Neruda And Vallejo: Selected Poems Part 17

and s.h.i.+vering wings, and my arm made of stone protects me.

There's a confused altar among the sciences of tears,

and in my twilight meditations with no perfume,

and in my deserted sleeping rooms where the moon lives,

and the spiders that belong to me, and the destructions I am fond of,

I love my own lost self, my faulty stuff,

my silver wound, and my eternal loss.

The damp grapes burned, and their funereal water

is still flickering, is still with us,

and the sterile inheritance, and the treacherous home.

Who performed a ceremony of ashes?

Who loved the lost thing, who sheltered the last thing of all?

The father's bone, the dead s.h.i.+p's timber,

and his own end, his flight,

his melancholy power, his G.o.d that had bad luck?

I lie in wait, then, for what is not alive and what is suffering,

and the extraordinary testimony I bring forward,

with brutal efficiency and written down in the ashes,

is the form of oblivion that I prefer,

the name I give to the earth, the value of my dreams,

the endless abundance which I distribute

with my wintry eyes, every day this world goes on.

Translated by Robert Bly

LA CALLE DESTRUDA.

Por el hierro injuriado, por los ojos del yeso

pasa una lengua de anos diferentes

del tiempo. Es una cola

de speras crines, unas manos de piedra llenas de ira,

y el color de las casas enmudece, y estallan

las decisiones de la arquitectura,

un pie terrible ensucia los balcones:

con lent.i.tud, con sombra ac.u.mulada,

con mscaras mordidas de invierno y lent.i.tud,