(no subject)

[parasitus.livejournal.com]

he offered me his hand
the way an old tree might
extend a broken branch
stripped
of leaves and fruit
The
hand
that once wrote, spinning
the thread and strands
of
destiny,
now was
intricately
scored
by days,months, and years
sere on his face
was
the writing
of time,
minute and meandering
as if
the lines
and signs
had been ordained
at birth
and little by little
air
had etched them

long deep lines,
chapters carved
by his face by age,
question marks,
mysterious tales,
asterisks
all that sirens had forgot
in the far-reaching
solitude of his soul.
all that fell from the starry sky,
was traced in his face.
Never had the ancient bard
captured
with pen and unyielding paper
the overflowing river
of life
and the unidentified god
that flirted with his verse,
and now,
on his cheeks,
all that
mystery
coldly
drafted
the algebra
of its revelations,
and the humble,
unchanging
things he had scorned
imprinted
on his brow
their most profound
pages,
and
even
on his
nose
thin
at the beak
of the errant cormorant,
voyages and waves
had sketched
their ultramarine
scrawl.
Two
unfriendly
pebbles,
two
ocean agates
in that combat,
were his eyes,
and only through them
did I see the extinguished
fire,
a rose
in the poet's
hands

Now
his suit
was much too large,
as if he were already living
in an
empty
house,
and all
the bones
of his body were visible
beneath his skin,
skin draped on bone,
he was nothing but bone,
alert and instructive bone,
a tiny tree, finally, of bone,
was the poet
quenched
by the calligraphy
of the rain,
by the inexhaustible
springs of time

There I left him
hurrying towards death
as if
death awaited,
she too, almost naked,
in a somber park,
and hand in hand
they would make
their way
to a decaying resting place
where they would sleep
as every man
of us
will sleep:
with
a dry
rose
in
a
hand
that will also
crumble into dust.
-pablo neruda, from odas elementales