when the poet pablo neruda is no longer with us

by yuriy tarnawsky



you are dead, Pablo,
during these days after my life was
shattered like a tomato crate on a
highway, and faucets of
blood have been opened in your home
country for people who wear white
gloves to wash their hands in
it, two days ago my head was split
open and I was surprised to
see my blood so dark and cold and
slippery, like a black satin
handkerchief, I let it cover my
face for five minutes but men of the
law came and told me to take it
off, it was illegal, this morning I
sat in the railroad car of my
body while it carried me, shaking, to some
operation I was too tired to find out
about, in June of 1959, in Paris, I met a
girl, Odile, your compatriot, she
used to sit at your feet with other
children listening to you eating grapes, grapes,
green as the map of Chile, you spoke poetry and grape
seeds, they stuck to your chin and the sweatered
chest, she said, it must have
been fitting for a poet of Chilean
grapes wearing a beard and breastplate of
Chilean grape seeds, I know of your
home on Black Island, it was made from
wood, white pine, most probably, it
housed other kinds of wood, all smooth and
warm, like a girl’s skin, wool,
such as sheepskins on the floors, you’d
walk in the morning barefoot over
them running your toes through the white
curls, your toes as white and curly as sheep’s
wool, you wrote about it, I think, in one of your
books of Odes speaking of
socks like two warm white doves, glass
green and blue, teary like a child’s eyes, with giant tiny
clippers swaying and bobbing on
the waves of oceans and imagination behind it, shells
like the ear of the sweet girl I’ll be
whispering words of love into tonight, you
gathered them yourself on the straight
sword-like beaches of Chile, the
Chile that’s like a straight sword of geography and humanity, books,
a few of them mine, they made spill off your
bookshelves like blood out of veins a couple of
weeks ago, you deeded them to the new poets of
America in your General Song, as you did your
house to the syndicates of copper and coal and
saltpeter in the previous poem, who
knows if the house still stands there, I read about
it on First Beach in Santander and told people in
New York a few years later about it, a few
years ago I saw and heard you in New
York, with two friends and someone whose
name I don’t want to
remember, you panted from your poetry like
I from my noontime speed
workouts, and probably sweated too, your
voice was hollow like the
coffin they put you into before they
put you into it, man, man, man, man, man,
do you remember Federico dressed in
peach flying over almond groves, the peach
fuzz on his cheeks rubbing against the
leaves like a spring breeze, you must have
pressed your cheek to his by now, Pablo, come
see the poet Pablo Neruda dead
in Chile, come see the poet Pablo Neruda
dead in Chile, come see the poet Pablo
Neruda dead in Chile!

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