Poetry Thursday: Chilean Poet-Style

Ask me where I have been
and I'll tell you: "Things keep
on happening."
I must talk of the rubble that
darkens the stones;
of the river's duration,
destroying itself;
I only know the things that the
birds have abandoned,
or the ocean behind me, or my
sorrowing sister.
Why the distinctions of place?
Why should day
follow day? Why must the
blackness
of nighttime collect in our
mouths? Why the dead?

If you question me: where have
you come from, I must talk
with things falling away,
artifacts tart to the taste,
great, cankering beasts, as often
as not,
and my own inconsolable
heart.

Those who cross over with us
are no keepsakes,
nor the yellowing pigeon who
sleeps in forgetfulness:
only the face with its tears,
the hands at our throats,
whatever the leafage dissevers:
the dark of an obsolete day,
a day that has tasted the grief
in our blood.

Here are violets, swallows--
all things that delight us, the
delicate tallies
that show in the lengthening
train
through which pleasure and
transciency pass.

Here let us halt, in the teeth of
a barrier:
useless to gnaw on the husks
that the silence assembles.
For I come without answers:
see: the dying are legion,
legion, the breakwaters
breached by the red of the sun,
the headpieces knocking the
ship's side,
the hands closing over their
kisses,
and legion the things I would
give to oblivion.

"There's No Forgetting (Sonata)," Pablo Neruda
translated by Ben Belitt