neruda

dream horse

Needlessly, watching my looking-glass image,
with its passion for papers and cinemas, days of the week,
I pluck from my heart my hell's captain
and order the clauses, equivocally sad.

I drift between this point and that, absorbing illusions.
converse in the nests of the tailors;
sometimes the voices are glacial and deadly--
they sing, and the sorcery goes.

There's a country spread out in the sky,
a credulous carpet of rainbows
and crepuscular plants:
I move towards it just a bit haggardly,
trampling a gravedigger's rubble still moist from the spade
to dream in a bedlam of vegetables.

I walk between origins, beneficent documents,
chopfallen, dressed like a natural: I want
the loose honey of deference,
the sweets of the catechist under whose leaves
drained violets drowse and grow old;
and those bustling abettors, the brooms, in whose image,
assuredly, sorrow and certainty join.
I plunder the whistle of roses, the carking anxiety:
I smash the attractive extremes--worst of all,
I await a symmetrical time beyond measure:
the taste of my spirit disheartens me.

What a morning is here! What a milk-heavy glow
in the air, integral, all of a piece,
intending some good! I have heard its red horses,
naked to bridle and iron, shimmering, whinnying there.

Mounted, I soar over churches,
gallop the garrisons empty of soldiers
while a dissolute army pursues me.
Its eyes of eucalyptus raze the darkness
and the bell of its galloping body strikes home.

I need but a spark of that perduring brightness,
my jubilant kindred to claim my inheritance.