(no subject)

[mizraim.livejournal.com]

Nuptial Substance

Standing like a cherry tree without bark or flowers,
special, burning, with veins and saliva,
and fingers and testicles,
I look at a girl of paper and moon,
horizontal, trembling and breathing and white
and her nipples like two separated ciphers,
and the rosy meeting of her legs where
her mound flutters with nocturnal eyelashes.

Pale, overflowing,
I feel words sink into my mouth,
words like drowned children,
and on we go and ships grow teeth,
and waters and breadth as if on fire.

I shall place her like a sword or a mirror,
and I shall open until death her fearful legs,
and I shall bite her ears and her veins,
and I shall make her retreat, her eyes closed
in a thick river of green semen.

I shall flood her with poppies and lightningbolts,
I shall wrap her in knees, in lips, in needles,
I shall enter her with inches of weeping epidermis
and pressures of crime and soaked hair.

I shall make her flee escaping through fingernails and sighs
toward never, toward nothing,
climbing up the slow marrow and the oxygen,
clutching memories and reasons
like a single hand, like a cleft finger
waving a fingernail of forsaken salt.

She must run sleeping along roads of skin
in a country of ashen gum and ashes,
struggling with knives, and sheets, and ants,
and with eyes that fall on her like dead men,
and with drops of black substance slipping
like blind fish or bullets of thick water.

- Pablo Neruda
trans. Donald D. Walsh