Pablo Neruda

Ode to My Socks

Maru Mori brought me a pair of socks which she knitted herself with her sheepherder's hands, two socks as soft as rabbits. I slipped my feet into them as though into two cases knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin. Violent socks, my feet were two fish made of wool, two long sharks sea-blue, shot through by one golden thread, two immense blackbirds, two cannons: my feet were honored in this way by these heavenly socks. They were so handsome for the first time my feet seemed to me unacceptable like two decrepit firemen, firemen unworthy of that woven fire, of those glowing socks. Nevertheless I resisted the sharp temptation to save them somewhere as schoolboys keep fireflies, as learned men collect sacred texts, I resisted the mad impulse to put them into a golden cage and each day give them birdseed and pieces of pink melon. Like exploreres in the jungle who hand over the very rare green deer to the spit and eat it with remorse, I stretched out my feet and pulled on the magnificent socks and then my shoes. The moral of my ode is this: beauty is twice beauty and what is good is doubly good when it is a matter of two socks made of wool in winter. trans. Robert Bly

2 Ode to Salt This salt in the saltcellar I once saw in the salt mines. I know you won't believe me, but it sings, salt sings, the skin of the salt mines, sings with a mouth smothered by the earth. I shivered in those solitudes when I heard the voice of the salt in the desert. Near Antofagasta the nitrous pampa resounds: a broken voice, a mournful song. In its caves the salt moans, mountain of buried light, translucent cathedral, crystal of the sea, oblivion of the waves. And then on every table in the world, salt, we see your piquant powder sprinkling vital light upon our food.

3 Preserver of the ancient holds of ships, discoverer on the high seas, earliest sailor of the unknown, shifting byways of the foam. Dust of the sea, in you the tongue receives a kiss from ocean night: taste imparts to every seasoned dish your ocean essence; the smallest miniature wave from the saltcellar reveals to us more than domestic whitenesss; in it, we taste infinitude. --trans. Margaret Sayers Peden

Ode to the Watermelon The tree of intense summer, hard, is all blue sky, yellow sun, fatigue in drops, a sword above the highways, a scorched shoe in the cities: the brightness and the world weigh us down, hit us in the eyes with clouds of dust, with sudden golden blows, they torture our feet with tiny thorns, with hot stones, and the mouth suffers

4 more than all the toes: the throat becomes thirsty, the teeth, the lips, the tongue: we want to drink waterfalls, the dark blue night, the South Pole, and then the coolest of all the planets crosses the sky, the round, magnificent, star-filled watermelon. It's a fruit from the thirst-tree. It's the green whale of the summer. The dry universe all at once given dark stars by this firmament of coolness lets the swelling fruit come down: its hemispheres open showing a flag green, white, red, that dissolves into wild rivers, sugar, delight! Jewel box of water, phlegmatic queen of the fruitshops, warehouse of profundity, moon on earth! You are pure, rubies fall apart in your abundance, and we want to bite into you, to bury our face in you, and

5 our hair, and the soul! When we're thirsty we glimpse you like a mine or a mountain of fantastic food, but among our longings and our teeth you change simply into cool light that slips in turn into spring water that touched us once singing. And that is why you don't weigh us down in the siesta hour that's like an oven, you don't weigh us down, you just go by and your heart, some cold ember, turned itself into a single drop of water. --trans. Robert Bly back to 323 Homepage

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