Poem of the Week

As I was reading Pedro Páramo last night I couldn't get away from the images of the fall and of death. It reminded me of one of my favorite poems of Pablo Neruda "Entrada a la Madera" - The Way Into Wood. So, I thought I would share it with anybody, if anybody, who reads this blog. I would rather have put it in Spanish but because of potential readers of the blog I thought English was appropriate for the occasion.

The Way Into Wood (The Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda. ed. Nathaniel Tarn p.114-115)

By the skin of my reason, with my fingers
with slow waters indolently swamped,
I fall to the imperium of the forget-me-nots,
an unforgiving air of mournfulness,
a decayed, forgotten hall
and a cluster of bitter clovers.

I fall into the shadows, to the core
of shattered things,
and I see spiders, and pastures coppices
of secret, inconclusive timbers,
pacing through soaked, uprooted fibres
at the living heart of matter and silence.

Oh lovely matter, dry-winged rose,
as I drown I climb your petals,
my feet are burning with fatigue,
I kneel down in your hard cathedral
thrashing my lips with an angel.

It is because I am myself faced with your colour of world,
with your pale dead shoulders,
your gathered hearts,
your silent multitude.

It is dying under your wave of odours
wrapped in autumn and resistance:
about to take a funeral journey
along the ridges of yellow scars:

I with my lamentations that have no genesis,
hungry, sleepless, alone,
threading darkened corridors,
arriving at your mysterious essence.

I see the course of your petrified currents,
the growth of frozen, interrupted hands,
I hear your oceanic vegetations,
rustling by night, engraved, intractable,
and I feel the leaves dying to the very core,
fusing their green materials
with your abandoned immobility.

Pores, veins, rings of sweetness,
weight, silent temperature,
arrows struck into your fallen soul,
beings asleep in your thick mouth,
shreds of sweet pulp devoured entirely,
ashes full of extinguished souls,
gather to me, to my limitless dream,
fall into my bed where the night falls
and fall without an end like broken water,
clasp me to your life, to your death,
to your submissive materials,
to your dead, neutralized doves,
and let us make fire, and silence, and sound,
and let us burn, and be hushed among bells.