Poet Of The Week: Pablo Neruda
It’s been a while since I’ve done a Poet of the Week post. In fact, it’s been a while since I’ve written anything worthwhile on this blog. I feel ashamed about it. I feel like I’ve forgotten about humility.
It’s been a long few weeks, with lots of work. Yesterday, I finished the first wave of it. Today, there’s a lull, and I’m having a hard time dealing with it. The air is getting cooler, and the clouds, as I was driving over the Manhattan bridge this morning, descended gray, not stormy. Soon, I’ll feel better being indoors most of the time, because it will be cold, and sweetly lonely.
This weather reminds me of the fall I spent in Buenos Aires, which I’ve referenced over the years, frequently. I never thought that I’d be truly happy back in those days—every thing I did was an effort to stave off an ever encroaching misery. I was restless. I didn’t know anybody. In the afternoons, after writing a bit in the mornings, and then taking my Spanish lessons, I’d walk for miles. Sometimes 5 or 6 miles. One day, 20.
Time moves very slowly when you’re very depressed, if at all. I’d sit down in cafes, to eat lunch. That would take fifteen minutes. I’d go into a museum. Thirty. I’d walk through a cemetery. Twenty minutes. An hour spent distracting myself, and I’d run out of ideas.
I started watching the World Cup excessively, in cafes all over the city. I went to dusty bookstores. I’d pick up books I had never read, written by Latin American authors, and try to read them.
The easiest were the poetry books, especially those by Pablo Neruda. He uses simple language. Hair. Love. The smell of oranges. Dark night. Full Moon. Woman. Kisses.
So today, in honor of those times, I choose Pablo Neruda as my poet of the week, and this poem, because I think often of the rhythms of love. You fall in love with someone, and after a time, things become less easy. Sometimes, you have periods of fighting. Sometimes, you are peaceful. Sometimes, you love the person more than they love you. Every day, you grow closer together. If you don’t, if your relationship ends, even if you’re still in love, then you never stop missing them.
Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines)
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example, ‘The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.’
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another’s. She will be another’s. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.
