Dear Pablo, sonnet from object-subject: draft 1

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,   

or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:   

I love you as one loves certain obscure things,   

secretly, between the shadow and the soul. 

One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII

Pablo Neruda

Translated Mark Eisner.  http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179257/

And I love him Pablo as one loves the colorless, failure and doubt;

The gaping impossibility of oceans that cleave

Abandoned motherland and American son; my love

A child's grasp and claw at an unwanted sibling's entry.

And yet I love him as a lion's roar lacerates

The sky in fleshly signals of lust and feast.

Laughing at futility, denying denials

Stealing the gift with peals of joyous hope.

Sand at low tide neither sea nor land

Just there, waiting for water's return.

I love him unheard, as an obscure thing,

Unseen between shadow and soul.

So distant my pulse drowns in passage

So distant our touch is misplaced.

Taking flight

BIRD It was passed from one bird to another, the whole gift of the day. The day went from flute to flute, went dressed in vegetation, in flights which opened a tunnel through the wind would pass to where birds were breaking open the dense blue air - and there, night came in. When I returned from so many journeys, I stayed suspended and green between sun and geography - I saw how wings worked, how perfumes are transmitted by feathery telegraph, and from above I saw the path, the springs and the roof tiles, the fishermen at their trades, the trousers of the foam; I saw it all from my green sky. I had no more alphabet than the swallows in their courses, the tiny, shining water of the small bird on fire which dances out of the pollen. Pablo Neruda