after
Pablo Neruda
Furies
and Sufferings
(Las furias y las penas, 1934)
We
are made bone together, in comb
of
ribs, in blood pooling, a country
to
walk in, a tiger weather.
We
skin the minutes, wrap ourselves
in
stalking hide, this salt
ours,
tasted, running with the vein’s jade
and
the kisses melting and running.
You,
this bully stance against me,
this
insomnia, smoky tendril glass
breaking
against sleep, rung, the bell’s note
wrapped
sugared and such fragrance,
your
swung hips, this pout of expectancy
liquid
downy and met and met—
everything
else, bone, its incisor edge,
floating
jelly lenses
stare
into our animal extinction, here,
the
tongue’s requirements, its flame-jet thirst.
Make
me anyone, make me burning
in
this core, circlings of heat white sticky
bursting
as a tropic, a voice,
the
leaf’s mouth and your eyes’ swarming
insect
light, make me anyone with you,
the
skewered voice
and
bondage silk, its water smoothness.
A
painted scene, the smalltalk
boozy
air hanging on your words,
quivers
and
your eyes sought, seeking—
the
light suspended, the polished grit of sun
and
your teeth marks in blood,
your
legs bruised with solar systems
and
the petal footsteps opening
to
the journey,
and
yet, more, yet in you
the
drunken streets, destinations
and
shifts of calico adorning
cathedral
ruins, huts at tide mark
and
you waiting still
in
driftwood and the mined vein,
the
swollen cell, the sloughed life,
its
skin of distance and the going you touch
and
the timber’s grain and the iron touch
electrifies,
rockets through this black.
…
Observe
the moon, rusting in the dark,
the
mist of jasmine, the silt of vanished seas,
the
ivory yellowed and the image trailing breathless
in
that knife-edge air, your sapphire navel
licked
and the weight of roses,
and
your breasts a roundness
and
the moon a roundness that pulls the tongue.
Answer
in the bareness of days, in blood
leeching
from the sand, in red remembrance,
the
dawn primed with corpses
and
the slow rot of light begun here,
this
month, its tortoise pace
and
the ox-hide hour whipped on, death’s procession
and
the woman called after flowers,
its
bloom and the stem’s spur.
We
have eaten our mouths, stuffed with hair
and
the tongue’s gold, a pounding
of
meal, a bread swallowed root and light.
…
A
day remembered, it was forever
and
nothing, a day predicted and still
the
long knowing of it was enough,
a
Thursday, I shall call it Thursday
the
way all days would be so-called
from
that day, meeting you there
naked
in the dance,
or
moving through deep water
or
laid out in our deaths, entering you
and
you above me and around me
and
the sounding bell of your presence
the
air swallows gulping
and
the shell and the sound breaking.
…
I
keep this harvest and the storm
over
it, and the burst season
of
cherry and the tasted
portions
of your skin.
Tell
me what month, what skin
shall
we dress in, the burning soil
below
the window, the waves.
Our
lives turn through leaves.
The
season’s grime
falls
around you, clothes you
in
the yellow shout of leaves
and
autumn’s corrosion.
Your
stocking foot blurs
and
this motion is what we were,
fingers
tobacco stained, shades
drawn
blind, doors
bolted
against leaving, this rubble
drawn
tight into the planet
stabbing
and thrown against
the
mountain’s high snows,
dove
senses, flying
one
hour more, the blood turning
on
it, this boil of collapsed
time
we made in our mouths,
everything
born in fear, waiting,
in
our mouths the asking.
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