Every day you play with the light of the universe. Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water. You are more than this white head that I hold tightly as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands. You are like nobody since I love you. Let me spread you out among yellow garlands. Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south? Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed. Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window. The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish. Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them. The rain takes off her clothes. The birds go by, fleeing. The wind. The wind. I can contend only against the power of men. The storm whirls dark leaves and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky. You are here. Oh, you do not run away. You will answer me to the last cry. Cling to me as though you were frightened. Even so, at one time a strange shadow ran through your eyes. Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle, and even your breasts smell of it. While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth. How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me, my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running. So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes, and over our heads the gray light unwind in turning fans. My words rained over you, stroking you. A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body. I go so far as to think that you own the universe. I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells, dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses. I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees. The play of love in the poem is not just with “light,” but between light and darkness in both persons. For Neruda, love and eros are confrontations with the real subjectivity of another person. That otherness takes the form of traumatic, destructive passion, and reveals a mutual incoherent and raw confusion, almost beyond endurance. The apparent disconnection between the descriptions of love, and the descriptions of the tempest, at first conceal the fact that for Neruda, love is the only means by which two people “weather” each other. They are in fact brought to life by their encounter, instead of being destroyed, through an alchemy of sentiment that transmutes the storm. I see on a daily basis an abundant number of posts on Love seen through the medium of poetry which is wonderful. A lot turn into excerpts. And being an avid poetry fan, I wonder whether some may be much more enraptured by the sheer beauty of COMPLETE poems, as the masters weave their breathtaking tapestries and we get to view them in full. Long-winded, I know.... But sometimes thoroughness is essential. This was Pablo Nerudas Love Poem, XIV: (many thanks to Dali Atash for the beautiful nod and reminder. I enjoy his lovely posts daily.)
Posted on: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 01:13:22 +0000