PABLO NERUDA

"Melancholy Inside Families"

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I keep a blue bottle.

Inside it an ear and a portrait.

When the night dominates

the feathers of the owl,

when the hoarse cherry tree

rips out its lips and makes menacing gestures

with rinds which the ocean wind often perforates—

then I know that there are immense expanses hidden from us,

quartz in slugs,

ooze,

blue waters for a battle,

much silence, many ore-veins

of withdrawals and camphor,

fallen things, medallions, kindnesses,

parachutes, kisses.

It is only the passage from one day to another,

a single bottle moving over the seas,

and a dining room where roses arrive,

a dining room deserted

as a fish-bone: I am speaking of

a smashed cup, a curtain, at the end

of a deserted room through which a river passes

dragging along the stones. It is a house

set on the foundations of the rain,

a house of two floors with the required number of windows,

and climbing vines faithful in every particular.

I walk through afternoons, I arrive

full of mud and death,

dragging along the earth and its roots,

and its indistinct stomach in which corpses

are sleeping with wheat,

metals, and pushed-over elephants.

But above all there is a terrifying,

a terrifying deserted dining room,

with its broken olive oil cruets,

and vinegar running under its chairs,

one ray of moonlight tied down,

something dark, and I look

for a comparison inside myself:

perhaps it is a grocery store surrounded by the sea

and torn clothing from which sea water is dripping.

It is only a deserted dining room,

and around it there are expanses,

sunken factories, pieces of timber

which I alone know

because I am sad, and because I travel,

and I know the earth, and I am sad.

 

Translated by James Wright and Robert Bly