Neruda And Vallejo: Selected Poems Part 20

into the hole, watches,

and flowers adjusted to nothingness.

Where is the newly born violet? Where are

the necktie and the virginal red yarn?

A tongue of rotten dust is moving forward

over the cities

smas.h.i.+ng rings, eating away the paint,

making the black chairs howl soundlessly,

burying the cement florals, the parapets

of mangled metal,

the orchard and the wool, the fiery and blown-up photographs

injured by the rain, the thirst of the bedrooms, and the huge

movie posters in which the panther

is wrestling with thunder,

the geranium-spears, granaries full of lost honey,

the cough, the suits with their metallic threads,

everything gets covered with a deathly flavor

of regression and dampness and damage.

It's possible that the conversations now underway, the bodies brus.h.i.+ng,

the chast.i.ty of the tired ladies who make their nest in the smoke,

the tomatoes murdered without mercy,

the horses of a depressed regiment going by,

the light, the pressure of nameless fingertips

are wearing out the flat fiber of the lime,

surrounding the building fronts with neuter air

like knives: while

the dangerous air goes chewing up the way we stay alive,

the bricks, the salt runs over like waters,

and the carts with fat axles go b.u.mping by.

Surf of broken roses and tiny holes! Future

of the perfumed vein! Merciless objects!

Do not move, anyone! Do not open your arms

while in the blind water!