Tag Archive | Pablo Neruda

For my Friend…on his Birthday.

Aug20

Gio and I have ben friends more than 20 years now, since we were in our teens. It’s rare that a friendship is both so intimate and so enduring, and I cherish “us” for those qualities and so many more. I could go on and on about the characteristics that qualify great friendship…but I think you know…it’s been said before and anything I might say would only be a reflection of your own experience i am sure. So instead I will offer some words from one of our favorite poets, Pablo Neruda…who we would read aloud to each other late into the night in that tiny colorful apartment on, “5th and B”…Funny how romantic love and sustained friendship (love) share so much in common.

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”  - 100 Love Sonnets

I love you Gio, today, tomorrow and always, your conchita.

I Will Never Find Fault in the Naked Body

Oct26

ODE TO NAKED BEAUTY
By Pablo Neruda

With chaste heart, and pure
eyes
I celebrate you, my beauty,
restraining my blood
so that the line
surges and follows
your contour,
and you bed yourself in my verse,
as in woodland, or wave-spume:
earth’s perfume,
sea’s music.

Nakedly beautiful,
whether it is your feet, arching
at a primal touch
of sound or breeze,
or your ears,
tiny spiral shells
from the splendour of America’s oceans.
Your breasts also,
of equal fullness, overflowing
with the living light
and, yes,
winged
your eyelids of silken corn
that disclose
or enclose
the deep twin landscapes of your eyes.

The line of your back
separating you
falls away into paler regions
then surges
to the smooth hemispheres
of an apple,
and goes splitting
your loveliness
into two pillars
of burnt gold, pure alabaster,
to be lost in the twin clusters of your feet,
from which, once more, lifts and takes fire
the double tree of your symmetry:
flower of fire, open circle of candles,
swollen fruit raised
over the meeting of earth and ocean.

Your body – from what substances
agate, quartz, ears of wheat,
did it flow, was it gathered,
rising like bread
in the warmth,
and signalling hills
silvered,
valleys of a single petal, sweetnesses
of velvet depth,
until the pure, fine, form of woman
thickened
and rested there?

It is not so much light that falls
over the world
extended by your body
its suffocating snow,
as brightness, pouring itself out of you,
as if you were
burning inside.

Under your skin the moon is alive.

‘…And you are pure beside me as sleeping amber.’

Oct5

Sonnet LXXXI

-Pablo Neruda

And now you’re mine. Rest with your dream in my dream.

Love and pain and work should all sleep, now.
The night turns on its invisible wheels,
and you are pure beside me as a sleeping amber.

No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go,
we will go together, over the waters of time.
No one else will travel through the shadows with me,
only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon.

Your hands have already opened their delicate fists
and let their soft drifting signs drop away; your eyes closed like two gray
wings, and I move

after, following the folding water you carry, that carries
me away. The night, the world, the wind spin out their destiny.
Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all.

A moment to hold: “I have scarcely left you…”

Jul7

Absense

I have scarcely left you 
When you go in me, crystalline,
Or trembling,
Or uneasy, wounded by me
Or overwhelmed with love, as
when your eyes 
Close upon the gift of life
That without cease I give you.

My love, 
We have found each other
Thirsty and we have 
Drunk up all the water and the
Blood, 
We found each other
Hungry 
And we bit each other
As fire bites,
Leaving wounds in us. 

But wait for me, 
Keep for me your sweetness.
I will give you too 
A rose

-Neruda

Feisty Friday Quotes: Pablo Neruda knew how to paint love for women…through his poetry.

Jun3

Carnal apple, Woman filled, burning moon

Carnal apple, Woman filled, burning moon,
dark smell of seaweed, crush of mud and light,
what secret knowledge is clasped between your pillars?
What primal night does Man touch with his senses?
Ay, Love is a journey through waters and stars,
through suffocating air, sharp tempests of grain:
Love is a war of lightning,
and two bodies ruined by a single sweetness.
Kiss by kiss I cover your tiny infinity,
your margins, your rivers, your diminutive villages,
and a genital fire, transformed by delight,
slips through the narrow channels of blood
to precipitate a nocturnal carnation,
to be, and be nothing but light in the dark.