1.
I touch your feet in the shade, your hands in the light,
and on the flight your peregrine eyes guide me
Matilde, with kisses your mouth taught me
my lips came to know fire.
Oh legs bequeathed the creaminess of perfect
oats, the battle spread,
its heart a meadow,
when I pressed my ears to your breasts,
my blood pounded out your Araucan syllable.
11.
If they put
a boat
near a Chilean,
he jumps in,
he exiles himself
and is lost.
The rich man
heads to Vesuvius,
and won't face
the maternal
heights, the high
Andean flame,
he flies to Broadway,
to the Mayo Clinic,
to the Moulin Rouge,
the poor
Chileno, with his only
shoes
crosses into Neuquen, the
forsaken territories of Patagonia,
he likes the lunary
shorelines of Peru,
he sets his hunger down
in Colombia,
migrates as he can,
changing stars like shirts,
the Chilean
is a crazy woman
with mutinous eyes,
an amiable heart, sky-blue skin
or he's the traveling salesman
with his wine, guitars,
water pipes
or he could be the sailor
who gets married
in Veracruz and never comes back
to his island,
to his fragrant oceanic Chiloe.
16.
Spring day,
a long Chilean day,
a long green lizard
lazing
on the amphitheater of snow
facing the navy blue.
Sun and water against
your green skin,
the resuscitated land
breathes behind your shield,
nodding off,
you lose your grip
but recover,
the pollen
stains you
red,
the cicadas
buzz by,
a bird
aims its bill at you,
you go on fully alive,
a fragrant
green creature
with a golden tail,
you give
and take sustenance,
you sing
and we sing of you,
sleepy
clear day
and you aren't even aware
that meantime
yellow beetles
are scrambling
up your head,
and violins
are taking wing
in your wind,
you don't know
who dies today,
you don't recognize
the mourners
trailing the cortege,
you don't know, can't conceive
of those evicted from their homes
last night, the woman
who lost her job,
the ring
slipping from the fingers
of the mother
as it clangs in the pawnbroker's drawer
like a lost cricket dying,
at ease
among so many
births,
the hub
of germinations,
attentive
in the wispy
spring of Chile,
you take it easy,
superb,
the sea's froth
like a sacred robe
nears and falls back
from your body,
and
the sky crowns you,
the ocean's chorus
etches into stone the song
of your praises,
among spiny thorns
of the cactus, the corolla burns,
the world is born again.
In the motherland of Chile
in spring
the voice,
the irregular theogony,
a bright abundance,
from green days lazing in the snow,
I draw out
this one day,
its face to the sea salt.
_________________________
P A B L O N E R U D A
F O R R E S T G A N D E R
Then Come Back
The Lost Neruda Poems
Copper Canyon Press 2016
