Pablo Neruda

'I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.

I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.

In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.'



I still haven't finished setting questions on this guy's poetry. Every time I try I just get overwhelmed. How can he have pinned an emotion like that? Does everyone feel that? Are these emotions recognisable simply for their fundamental role in life or is there something more specific to that ring of truth? How dare he take something so pure and pore emotions into it? Or, take the fire of emotions and structure it like that? There are a thousand questions I could think of, but the problem is I have to also know the answer.

It's incredible how anchored to the land he is. He writes about her body, and she is the earth. He writes about her waist: it is fog. Their love: the sighing of pines, the wind, the universe. How does this not become ridiculous?

'So that you will hear me
my words
sometimes grow thin
as the tracks of the gulls on the beaches.'

I can no longer sleep. I'm writing this instead of annoying myself by trying. It was this or go smell the night-blooming flowers and I knew I had to look up some of the poems I was missing out of my collection of Neruda. And then I read them and my being alone is compounded by his physicality. It keeps just bouncing away from being hilarious. Arms of flowers and laps of roses indeed. Closest I've got to porn in a while, except when I walked in on the same guy who put this chain on my poor rusted wrist.

'Hardened by passions, I go mounted on my one wave,
lunar, solar, burning and cold, all at once,
becalmed in the throat of fortunate isles
that are white and sweet as cool hips.

In the moist night my garment of kisses trembles
charged to insanity with electric currents,
heroically dividing into dreams
and intoxicating roses practicing on me.

Upstream, in the midst of the outer waves,
your parallel body yields to my arms
like a fish infinitely fastened to my soul,
quick and slow, in the energy under the sky.'

My goodness. Hardened by passions, eh? And that's only the 9th! There's eleven more to go! And then he'll reference his cape or something. As if that's important to him when some woman's eyes are light houses. Or whatever.

It'd be so easy to take all of his similes and write a series of ironic poems. Someone probably already has. But I couldn't, because right after he's waxed lyrical on the subject of how much he's getting, he'll say something like:

'Turning, wandering night, the digger of eyes.
Let's see how many stars are smashed in the pool.'

Can't you see the cosmic wanderer, destructive, digging, smashing, all within her eyes? If I don't stop quoting him now I'll just have to bung the whole collection in.

Individuality comes through love. Can that be right?

The problem with airports is their blandness. They should be rich, a meeting point of cultures and times and joys. Instead I ended up staring longingly at a pack of Camels and chewing tough grey noodles (which seemed determined to flick goop everywhere whilst I struggled with chopsticks) in a grey soup with grey seaweed and grey Japanese flavourings, whilst a particularly oversized couple and their son of the gargantuan mouth, resembling snails which had been slid out of their shells and sprinkled with pink sugar, managed to fit a distressing amount of startlingly colourful hamburger between their rubbery lips. They weren't even Americans. They should have been enough to awaken me from my paralysis of grey doom but it was too cold to move, so I just had to sit there and stare at them as they threw away half of their 'extra' plate (yes, they had ordered a spare meal just in case, and it was a wonder any of it escaped).

Then I realised I couldn't see the arrivals boards as my eyes had apparently decided that anything happening around such awful soup and people could not possibly be worth seeing and had packed up and left me with blurred ideas of colour. Luckily I'd thawed out by then, so I shuffled to stand staring at the arrivals door for the next hour. Maya is a glorious person.

Just realised that the nice arts poster I brought for my university bedroom wall has at least three or four naked people on it. I would say four naked guys except pretty sure the top half (or at least the face, I can't remember that well despite Maya's inspection) of one of them is definitely a woman. I think she's an actress. How did I not notice them before? I've looked at it quite a few times and they just escaped me. My bad.

I wonder at which small hour my eyes will stop functioning altogether. It feels like it might happen soon.