A Friday Homage: Pablo Neruda

Today, I am thinking of  Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. The man all of them call Neruda.
I mean Pablo the African who was born in Parral/Chile and took up a Czech pen-name that stuck.

But I shall lack voice and verbal skill. The words of Pablo must not be approached lightly.
Or carelessly.
They must not be play-hoisted on whimsical rant-spots without consultations with the multiple radiances of the multiple celestial forces whom he opened up to.
The gods of songs that filled and flowed through him with all that painful/joyful eloquence.

Maybe I should let the man do his own talking, while we sit back and watch/read:

How many of us, petty mortals, have not lived our lives in perpetual quests for that time/age of which it was said:

...Poetry arrived

in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where

it came from, from winter or a river.

I don't know how or when,

no, they were not voices, they were not

words, nor silence,

but from a street I was summoned,

from the branches of night,

abruptly from the others,

among violent fires

or returning alone,

there I was without a face

and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth

had no way

with names

my eyes were blind,

and something started in my soul,

fever or forgotten wings,

and I made my own way,

deciphering

that fire

and I wrote the first faint line,

faint, without substance, pure

nonsense,

pure wisdom

of someone who knows nothing,

and suddenly I saw

the heavens

unfastened

and open,

planets,

palpitating plantations,

shadows perforated,

riddled

with arrows, fire and flowers,

the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,

drunk with the great starry

void,

likeness, image of

mystery,

I felt myself a pure part

of the abyss,

I wheeled with the stars,

my heart broke free on the open sky.

Those are his words. But they are believable in the same way as a prophet drunk on his god's power can be believable. Must be believable.  
Here was a man drunk with the great starry void who became the very image of the mystery.
Touched by the pure fire of the divine muses, he could also become a pure part of the abyss. 
He was so free he could wheel with the stars. Wheel with the stars, just like that...

And that freedom-seed, having found a home in his bosom, would turn him into a chanticleer for redemption songs every where the shadows of fetters dared to show up.

In Spain of the fascist storm-tides, against the norm of hypocritical yea-saying, he would set up his untameable/barbaric yawp against what many of us pretend not to see today on the streets of Tripoli/Damascus/Tikrit/Baghdad/Kabul/Istanbul/Mexico City/Medellin/Bogota/La Paz/Mogadishu...He would shake his rattle of uncomfortable words-as-weapons against the hypocritical lie that sought/seeks to veil:


Come and see the blood in the streets. 
Come and see
                      the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!


But Neruda could hate so much because he could also love so well. Love so well and paint love so well. In his hands, all the rough diamonds came out sparkling and all the abandoned bundles let out their treasures:  


I have named you queen.
There are taller ones than you, taller.
There are purer ones than you, purer.
There are lovelier ones than you, lovelier.


But you are the queen....


And when you appear
all the rivers sound in my body, bells 
shake the sky,
and a hymn fills the world.


Only you and I,
only you and I, my love,
listen to it. 


He could be desperate too; sending pleading moans into the vertiginous doubtfields...carefully sculpted gems akin to those we maimed on the cusp of our first orgasmic spurts when we neither knew the old/real names for the experience, nor dared to speak too loud lest we make the magic glow go:


Take bread away from me, if you wish,
take air away, but
do not take from me your laughter.


Do not take away the rose,
the lanceflower that you pluck,
the water that suddenly
bursts forth in your joy,
the sudden wave of silver born in you...


And he could be the freaky romantic we dare not speak for at day and yet wet-dream of at night: The wild untamed beast-as-it-should-be-in-love, free from all the fetid/fickle/feckless/foolish moralities that drive us into stale prison-cells of the conventional missionary position and other such boring-dos. The ultimate poet-laureate of Naked-Town and Succulent Breasts and Erect Nipples and Wet Armpits and Heaving Arses and Shining Foreheads and Glistening Teeth and Seductive Eyes. Of the bloody/fiery mutual fuck; the taboo that we must all endure/enjoy at least once...and then again and again and again: 


I am the tiger.
I lie in wait for you among leaves
broad as ingots of wet mineral.


The white river grows 
beneath the fog. You come.


Naked you submerge.
I wait.


Then in a leap
of fire, blood, teeth, 
with a claw slash I tear away
your bosom, your hips.


I drink your blood, I break 
your limbs one by one...




Talk again of the untranslatable barbaric yawp. The ultimate prophet of the cannibalistic orgy who compels our admiration.  But also a supremely secure man at the height of his powers who knows just how on top of things one could be if one touches the right sacred spots and tickles the right nerves:


Facing you
I am not jealous.



Come with a man
at your back,
come with a hundred men in your hair,
come with a thousand men between your bosom and  your feet
come like a river
filled with drowned men 
that meets the furious sea,
the eternal foam, the weather.



Bring them all
where I wait for you:
we shall always be alone,
we shall always be, you and I,
alone upon the earth
to begin life




Alone. Alone with the Stars. Alone with the Celestial Fires that forced their blazes through his pores and made him the timeless/restless chanteur of joys/hopes/fears/desires we still have with us aplenty. 


And as he loved so much, let his beloved Matilde Urrutia have the final say on the final journey he made in order to join the stars/oceans/constellations/divinities he sang so well: 


As we pass the streets, people pour out from them and join the procession. Military vehicles appear carrying soldiers who have their machine guns pointed at us. But they hold back; they only want to scare us. It doesn't work. At every turn, more and more people join the procession and they raise their voice together, shouting:


"Pablo Neruda! Present! Now and Forever!"

Pablo, our own Don Pablo, always present, with us, now, and forever!!!