Erasure of Neruda's Epithalamium

At first I did not see you: I did not know

  your           presence:

  

the shouts of the wind in the shadow.

Do you remember

how sleep grew

in you,

      how  

               the wind

  

echoed  

      its secret syllable

  

and all things spoke 

of the seed that half opens?

Your name is on the petals

of the rose that grows on the stone,

       a scarlet mouth  

deciphers your name:

  

    broken window

crazy with light.  

As if from the Shipwreck we returned - A Neruda Cento

Climbing vines murmured as we passed.

The gray stones knew us - the wind

in the shadow. Between you and me

a new door opened.


All that we learned was of no use:

we emerged from the ocean

as if from the shipwreck we returned.


Everything carries me to you:

aromas, light, metals,

boats filled from within with black light,


there too I would like to let my blood sleep

against the devil's webs,

     against organized misery.



You have seen the same sky each day,

the same dark winter mud, the endless branching

of the plum trees and their dark-purple sweetness.



Night has fallen for you.

Perhaps at dawn we shall see each other again.

 
 




Cento Source Text: The Captain's Verses Pablo Neruda , 1952
Image: Fisherman at Sea by William Turner

The Crescent of Silence is Brimmed - a Neruda collage

When I open the door of night,

the crescent of silence is brimmed.

It is midnight: all around me

death beats on a gong, black water

the screaming of birds in the rain.

Something shoves me toward damp houses, into dark

corners, into hospitals with bones flying out of the windows,

devoured by haze. All things that live

give some part of themselves to the air.

The big breathing encircles me

with its raddle of towering blossoms, mouths

with their teeth black at the root:

a kiss dusky with pitch.

 
 
Phrases and lines from Five Decades: Poems 1925-1970 Pablo Neruda, translated by Ben Belitt
Painting: The Water-Sprite and Ägir's Daughters by Nils Johan Olsson Blommér