Tenth Thursday Literary Lines

Tagged as Neruda, Poetry

Written on 2007-07-27 16:56:35

Thursday Literary Lines
Today's piece is from the Neruda book that arrived while I was at the beach. It is titled Ars Poetica.

Between shadow and space, between trimmings and damsels,
Endowed with a singular heart and sorrowful dreams,
Precipitously pallid, withered in the brow
And with a furious widower's mourning for each day of life,
Ah, for each invisible water that I drink somnolently
And from every sound that I welcome trembling,
I have the same absent thirst and the same cold fever,
A nascent ear, an indirect anguish,
As if thieves or ghosts were coming,
And in a shell or fixed and profound expanse,
Like a humiliated waiter, like a slightly raucous bell,
Like an old mirror, like the smell of a solitary house
Where the guests come in at night wildly drunk,
And there is a smell of clothes thrown on the floor, and an absence of flowers-
Possibly in another even less melancholy way-
But the truth is that suddenly the wind that lashes my chest,
The nights of infinite substance fallen in my bedroom,
The noise of a day that burns with sacrifice,
Ask me mournfully what prophecy there is in me,
And there is a swarm of objects that call without being answered,
And a ceaseless movement, and a bewildered man.

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