196 PA RT T W O
“The color of poppies sits on your brow,” “sweet toads rush trembling from
your footsteps,” says Neruda, gazing at “your eyes’ full lids / gold as oxen, while
plump doves / build their white nests in you.” Potent praise, but with poppies
on her brow, toads underfoot, oxen in her eyes, doves’ nests somewhere else,
she ’s not likely to do much or get anywhere at all. Kenneth Rexroth renders
Neruda’s “Serenata”:
So, nameless, vague as life, turbid
As the burgeoning mud and vegetation,
You awake in my breast whenever I shut my eyes.
When I lie on the earth you come into being
Like the flowing dust, the river deepening its bed.Since Eden revives here, or some Amerindian Creation story, maybe censure
by hindsight has its limits? Besides, such earth-bent energy drives Neruda’s
benchmark poems of the 1920s and 1930s, and his epic Alturas de Macchu Picchu
(Heights of Macchu Picchu).
The poet ’s long path to this ruinous forgotten city in the Peruvian Andes
leads through nature as well as history. An early poem sees “plums rolling to
earth / that rot in time, endlessly green.” That wasting and sustaining could fit
a city reclaimed from oblivion after four centuries. Later in Madrid during the
Spanish Republic, Federico García Lorca and others published Neruda’s “En-
trada a la madera” (Entrance into Wood), from his book Residence on Earth:
clasp me to your life, to your death,
to your beaten matter,he pleads to the wood, as if it held his mother lost in infancy (maderais cog-
nate with madre) and eventually those beaten-down native workers who built
Machu Picchu.
Back home in Chile he wrote “Inundaciones.” Here is no metaphor, floods
subject humankind to nature.
The poor live on low ground waiting for the river
to rise one night and sweep them out to sea.
I’ve seen small cradles floating by, the wrecks
of houses, chairs, and a great rage of ash-
pale water draining terror from the sky:
this is all yours, poor man, for your wife and crop,
your dog and tools, so you can learn to beg.
No water climbs to the homes of gentlemen
whose snowy collars flutter on the line.
It feeds on this rolling mire, these ruins winding
their idle course to the sea with your dead,