Neruda And Vallejo: Selected Poems Part 15

and now he escorts her to the miserable movies,

where the heroes are either colts or pa.s.sionate princes,

and he strokes her legs sheathed in their sweet down

with his warm and damp hands that smell of cigarettes.

The evenings of the woman-chaser and the nights of the husbands

come together like two bed-sheets and bury me,

and the hours after lunch, when the young male students

and the young women students, and the priests are masturbating,

and the animals are riding each other frankly,

and the bees have an odor of blood, and the flies buzz in anger,

and cousins play strange games with their girl-cousins,

and doctors look with rage at the husband of the young patient,

and the morning hours, when the professor, as if absentminded,

performs his marital duty, and has breakfast,

and still more, the adulterers, who love each other with a real love

on beds high and huge as ocean liners,

this immense forest, entangled and breathing,

hedges me around firmly on all sides forever

with huge flowers like mouths and rows of teeth

and black roots that look like fingernails and shoes.

Translated by Robert Bly

SONATA Y DESTRUCCIONES.

Despues de mucho, despues de vagas leguas,

confuso de dominios, incierto de territorios,

acompanado de pobres esperanzas

y companas infieles y desconfiados suenos,

amo lo tenaz que an sobrevive en mis ojos,

oigo en mi corazn mis pasos de jinete,

muerdo el fuego dormido y la sal arruinada,

y de noche, de atmsfera oscura y luto prfugo,

aquel que vela a la orilla de los campamentos,

el viajero armado de esteriles resistencias,

detenido entre sombras que crecen y alas que tiemblan,

me siento ser, y mi brazo de piedra me defiende.