren’t that your eyes have the color of moon, the color of morning with work, fire, and clay, and captured, you have the agility of air, if it weren’t that you are a week of amber, if it weren’t that you are the golden moment when autumn climbs the vines, and are the bread the fragrant moon bakes parading its flour through the sky, oh, beloved, I would not love you! In your arms I hold all that exists, sand, time, the flowering branch of the rain, and every living thing lives so that I can live: without even moving I see it all: in your life I behold every living thing. With the crash of the wave against the untamed rock clarity bursts forth and establishes its rose, and the circle of the sea is reduced to a branch, to a single drop of blue salt that falls. Oh radiant magnolia unleashed in the foam, magnetic traveler whose death blossoms and eternally returns to be and not be, broken salt, dazzling maritime movement. Together you and I, my love, seal the silence, while the ocean besieges its constant statues and topples its towers of virtue and rapture, because in the weave of those invisible threads, the runaway water, the incessant sand, we maintain the only assaulted tenderness. Soft is my love, as if music and wood, agate, cloth, wheat and transparent peaches had erected a moving statue. Toward the wave she directs her feisty freshness. The sea splashes polished feet, copied in the form recently wrought in the sand, and her feminine fire of rose is a single bubble besieged by sea and sun. Oh, let nothing touch you but the salty spray! Let not even love break the unbroken spring! My love, reverberation of indelible foam, let your hips impose upon the water a new measure of swan or lily and let your statue sail through the timeless crystal. I hunger for your mouth, your voice, your hair, and I go through the streets starving, silent. Bread does not nourish me, the dawn rattles me. I search for the liquid sounds of your feet in the day. I’m famished for the splash of your laugh, for your hands the color of wild grain, I hunger for the pale stone of your nails, I want to eat your skin like an unblemished almond. I want to eat the burning ray of your beauty, the kingly nose of your arrogant face, I want to eat the fleeting shadow of your lashes, and come and go, sniffing the dusk, famished, stalking your hot heart like a puma in the steppes of Quitratúe. Full woman, carnal apple, hot moon, thick aroma of sea grass, loam and light ground as one, what dark clarity opens among your columns? What ancient night does man touch with his senses? Oh, to love is a trip with water and stars, a trip of drowned air and outbursts of flour: loving is a battle of lightning, and two bodies defeated by a single syrup. Kiss by kiss I retrace your small infinity, your margins, your rivers, your diminutive towns, and the genital fire made pleasure runs through the slender roads of the blood until it blooms like a nocturnal carnation, until it is and isn’t a flash of light in the shadows. The light that rises from your feet to your hair, the firmness that encloses your delicate form, is not of sea-shell pearl, never cold silver: you are made of bread, bread beloved by the fire. Flour erected its granary in you, and sowed, increased by fertile years, the double harvest of your breasts. Meanwhile, my love was coal digging the earth. Oh bread of forehead, bread of legs, bread of mouth, bread I devour that is born each day, my dear one, my banner of bakeries, fire taught you its lesson of blood, flour read you its saintly sermon, and bread gave you your words and aroma. I lack time to celebrate the hairs of your head, one by one I should count and praise them: everyone wants to find the most beautiful eyes, I just want to comb your hair. In Italy they baptized you Medusa for the curly high light of your locks. I christen you my matted and tangled one: only my heart knows the doors of your hair. When you get lost in your tresses, don’t forget me, remember I love you, don’t leave me alone without your hair to travel the sad world of so many roads that only have shadow and passing pains, until the morning light climbs your tower of hair. For a long time the earth has known you: you’re as compact as wood or bread, you’re the body and branch of solid substance, you have the weight of acacia, and golden legume. I know you exist not only because your eyes fly and cast light on the world like an open window, but also because they made you of clay and baked you in a magic mud oven in Chillán. The people pour out like air or water or cold and they’re vague, erased by the touch of time, as if before dying they all broke to pieces. You and I will fall like a stone in the tomb and because our love was never consumed the earth will never live without us. I love the piece of earth you are, because from the planetary meadows I have no other star. In you shines the multiplication of the universe. Your wide eyes are the light I steal from conquered constellations, your skin throbs like the trail of a meteor in the rain. From so much moon your hips were made, from all the sun your deep mouth and its delight, from so much blazing light like honey in the shadow came your heart seared by long red rays, and so I go, traveling the fire of your form, kissing you, small and planetary shape of dove and geography. I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz or lance of carnations that propagate fire: I love you like one loves certain dark things, secretly, between the shadow and the soul. I love you like the plant that doesn’t bloom and carries inside itself, out of sight, the light of those flowers, and thanks to your love the close-held aroma that rose from the earth lives hidden in my heart. I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where, I love you directly without problems or pride: I love you this way because I don’t know any other, only this way in which “you” and “I” do not exist, so near that your hand on my breast is my hand, so near that your eyes close when I close mine. Through the mountains you come and go like the breeze or sudden stream that descends from the snow and your throbbing hair bestows on the thickness its lofty ornaments of sun. All the light of Cáucaso falls on your form as into a small interminable vase in which the water changes its appearance and song with each transparent sweep of the stream. Through the hills, the old road of warriors, and below, the enraged water shines like a sword between walls of mineral hands, until you suddenly receive from the forests the branch or flash of a few blue flowers and the unexpected arrow of a wild aroma. While the grand foam of Isla Negra, the blue salt, the sun on the waves, wash over you, I watch the travails of the wasp absorbed in the honey of its universe. It comes and goes, balancing its unswerving blond flight, as if trailing along an invisible wire the elegance of its dance, the thirst of its waist, the assassinations of its malignant needle. Its rainbow is made of oranges and petroleum, it hunts like an airplane among the grass, it flies with the sound of sharpness, it disappears, while you emerge from the sea, naked, and return to the world full of salt and sun, a reverberating statue thrust like sword in the sand. My ugly one, you are an uncombed chestnut, my lovely one, you’re as beautiful as the wind, my ugly one, from your one mouth they could make two, my lovely one, your kisses are as fresh as watermelons. My ugly one, where are your breasts hiding? They’re as minimal as two goblets of wheat. I’d prefer to see two moons upon your chest, two gigantic towers of arrogant pride. My ugly one, the sea doesn’t carry your nails in its shop, my lovely one, flower by flower, star by star, wave by wave, I have tallied your flesh: my ugly one, I love you for your waist of gold, my lovely one, I love you for the furrow in your brow, my love, I love you for your clarity and your shadow. Oh that all of love would open in me its mouth so I would not suffer another moment without spring, I didn’t sell anything but my hands into sorrow, and now, beloved, let me stay here with your kisses. Cover with your fragrance the light of the open month, close the doors with the waves of your hair, and don’t forget that if I wake and cry it’s because in dreams I’m just a lost little boy that looks among the leaves of night for your hands, the touch of wheat you bring me, the flashing rapture of energy and time. Oh beloved, let there be nothing but shadow on the path where you take me in your dreams, where you tell me the hour and minute of light. How many times, love, did I love you without seeing you, maybe without memory, without recalling your glance, without noticing you, blue flower, in hostile regions, in the fire of noon: you were the aroma of the harvest I love. Maybe I saw you, or imagined you, when I passed by, raising a toast in Angol to the light of moon in summer, or you were the waist of the guitar I touched in the night that sang with the sound of a measureless sea. I loved you without knowing, I searched for your memory in empty houses, I entered by night to steal your portrait, but I already knew what you were like. Suddenly while you traveled next to me I touched you and my life stopped: you were standing before my eyes, commanding me as you still do. Like a bonfire in the woods, yours is the kingdom of fire. The fire was made of light, and the embittered moon of bread, the jasmine duplicated its starry secret, and from terrifying love your soft pure hands gave peace to my eyes and sun to my senses. Oh love, how suddenly, from heart-rending wounds you raised an edifice of sweet firmness, you conquered the jealous and malignant claws, and now today we stand together before the world as one. That’s how it was, and how it will be, until the moment, my beloved Matilde, wild and sweet love, that time reveals the final flower of the day. Without you, without me, without light, we will cease to be, but far beyond the earth and the shadow the blaze of our love will continue to burn. Love, love, the clouds rose to the tower of the sky like triumphant washerwomen with their sheets, and everything burned blue, everything was star: the sea, the ship, the day, set sail together as one. Come see the cherry woods of the starry water and the round secret of the rapid universe, come touch the fire of instantaneous blue, come, before its petals are consumed. There’s nothing here but light, quantities, clusters, space opened by the virtues of the wind that reveals the last secrets of the foam. And among so many celestial blues, submerged, our eyes are lost, scarcely divining the powers of the air, the keys beneath the waves. Before loving you, love, nothing was mine: I stumbled through streets and things: nothing mattered or went by name: the world belonged to an expectant air. I entered ashen rooms, tunnels inhabited by the moon, cruel caverns that said good-bye, questions that insisted in the sand. Everything was empty, dead and deaf, fallen, abandoned and decayed, everything was inalienably alien, everything belonged to others and no one, until your beauty and poverty filled the autumn with gifts. Neither the color of the terrible dunes in Iquique, nor the estuary of the Río Dulce de Guatemala, altered your profile conquered in the wheat, your style of bulging grape, your mouth of guitar. Oh heart, oh mine since leaving my silence, from the peaks where the vine ruled to the desolate plains of platinum, in every pure country you were copied in the earth. But nothing altered your form of traveling grain, not the wild hand of mineral mountains, nor the Tibetan snow, nor the Polish stone, as if clay or wheat, guitars or bouquets from Chillán defended their domain in you, imposing on all you met their power of wild moon. Naked you are as simple as one of your hands, smooth, earthy, minimal, round, transparent, you have lines of moon, landscapes of apple, naked you are as slender as naked wheat. Naked you are blue like the night in Cuba, you have vines and stars in your hair, naked you are limitless and yellow like the summer in a church of gold. Naked you are as small as one of your nails, curved, subtle, pink, until day breaks and you slip into the world’s darkness into a long tunnel of suits and responsibilities: your clarity is extinguished, is clothed, loses its leaves, until it returns once more to become a naked hand. Love, from seed to seed, from planet to planet, from the net of the wind with its dark countries, and the war with its shoes of blood, and from the day and night of the sprout. Wherever we went, islands or bridges or flags, violins of the fleeting bullet-riddled autumn, happiness kissed our lips on the lips of the goblet, and pain arrested us with its lesson of tears. In all the republics the wind unfurled its unstained flag, its glacial tresses, and the flower returned to its obligations. But in us the autumn never grew old. And in our unchanging country love sprouted and bestowed on us the privileges of dawn. You come from the poverty of the houses in the South, from hard regions cold with earthquakes, and even when your gods rolled to their deaths they still taught us a lesson of life in the clay. You’re a black little oven-cooked horse, a kiss of dark earth, a poppy of potter’s clay, dove of twilight that flew along the roads, moneybox filled with tears from an impoverished past. your poor girl’s feet accustomed to stones, your mouth that often went without bread or pleasure. You’re from the poor South, where my heart was born: in their heaven, your mother continues to wash clothes with my mother, and that’s why I chose you, my love. You have the fiber of the larch from the islands, the flesh worked by centuries of time, veins that knew the seas of timber, green blood fallen into memory from the sky. No one will find my lost heart among so many roots, in the bitter cool of the sun mirrored on the furious water, that’s where the shadow lives that won’t go with me. And then you emerged from the South like an island populated and crowned by feathers and woods and I smelled the aroma of roaming forests, I found the dark honey I knew in the jungle, and I touched in your hips the somber petals that were born with me and shaped my soul. With laurels from the South and oregano from Lota I crown you, little monarch of my bones, and you’ll always wear that crown woven by the earth with balsam and leaves. You are, like the one who loves you, from green regions where wet earth runs in the blood, and we walked through the city, lost like so many others, fearing we wouldn’t make it to market on time. Beloved, your shadow has the fragrance of plums, your eyes buried their roots in the South, your heart is a dove made of potter’s clay, your body is smooth like stones in a stream, your kisses are flowers wet with dew, and living next to you I live with the earth. The house in the morning with the truth tossed about in sheets and feathers, the beginning of the directionless day, adrift like a poor ship sailing between horizons of order and sleep. The objects want to drag along traces, pointless adherences, cold habits, the papers hide their wrinkled vowels and in the bottle the wine wants to relive yesterday. But you go by, organizing, vibrating like a bee, reaching into places lost in the shadow conquering the day with your white energy. And clarity is restored once more: the objects obey the wind of life, and order establishes its bread and its dove. Love, let’s leave soon for home where the vines ascend the steps: before you get to your room the naked summer will have arrived with its honeysuckle feet. Our wandering kisses crossed the world: Armenia, thick drop of unearthed honey, Ceylon, green dove, and the Yang Tse separating with ancient patience the day from the night. And now, beloved, by way of the crackling sea we return like two birds to the wall, to the nest of the faraway spring, because love cannot fly without resting: to the ledge and the stones of the sea we go, to their homeland our kisses sail, going home. You are the daughter of the sea and the cousin of oregano, when you swim your body is pure water, when you cook your blood is living earth and your habits are of flower and soil. Your eyes look to the sea and the waves rise, your hands reach to the earth and the seeds sprout, in water and earth you have unsoundable powers that come together in you like the virtues of clay. River nymph, whose body, cut by turquoise, is resurrected and flowers in the kitchen then suddenly takes on all that exists and sleeps, at last, surrounded by my arms that push away from the shadow the foam of your dreams, vegetables, seaweed, herbs, so you can rest. Your hand went flying from my eyes to the day. The light entered like a blooming rosebush. Sand and sky throbbed like a crowning beehive carved in turquoise. Your hands touched syllables that clinked and jingled, wine glasses, bottles, yellow oils, touched flowers, flowing waters, and above all love: your sacred hand, protector of spoons. The afternoon passed. The night secretly pulled its celestial capsule over the dream of man. The honeysuckle released its sad savage smell. And your hand returned from its flight flying to fold its wings—wings I feared lost— over my eyes devoured by night’s shadow. Heart of mine, queen of celery and the kneading bowl, little leopard of thread and onion: I like to see your small kingdom shine, its weapons—wax, wine, oil, garlic, earth opened by your hands, blue substance set afire with your touch, pilgrimage from sleep to salad, reptile coiled in the garden hose. You, with your pruning shears releasing aroma, you, directing the soap in the foam, you, climbing my crazy ladders and stairs, you, steadying the shakiness of my pen and finding in the sand of my notebook the lost letters that were seeking your mouth. Oh love, oh crazy flash and sacred purple threat, you visit me and climb, with your fresh steps, the castle that time crowned with fog, the pale walls of my shuttered heart. No one could know it was only my softness building windows hard as cities, and my blood opening unhappy tunnels powerless to conquer winter’s reign. That’s why, love, your mouth, your skin, your light, your sorrows were the patrimony of life, the sacred gifts of the rain, of the living world that receives and raises the swollen seed, the secret storm of wine in the bodegas, and the sudden blaze of grain in the soil. Your house makes a sound like a train at noon, the wasps buzz, the pots sing, the falling water enumerates the deeds of the dew, your laughter releases its palm-tree song. The blue light of the wall converses with the stone, it arrives like a shepherd singing the news of the day and between the two green-voiced figs Homer climbs along on noiseless shoes. Only here does the city exchange voice, lament, chores, sonatas, lips, horns, for a colloquium of waterfall and lions, and you ascend, sing, run, walk, descend, plant, sew, cook, hammer, write, return, or leave, and let us know that the winter has come. But I forgot that your hands satisfied the roots, watering entangled flowers, until the trail of your fingerprints bloomed in the bountiful concord of nature. The hoe and water are your animals, they follow you, biting, licking the earth, and that’s how, working, you impart fertility, the fiery freshness of carnations. Love and honor of bees I ask for your hands that mix their transparent blood in the earth, and even in my heart they plow the soil, in such a way that I am the charred stone that suddenly, with you, sings, because it drinks the water of the forests carried on your voice. It was green, the silence, wet was the light, the month of June trembled like a butterfly and in the regions of the South, from sea and stones, Matilde, you crossed the province of noon. You were loaded with ferruginous flowers, seaweed that the southern wind torments and forgets, but your hands, still white, split by devouring salt, continued to raise sprouts from the sand. I love your unblemished gifts, your skin of unbroken stone, your nails offered up in the sun of your fingers, your mouth overflowing with each existing joy, but for my house that borders the abyss, give me the tormented system of silence, the banner of waves swallowed in the sand. Misfortunes of the month of January when the indifferent noon establishes its equation in the sky, a hard gold like the wine of a brimming cup fills the earth to its borders of blue. Misfortunes of this season akin to small grapes that gathered together their bitter green, confused hidden tears of the days, until the storm spread its branches on the sky. Yes, seeds, pains, and all things that palpitate, terrified, will grow ripe in the sizzling first-month sun, and will burn like the fruit that burned on the trees. The pains will be distributed: the soul will strike a blow of wind, but the home will remain clean with fresh bread on the table. Radiant days balanced by the waves of the sea, concentrated like the inside of a yellow stone whose honey spender, unconquered by chaos, preserved its rectangular purity. Yes, the hour crackles like fire or bees, and it’s a green task to become so covered with leaves that up toward the heights the foliage becomes a twinkling world extinguishing flames and whispers. Thirst of fire, scorching multitude of summer that fashions an Eden with so many leaves, because the dark-faced earth doesn’t want miseries but rather freshness, fire, water, and bread for all, and nothing should separate man from man but the sun, the night, the moon and the sprouts. One trace of you I seek in all the others, in the sudden, undulating river of women, braids, eyes that can scarcely look away, clear feet that glide, sailing on the foam. Suddenly it seems I can make out your nails, oblong, fugitive, nieces of the cherry tree, and another time it’s your hair that passes and burning in the water I see your portrait of fire. I looked, but not one of them had your pulse, your light, the dark clay you brought from the forest, not one of them had your tiny little ears. You are all of them made one, one made all, and so I go with you, traveling and loving a wide Mississippi of flowing female waters. You know that I don’t and I do love you, because life has two faces, words have a wing of silence, and fire has a fragment of cold. I love you in order to start loving you, to reestablish infinity and to never stop loving you: that’s why I still don’t love you. I love you and don’t love you as if I had the keys in my hands to happiness and a vague future of misfortune. My love has to lives to love you. That’s why I love you when I don’t love you and why I love you when I do. Don’t be distant a single day, because how, because—I can’t find the words—the day is long and I’ll be waiting, like in a station when the train has fallen asleep back down the line. Don’t leave me for even an hour, because in that hour drops of anxiety will gather and the smoke that’s seeking a home will find me, and kill my heavy heart. Oh don’t let your silhouette expire on the sand, oh don’t let your eyelids fly from me: don’t leave me for even a minute, my love, because in that minute you’ll have gone so far that I’ll have to cross the earth asking if you’re going to return, or leave me here dying. Of all the stars I admired, bathed by different rivers and dews, I chose only the one I loved, and now I sleep with the night. From the waves, one and then another, green sea, cold green, green spray, I chose a single wave: the unbroken wave of your body. All the drops, all the roots, all the threads of light came, they came to see me, early or late. But I wanted only your hair, and of all the blessings of my land the only gift I chose was your wild heart. I want to see you behind me on the branch. Little by little you grew into a fruit. It wasn’t hard to climb from your roots, singing with your syllables of sap. And here you are, first a fragrant flower, remodeled as the statue of a kiss, until the sun and earth, the blood and sky, shower you with sweetness and delight. On the branch I see your hair, your shape ripening in the foliage bending its leaves to my thirst, then your substance fills my mouth, the kiss that rose from the earth with your blood of enamored fruit. Two happy lovers make a single bread, a single drop of moon in the grass, walking, their two shadows make one, and the bed preserves the print of a single sun. Of all good things, the lovers chose daylight: they weren’t tied with strings, but with aroma, and they didn’t pick apart peace or words. Happiness is a transparent tower. Air and wine go with the lovers, the night grants them its happy petals, and they have the key to every carnation. Two happy lovers don’t have an end or death, they are born and die many times while they live, they persist in the eternity of natural things. It is today: all of yesterday fell away between fingers of light and eyes of sleep, tomorrow will arrive with green steps: no one can stop the river of dawn. No one can stop the river of your hands, the eyes of your dreams, beloved, you’re a tremor of time that passes among vertical light and shadowy sun, and the sky closes its wings around you, lifting and bringing you to my arms with punctual, mysterious courtesy. That’s why I sing to the day and the moon, to the sea, to time, to the planets, to your daily voice and nocturnal skin. Cotapos says that your laughter swoops down like a falcon from a sudden tower, and it’s true, you flash through the foliage with a single bolt of celestial blood that falls and cuts, releasing tongues of dew, sprays of diamond, flames of bees, and there, where silence lived with its beard, the sun and stars explode like grenades, the somber night is brought to its knees, bells and carnations burn in the moon and the harness-maker’s horses run free because you, as small as you are, let loose the meteor of your laughter, electrifying the very name of nature. Your laughter belongs to a tree torn open by a flash, by a silver bolt of lightning that falls from the sky breaking the branches, dividing the trunk with a single sword. Only in the highlands with snowy leaves is born a laughter like yours, my love, it’s the laughter of air unleashed in the heights, born of Araucan blood, my love. Oh mountain girl of mine, conspicuous shrieker, cut the shadows with the knives of your laughter, cut the night, the morning, the honey of noon, and let the birds leap from the branches when your unbridled lavishing light, your laughter, tears in two the tree of life. You sing, and with your song your voice separates the day’s grain into sun and sky, the pines talk with green tongues: and all the birds of winter whistle a song. The sea fills its cellars with footsteps, with bells, chains and groans, the day’s metals clink and jingle, the wheels of the caravan squeal. But I hear only your voice that rises with the flight and sureness of an arrow, your voice that descends with the gravity of rain, dispersing noble and princely swords, then returns charged with violets to accompany me through the sky. Here is bread, wine, table, home: everything necessary for man, woman and life: to this place rushed vertiginous peace, in this light burned a common burning. Honor to your two hands that fly preparing the white products of kitchen and song! Blessed be the integrity of your scurrying feet! Long live the dancer who dances with the broom! Those sudden rivers with waters and threats, that tormented banner of foam, those incendiary hives and reefs are today this repose of your blood in mine, this river, starry and blue as night, this never-ending simplicity of tenderness. Splendid power of reason, bright devil of the dogmatic branch, of unimpeachable noon, here we are at last, alone and not alone, far from the insanity of the savage city. When the pure line circles its dove and the fire bestows on peace its sustenance, you and I come to this heavenly conclusion. Reason and love will live, naked, in this house. Furious plans, rivers of bitter certainty, decisions harder than a hammer’s dreams fell into the double wineglass of lovers, until on the scale both sides rose, identical, reason and love, like two wings, and transparency was born from the balance. Thorns, broken glass, disease and tears besiege the honey of happiness by day and by night, and nothing helps, the watchtower, the journey, the walls: misery skewers the peace of sleepers. Pain rises and falls, offering up its spoonfuls, and no one lives outside its cradle, no births, no roofs, no fences: it’s always there, screaming to be noticed. And hiding your eyes in love is futile, in deep beds far from the lament of the wounded, or from the one conquering his flag by degrees. Because life throws punches like anger or rushing water and opens a bloody tunnel through which we are watched by the eyes of an immense family of pains. Get used to seeing my shadow behind me, and let your hands emerge, transparent, from its rancor, as if they were created in the morning of the sea: the salt gave you, my love, its share of crystal. Envy suffers, dies, and is consumed in my song. One by one its sad captains expire. I speak of love, and the world bursts with doves. Every syllable I chant calls forth the spring. Then you, flowery one, heart, beloved, appear over my eyes like the leaves of the sky, and I see you spreading yourself on the earth. I see the sun sift through branches to your face, and looking to the heavens I recognize your steps. Matilde, my love, my crown, come in and stay! They lie who say I lost the moon, those who prophesized my future of sand and asserted countless things with cold tongues: they wanted to outlaw the flower of the universe. “Now he won’t sing of the surging amber of the siren, now he has only the people.” And they chewed their incessant papers advocating oblivion for my guitar. I threw at their eyes the dazzling spears of our love that nail your heart to mine, I reclaimed the jasmine left in your tracks, I lost myself in the lightless night beneath your eyelids and when the clarity enveloped me I was born anew, master of my own darkness. Between the broad scimitars of literary iron I pass like a foreign sailor who doesn’t know the corners and sings just because, just because, and why not? From the tormented islands I brought my accordion, along with storms, streaks of crazy rain, and a slow habit of natural things: everything that fashioned my untamed heart. And so, when the teeth of literature tried to bite my honorable heels, I walked thoughtlessly, singing with the wind, toward the rainy warehouses of my youth, toward the cold forests of the indefinable South, toward where my life was filled with the breath of your kiss. Poor poets whom life and death chased with the same dark tenacity, and then were covered by impassive pomposity, handed over to ritual and the final tooth. They—dark as small stones—now go, laid out behind arrogant horses, governed in the end by intruders, between the soldiers, to sleep in silence. Before, and now certain that the dead one is dead, they make of the funeral a miserable feast with turkeys, pigs, and other speakers. They spied on his death and offended it: only because his mouth is now closed and his song cannot rise to his defense. You are wounded by the one who tried to wound me, and the blow of venom directed my way passes through the net of my chores and leaves on you its stain of rust and insomnia. I don’t want to see, my love, the hate meant for me pass across the flowery moon of your forehead. I don’t want someone else’s anger to leave its useless crown of knives, forgotten, in your dreams. Wherever I go bitter steps follow, wherever I laugh a grimace reflects my face, wherever I sing envy slanders, laughs, and gnaws. And that, my love, is the shadow life has given me: it’s an empty suit that limps along behind like a smiling scarecrow with a bleeding smile. Love brought its tail of sorrows, its long static ray of thorns, and we closed our eyes so that nothing, so that no wound could part us. Your eyes are not to blame for these tears: your hands did not thrust this sword: your feet did not seek this path: the dark honey made its own way to your heart. When the sea like an immense wave cracked us against the hard rock, kneaded us with a single flour, the pain fell on some other sweet face and in the light of the open season the wounded spring was blessed. Poor me, poor us, beloved, we only wanted love, to love each other, and among so many pains it was decreed that only the two of us would be wounded. We wanted the you and I of us, the you of a kiss, the I of secret bread, and that’s how everything was, eternally simple, until hatred flew in through the window. They hated, those who didn’t love our love, nor any other love, those unfortunate ones like chairs in an abandoned room, until they snared themselves in ash and the threatening face they possessed was extinguished in the extinguished light. Not only did I walk through the deserted lands where the salty stone is the only rose, the flower buried by the sea, but also along the bank of rivers that cut the snow. The bitter heights of the mountains know my steps. Tangled, whistling region of my wild home, vines whose mortal kiss is chained in the forest, wet lament of the bird that soars casting off shivers, oh region of lost sorrows and inclement tears! Not only do I claim the venomous skin of copper and the extended saltpeter like a snowy reclining statue, but also the vineyard, and the cherry tree blessed by spring. I belong like a black atom to the arid lands and to the light of autumn in the grapes, to this metallic country raised by towers of snow. From so much love my life was dyed violet and I went from route to route like a blind bird until I reached your window, my friend: you heard a murmur of broken heart and there in the shadows I rose to your breast, without being or knowing I flew to the tower of life, I burst forth to live in your hands, I lifted myself from the sea to your joy. No one can calculate what I owe you, it’s blinding what I owe, my love, and it’s like a root from your native past, all that I owe, my love. Everything I owe you brims with starlight, no doubt, and what I owe is like the well of a wild land in which time watches over its lost flashes of light. Matilde, where are you? I noticed, below, between my tie and my heart, and above, a certain sadness in my ribs: because you were suddenly not near. I was lacking the light of your energy and I looked with devouring hope, I looked at the void in the house without you, in which nothing remains but tragic windows. In guarded silence the roof listens to the falling of ancient leafless rains, feathers, and all that night enclosed: and I wait like a lonely house, for you to return, and see, and inhabit me, and soothe the slow ache in my windows. I only love you because I love you, and from loving to not loving you I go, and from waiting when I’m not waiting my heart moves to fire from cold. I only love you because I love you, and hate until hating I implore, and the measure of illogical love is not to see you and to love you even more. Perhaps the summer light will consume with its raging ray my heart, stealing the last piece of peace I’ll ever know. In this story I’m the only one who dies, and I die, my love, and love you, with blood and fire and more. The great rain of the south falls on Isla Negra like a single drop, transparent and weighty, and the sea opens its cold leaves to the sky, and the earth takes on the humid fate of a cup. Soulmate, carry in your kisses the salty water of these months, the honey of the land, the fragrance wet by a thousand lips of the sky, the sacred patience of waves in winter. Something calls and all the doors open, the water tells a tale to the windows, the sky grows down to the roots, and the day weaves and unweaves its heavenly net with time, salt, whispers, growth, roads, a woman, a man, and the cold season on the earth. The girl made of wood didn’t arrive on foot: she was suddenly there, sitting on the bricks, with old flowers from the sea on her head, and eyes that peer with the sadness of roots. She remained there observing our open lives, the going and being and walking and coming by land, and the day discoloring her slow petals. She kept vigil without seeing us, the woman of wood. The girl crowned by ancient waves watched with her defeated eyes: she knew we lived in a distant net of time and water and sounds and rain, not knowing if we were real or were just her dream. This is the story of the young woman of wood. Perhaps not to be is to be without you being, without you cutting the noontime like a blue flower, without you walking later on through the mist and stones, without that light you carry in your hand that perhaps others don’t see as golden, that perhaps no one knew was growing like the red origins of the rose, without you being, in the end, without you coming sudden, inciting, into my life, breath of roses, wheat of the wind, and since then I am because you are, and since then you are, I am, we are, and by loving I’ll be, you’ll be, we’ll be. Perhaps I am traveling wounded, without bleeding, through one of the rays of your life and in the midst of the jungle the water stops me: the rain that descends with its sky. Then I touch the water-soaked heart: I know that your eyes entered there through the expanse of my pain and a whisper of shadow emerges: Who is it? Who is it? But it had no name, the leaf or dark water that throbbed in the midst of the jungle, deaf, in the road, and so, my love, I realized I was wounded and no one was speaking but the shadow, and the roaming night, and the kiss of the rain. From sorrow to sorrow love crosses the islands and establishes roots and then waters the tears, and no one can, no one is able to avoid the steps of the heart that runs along silent and carnivorous. And so you and I looked for a space, another planet in which the salt wouldn’t touch your tresses, in which pain wouldn’t call because of me, in which the bread of day might live without dying. A planet ensnared in space and foliage, a desert, a cruel uninhabited stone, we wanted to make with our own hands a firm nest, without harm, without wound, without words, but love was not like that, instead it was an insane city where the people grow pale sitting on balconies. My love, winter returns to its barracks, the earth offers up its yellow gifts and we run our hand over a forgotten land, over the flowing locks of geography. To depart! Today! Onward! Wheels, ships, bells, iron birds moving through the infinite day to the nuptial aroma of the islands, to the longitudinal flours of abundance! Let’s go, get up, pin your hair, climb, descend, run, and whistle with me and the air, let’s leave for the trains to Arabia or Tocopilla, with nothing to do but migrate towards distant pollen, towards piercing towns with rags and gardenias, towards cities governed by shoeless Caesars. Perhaps you will remember that slender man that emerged from the shadow like a knife and before we knew it, he knew: he saw smoke and was sure there was fire. The pale woman with black hair leapt like a fish from the abyss and the two of them erected against love a machine armed with innumerable teeth. Man and woman tended mountains and flowers, descended to rivers, climbed walls, and carried their fierce artillery through the hills. Then love realized that it was love. And when I raised my eyes to your name your heart instantly pointed out my path. The road soaked by water in August shines as if cut beneath the full moon, beneath the ripe clarity of apples in the middle of the blossom of autumn. Fog, space or sky, the vague net of day grows with cold dreams, noises and fish, the mist of the islands combats the clarity, the sea pulsates over the light of Chile. Everything seeks its center like metal, the leaves take shelter, the winter masks its blood and we go on blindly, endlessly, alone. Alone and tied to the secret source of movement, of good-byes, travel, roads: farewell my friend, the tears of nature are falling. This is the house, the sea and the flag. We had been walking along other walls. We hadn’t found a door or a sound since being gone, since being as good as dead. After so much time the house opens its silence, and we enter to survey the neglect, the dead mice, the forgotten farewell, the tears that fell from the faucets. The house wept, it wept night and day, groaning with spiders, half-open, and fell apart piece by piece from its eyes, then suddenly we bring it back to life, we people it and it doesn’t know us: it wants to bloom, but doesn’t remember how. Diego Rivera with the patience of a bear searched in paint to find the jewel of the forest, the sudden red flower of the blood, and gathered the light of the world in your portrait. He painted the imperial vesture of your nose, the sparkle of your wide-open eyes, your fingernails that feed the envy of the moon, and upon your summer skin, your watermelon mouth. He gave you two heads of live volcano burning with fire and Araucan blood, and upon the two gold faces of clay he covered you with a helmet of wild fire where my eyes were secretly entangled in the towering spire of your hair. Today is today with the weight of all time past, with the wings of all that will be tomorrow, today is the south sea, the countless years of the waves, and the composition of morning. Into your mouth, lifted to the sun or moon, fell the petals of a departed day, and yesterday comes trotting down the street so we won’t forget its funeral face. Today, yesterday and tomorrow expire as they go, we devour the days like roasted steer, our livestock counts its numbered days, but into your heart time tossed its flour, and my love built an oven with Temuco clay to bake my daily bread and feed my famished soul. I don’t have never, I don’t have always. In the sand victory has left its forgotten footprints. I’m a poor man disposed to love his neighbors. I don’t know you. I love you. I don’t give or sell thorns. It’s known I don’t weave bloody crowns, that I fought against humiliation, and filled my watery soul with truth. I rewarded hatred with doves. I don’t have never because I was, and am, and will be, different, and in the name of transforming love I proclaim purity. Death is but a stone of oblivion. I love you, and kiss happiness when I kiss your mouth. Let’s gather wood. We’ll make a fire on the mountain. At night, beloved, bind your heart to mine so that two hearts can conquer the shadows of sleep like a double drum pounding in the forest against the thick wall of dripping leaves. Nocturnal crossing, black coal of sleep cutting the thread of earthly grapes with the punctuality of a headlong train endlessly dragging stones and shadow. And so, love, bind me to pure movement, to the tenacity that beats in your heart with the wings of a drowned swan, so that our sleep can respond to the starry questions of the sky with a single key, with a single door, closed by the shadow. From travels and sorrows I returned, my love, to your voice, to your hand flying in the guitar, to the fire that warms the autumn with kisses, to the circulation of night in the sky. For all men I request bread and dominion, I request earth for the hapless worker, and I offer no truce from my blood and my song. But I cannot renounce your love without dying. That’s why the waltz of the serene moon plays, and the barcarole sings in the water of the guitar, until my head nods off dreaming: all the sleepless hours of my life wove this canopy in which your hand lives and flies watching over the night of the sleeping traveler. Now you are mine. Rest with your dream in my dream. Love, pain, labors, can all retire now. The night spins on its invisible wheels and next to me you’re as pure as sleeping amber. No one else, ever, my love, will sleep with my dreams. You will go, we will go through the waters of time. No one else will travel through the shadow with me, only you, ever-living, ever-sun, ever-moon. Now your hands open their delicate fists and let fall sweet directionless signs, your eyes close like two grey wings, while I follow the water you carry that carries me: the night, the world and the wind unravel their fates, until I don’t exist without you except as your dream. My love, upon closing this night door I ask of you a journey through darkness: close your dreams, enter with your sky in my eyes, extend yourself in my blood like a wide river. Good-bye, good-bye, cruel clarity that was falling beneath the sack-coat of each passing day, good-bye to each flash of orange or time, cheers to the shadow, oh intermittent companion! In this ship or water or death or new life, united again, asleep, resurrected, we consecrate the marriage of blood in the night. I don’t know who lives or dies, who rests or wakes, but I know your heart is the one that leaves the gifts of light in my breast. It’s good, my love, to feel you next to me in the night, invisible in your dream, soundly nocturnal, while I sort out my worries like twisted and tangled nets. Absent one, your heart sails through sleep, but your abandoned body breathes, seeking me without seeing, completing my dream like a plant that doubles its size in the shadow. When you rise, you’ll be someone different tomorrow, but from the borders lost in the night, from this present state of being and not being something keeps drawing near in the light of life as if the closed shadow were signaling with its torch its secret creatures. One more time, love, the net of the day extinguishes work, wheels, fires, wheezings, good-byes, and we give to the night the dancing wheat that day drew from the light and the land. Only the moon in the middle of its pure page supports the pillars of the estuary of the sky, the bedroom takes on the slowness of gold and your hands flit and flutter, preparing the night. Oh love, oh night, oh dome in the shadow of sky covered by a river of impenetrable waters that dislodges and drowns the day’s impassioned grapes, until we are only a single dark space, a cup into which the night empties its ashes, a drop in a long throbbing river. From the sea to the streets the vague mist rolls in like the breath of an ox buried in the cold, and long tongues of water accumulate and cover the month that promised it would be heavenly. Early autumn, whistling beehive of leaves, when your banner waves over the towns crazy women sing saying good-bye to the rivers, the horses whinny from here to Patagonia. There’s a night plant that rises to your face silently coaxed by love until it stretches to the clicking horseshoes of the sky. I bend over the fire of your nocturnal form and love not only your breasts but also the autumn that spreads through the fog your borderless blood. Oh Southern Cross, oh clover of fragrant fire, with four kisses today your beauty penetrated and skewered the shadow of my hat: the moon traveled, round, through the cold. Then with my love, with my lover, oh diamonds of blue frost, serenity of the sky, mirror, you appeared, and the night was filled with your four trembling cellars of wine. Oh palpitating silver of polished and pure fish, green cross, ornament of the radiant shadow, firefly condemned to the unity of the sky, rest in me, let us close your eyes and mine. Sleep, for a minute, with the night of man. Ignite in me your four, star-filled numbers. Three birds of the sea, three rays, three scissors, sliced through the cold sky to Antofagasta, and left the air trembling: everything shook like a wounded flag. Solitude, give me the sign of your beginningless beginning, the difficult path of cruel birds, and the throbbing that precedes honey, music, sea, and birth. (Solitude sustained by a constant face like a grave flower endlessly stretching to reach the unsoiled abundance of the sky) Cold wings of the sea, of the islands, went flying to the sands of Northeast Chile. And the night bolted shut its celestial door. The month of March returns with hidden light and enormous fish glide through the sky, vague earthly mist advances in secret, and one by one things fall silent. Fortunately in this crisis of wandering weather the lives of water were reconciled with the lives of fire, the grey movement of the winter ship, the form that love imprinted on the guitar. Oh love, rose bathed by sirens and waves, fire that dances and climbs the invisible ladder and wakes the blood in the tunnel of insomnia so that the waves of the sky are consumed, the sea forgets its gifts and lions, and the world falls away inside its dark nets. When I die I want your hands on my eyes: I want the light and wheat of your beloved hands to pass over me their freshness one last time: to feel the softness that changed my life. I want you to live while I, asleep, wait for you, I want your ears to continue catching the wind, I want you to smell the ocean air we loved together, I want you to continue to walk the sand that we walked. I want what I love to go on living and I loved and sang you above all things, and so, keep flowering, my flower, so that you can embrace all that my love can give, so that my shadow can stroll through your hair, so that everyone will know the reason I was singing. I thought I would die, I felt the cold so near, and of all I lived I was only losing you: your mouth was my day and my night on earth and your skin was the land conquered by my kisses. In that moment all the books closed, friendship, the treasures tirelessly accumulated, the transparent home we built: everything ceased to be, except for your eyes. Because love, while life assaults us, it is simply one wave above the others, but oh when death comes to call there is only your eyes to fight so much nothing, only your clarity to fight not continuing to be, only your love to shut out and close the shadows. Age covers us like drizzle, time is endless and arid, a feather of salt touches your face, a slow drip corroded my skin: time does not bestow honor in my hands or a flight of oranges in yours: it chops at life with snow and metal: your life which is my life. My life that I gave you fills up with years, like the fullness of a flowering branch. The grapes will ripen again on earth. And still down below time keeps working, waiting, raining on the dust, anxious to erase even what isn’t there. My love, if I die and you don’t die, my love, if you die and I don’t die, don’t let sorrow steal our land: there’s no kingdom like the one we lived. Dust on the wheat, sand on the sands, time, wayward water, roaming wind, carried us like a floating seedling. We might never have found each other in time. This meadow in which we met, oh small infinity! we give back. But this love, love, has not ended, and just as it had no birth it has no death, it’s like a long river, winding through different countries and kisses. If your heart ever stops, if fire ceases to surge through your veins, if your voice disappears in your mouth without a word, if your hands forget to fly and they sleep, Matilde, love, leave your lips slightly parted, because that final kiss will have to last me, will have to remain ever-motionless on your mouth so it can go with me, too, in my death. I will die kissing your cold crazy mouth, embracing the lost bouquet of your body, and searching for the light of your closed eyes. And so, when the earth receives our embrace, we will go, mixed together in a single death, to live forever the endless night of a kiss. If I die, go on living with such clear strength that you make fire out of pallor and cold, from south to south lift your indelible eyes, from sun to sun let your guitar mouth sing. I don’t want your laughter to waver nor your steps, I don’t want to let my joyful legacy die, don’t knock at my breast, I’m gone. Live in my absence as you would in a house. Absence is a house is so big you can walk through the walls and hang paintings on the air. Absence is a house so transparent I’ll see you living, even in death, and if you suffer, my love, I’ll have to die again. Who else loved each other like we did? Let’s scour the ancient ashes of burnt hearts and let our kisses fall there, one by one, until the abandoned flower is revived. Let’s love the love that consumed its blossoms and descended to the earth with fame and authority: you and I are the light that continues, its unbreakable, delicate sprout. Let’s shine a light on love, covered by cold time, buried by snow and spring, by autumn and oblivion, a light of new apple, a light of freshness opened by a new wound, like the love of dead lovers that walk in silence through an eternity of buried mouths. I think, this time in which you loved me will continue through some other blue, some other skin on similar bones, some other eyes that will see the spring. Not one person who tied up our time, who conversed with smoke, governments, merchants, transients, will continue dancing on his strings. The heartless gods with spectacles will vanish, the bald carnivores with books, the swollen bloodsuckers and twittering fools. And when the world is washed clean other eyes will be born in the water and the wheat will grow without tears. We have to fly these days, but to where? Without wings, without a jet, we still have to fly: the steps were taken and nothing could be done, they never let the passenger put up his feet. We have to fly every single minute like eagles, insects and days, we’ve got to conquer the god of time, put new alarm clocks in his eyes. Shoes and roads are not enough, the earth is a bother to those in a hurry, but roots have already crossed the night, and you will shine in some other star, decidedly transitory, becoming, in the end, the petals of a poppy. And this word, this page written by the thousand hands of my single hand, does not die in you, is not for dreams, it falls to the earth, and continues there. It doesn’t matter if light or flattery overflow and spill from the cup, like a tenacious tremor of wine, or if your mouth was stained red. These last syllables don’t want more than what comes and goes on the reef of my memories, the furious foam, they only want to write your name. And though my dark love doesn’t say it, later on it will be shouted by spring. Other days will come, the silence of planets and plants will catch fire and so many pure things will come to pass! Violins will exhale an aroma of moon! Bread may come to be your equal: have your voice, your essence of wheat, and other things will speak with your mouth: the lost horses of autumn. Even if it isn’t as it should be, love will fill bulging barrels like the ancient honey of shepherds, and you, in the dust of my heart, (which will be filled with endless markets) will come and go among watermelons. Wherever I am on earth I’ll push away emeralds in order to glimpse you, and you’ll be there, looking like a sprout, with a plume of speaking water. What a world! What endless decoration! What a ship sailing through sweetness! And you perhaps, and me perhaps, topaz! Today the bells ring as one. Today there will be nothing but open air, apples carried on the wind, the succulent book in the bower, and where the carnations breathe we will found a new habit to outlast the eternity of a conquering kiss.
translated by Alan Davison
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Little girl, you’ve conserved your poor girl’s heart,
XXX
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LXVIII (head of ship’s prow)
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C
