lorca

song of the seven-hearted boy

Seven hearts
are the hearts that I have.
But mine is not t here among them.

In the high mountains, mother,
where I sometimes ran into the wind,
seven girls with long hands
carried me around in their mirrors.

I have sung my way through this world
with my mouth with its seven petals.
My crimson-colored galleys
have cast off without rigging or oars.

I have lived my life in landscapes
that other men have owned.
And the secrets I wore at my throat,
unbeknownst to me, had come open.

In the high mountains, mothers,
where my heart rises over its echoes
in the memory book of a star,
I sometimes ran into the wind.

Seven hearts
are the hearts that I have.
But mine is not there among them.

neruda

me again

I who wanted to talk
of a century inside the web
that is always my poem-in-progress,
have found only myself wherever I looked
and missed the real happening.
With wary good faith
I opened myself to the wind: the lockers,
clothes-closets, graveyards,
the calendar months of the year,
and in every opening crevice
my face looked back at me.

The more bored I became
with my unacceptable person,
the more I returned to the theme of my person;
worst of all,
I kept painting myself to myself
in the midst of a happening.
What an idiot (I said to myself
a thousand times over) to perfect all that craft
of description and describe only myself,
as though I had nothing to show but my head,
nothing better to tell than the mistakes of a lifetime.

Tell me, my good brothers,
I said at the Fishermen's Union,
do you love yourselves as I do?
The plain truth of it is:
we fishermen stick to our fishing,
while you fish for yourself (said
the fishermen): you fish over and over again
for yourself, then throw yourself back in the sea.

neruda

conditions

With these moody negations
I said goodbye to the mirrors
and gave up my profession:
better a blind man in a corner
singing songs to the world
without setting eyes on a soul,
if part of me is so like the others!

Nevertheless I kept trying:
how to look back at oneself
to wherever it is one sat blinded
when one's total condition was dark?
There was nothing to show for my singing
in a blind rabble of singers:
but the harsher the street sounds became,
the sweeter I seemed to myself.

Condemned to self-love,
I lived the exterior life of a hypocrite
hiding the depths of the love
my defects had brought down on my head.
I keep on being happy,
disclosing to nobody
my ambiguous malady:
the grief I endure for self-love,
who was never so loved in return.

neruda

summation

I am glad of the great obligations
I imposed on myself. In my life
many strange and material things have crowded together--
fragile wraiths that entangled me,
categorical mineral hands,
an irrational wind that dismayed me,
barbed kisses that scarred me, the hard reality
of my brothers,
my implacable vow to keep watchful,
my penchant for loneliness--to keep to myself
in the frailty of my personal whims.
That is why--water on stone--my whole life has
sung itself out between chance and austerity.

neruda

pastoral

I go copying mountains and rivers and clouds:
I shake out my fountain pen, remark
on a bird flying upward
or a spider alive in his workshop of floss,
with no thought in my head; I am air,
I am limitless air where the wheat tosses,
and am moved by an impulse to fly, the uncertain
direction of leaves, the round
eye of the motionless fish in the cove,
statues that soar through the clouds,
the rain's multiplications.

I see only a summer's
transparency, I sing nothing but wind,
while history creaks on its carnival floats
hoarding medals and shrouds
and passes me by, and I stand by myself
in the spring, knowing nothing but rivers.

Shepherd-boy, shepherd-boy, don't you know
that they wait for you?

I know and I know it: but here by the water
in the crackle and flare of cicadas,
I must wait for myself, as they wait for me there:
I also would see myself coming
and know in the end how it feels to me
when I come to the place where I wait for my coming
and turn back to my sleep and die laughing.

neruda

diver

The rubber man
rose from the sea.

Seated,
he seemed
like a globular
king
of the waters,
a bulbous
and secretive
cuttlefish,
the truncated
device
of invisible algae.

From their boats, in mid-ocean,
the fishermen
sink
in their rags,
blue
with the night
of the ocean:
around them arise
the great fish of phosphor,
a voltage
of fire,
they go under:
around them, the sea urchins
tumble, piling
the silt
with the splintering spite
of their hackles.

The underseas
man
thrashes the breadth of his legs;
languidly
reels
in the horror of fish gut:
gulls
slash
the limitless air
with their hurrying scissors;
the diver
toils
through the sand
like a drunkard,
swarthy
and comatose,
locked
into his clothing, cetacean,
half-earthen,
half-ocean,
going nowhere,
inept
in the rubbery bulk
of his feet.

He goes on to his birth-throes.
The ocean
gives way
like a womb
to this innocent:
he floats sullen
and strengthless
and barbarous,
like
the
newly born.
Time after time
he takes hold of the water, the sand,
and is
born again.
Submerging
each day
to the hold
of the pitiless
current,
Pacific and
Chilean
cold,
the diver
must practice
his
birth again,
make himself
monstrous
and tentative,
displace himself
fearfully,
grow wise
in his slothful
mobility, like
an underseas
moon.
Even
his thinking
must merge
with the water:
he harvests
inimical
fruits, stalactites,
treasures,
in the pit of a solitude
drenched
with the wash
of those graveyards--
as others
would turn up a cauliflower,
he comes up
to the light--
black air in a bubble--
to Mercedes,
Clara, Rosaura.
It is painful
to walk like a man again,
to think as a man thinks, to eat
again.
All
is beginning again
for
the bulking,
ambiguous man
staggering still
in the dark
of two different abysses.

This I know--
do I not?--
as I know my existence: all
things I have seen and considered.
The way of the diver
is hazardous? The vocation
is
infinite.

neruda

walking around

It so happens I'm tired of just being a man.
I go to a movie, drop in at the tailor's--it so happens--
feeling wizened and numbed, like a big, wooly swan,
awash on an ocean of clinkers and causes.

A whiff from a barbershop does it: I yell bloody murder.
All I ask is a little vacation from things: from boulders and woolens,
from gardens, institutional projects, merchandise,
eyeglasses, elevators--I'd rather not look at them.

It so happens I'm fed--with my feet and my fingernails
and my hair and my shadow.
Being a man leaves me cold: that's how it is.

Still--it would be lovely
to wave a cut lily and panic a notary,
or finish a nun with a jab to the ear.
It would be nice
just to walk down the street with a green switchblade handy,
whooping it up till I die of the shivers.

I won't live like this--like a root in a shadow,
wide-open and wondering, teeth chattering sleepily,
going down to the dripping entrails of the universe
absorbing things, taking things in, eating three squares a day.

I've had all I'll take from catastrophe.
I won't have it this way, muddling through like a root or a grave,
all alone underground, in a morgue of cadavers,
cold as a stiff, dying of misery.

That's why Monday flares up like an oil-slick,
when it sees me up close, with the face of a jailbird,
or squeaks like a broken-down wheel as it goes,
stepping hot-blooded into the night.

Something shoves me toward certain damp houses, in certain dark corners,
into hospitals, with bones flying out of the windows;
into shoe stores smelling of vinegar,
streets frightful as fissures laid open.

There, trussed to the doors of the houses I loathe
are the sulphurous birds, in a horror of tripes,
dental plates lost in a coffeepot,
mirrors
that must surely have wept with the nightmare and shame of it all;
and everywhere, poisons, umbrellas, and belly buttons.

I stroll and keep cool, in my eyes and my shoes
and my rage and oblivion.
I go on, crossing offices, retail orthopedics,
courtyards with laundry hung out on a wire:
the blouses and towels and the drawers newly washed,
slowly dribbling a slovenly tear.

neruda

Savor

From counterfeit stargazers, somewhat maudlin proprieties,
from the flotsam of usage borne in on us always, close at hand,
inconclusive, I have cherished an impulse, a taste of my loneliness.

From table-talk flimsy as scrapwood,
with a chair's self-effacement and a language that labors
to wait on a substitute will, like a lackey,
milky in stamina, with last week's consistency,
stagnating in air, like smog on a city.

Who can boast a more tangible patience?
I am swathed in discretion, packed in like a hide
with a color that gathers itself to itself like a serpent.
All my creatures are born in a massive recoil;
one helping of alcohol--alas!--and I wave off the day
that I chose for myself, like all of the days of my world.

I live in the fullness of matter; my color is general;
mute as a matriarch, my forbearance is fixed
like a church and its shadow, or the quiet of bones.
I brim with the deep disposition of waters
primed and expectant, asleep in a lachrymose vigil.

The inner guitar that I am, keeps the catch of a ballad,
spare and sonorous, abiding, immobile,
like a punctual nutriment, like smoke in the air:
force in repose, the volatile power of oil:
an incorruptible bird keeps watch on my head:
an unvarying angel inhabits my sword.

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.