Ode with a Lament
Oh child among the roses, oh pressure of doves,
oh jail of fish and rosebushes,
your soul is a bottle full of thirsting salt
and a bell of grapes, your skin.
Unfortunately, I’ve nothing to give you except
the nails of my fingers
or eyelashes, or pianos melted by love
or dreams that pour from my heart in torrents,
dreams covered with dust that gallop like black riders,
dreams charged full of velocities and misfortunes.
I love you only with kisses and red poppies,
with rain soaked wreaths,
my eyes full of ember-red horses and yellow dogs.
I love you only with waves on my shoulder,
amid random explosions of sulphur and waters lost in thought,
swimming against cemeteries that circulate in certain rivers,
drowned pasture flooding the sad, chalky tombstones,
swimming against the cemeteries of the submerged hearts
which run in certain rivers
with wet grass growing over the sad plaster tombs
and faded lists of unburied children.
There’s so much death, so many funereal events
in my destitute passions, my desolate kisses,
there’s water that falls in my head,
while my hair grows out,
a water like time, a black, undammed water
with a nocturnal voice, with a parrot’s
shriek in rain, with the interminable
shadow of a wet wing shielding my bones:
while I dress myself, while
incessantly I survey myself in mirrors and window panes,
I hear someone following me me, sobbing out my name
in a wounded voice putrefied by time.
You are standing over the earth,
full of teeth and lightning.
You propagate kisses and kill the ants.
You weep tears of health, from an onion, a bee,
from your burning alphabet.
You’re like a sword, blue and green
and at my touch you undulate like a river.
Come to my soul, dressed in white, with a branch
of bleeding roses and goblets of ash,
come near with an apple and a horse,
because therein lies a dark living room and a shattered candelabrum,
a few bent chairs waiting on winter,
and a dove, dead, with a number.
Pablo Neruda. Seected Poems Penguin Poetry
