Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

PABLO NERUDA AT MACHU PICCHU 199

On one recording, Neruda misspeaks jazmín/ jasmine as jardín, as if seeking
a garden, a lost Eden like his wooded, flowery childhood. And though gastada
primavera humana speaks of an exhausted human season, the chance pun on
“spring” in English taps a source, a fountainhead for this quest.
Machu Picchu arises integral to rock and earth, its masonry walls, towers,
lintels, stairs, water conduits, stepped plazas meld with terracing beneath, which
falls away “into blue-green abysses,” says an architectural historian, while the
“rush of the river waters rises to the ear on all sides” along with “Chinese washes
of fog and mist.” To build the great city, he notes casually, may not have cost
“more than a generation or two” of labor. “Stone upon stone, and man, where
was he?” Hambre, coral del hombre, Neruda cries, for nothing keeps hambrefrom
hombre, hunger from man, but one small vowel.

Hunger, coral of humankind,

hunger, hidden plant, woodcutter’s root,

hunger, did your reef-edge climb

to these high and ruinous towers?

Root and reef make hunger organic to this site, this “high reef of the human
dawn.”

I question you, salt of the paths,

show me the trowel. Architecture, let me

grind stone stamens with a stick,

climb every step of air up to the void,

scrape in the womb till I touch man.

Now he grasps not the city’s heights but la entraña. Saying “womb” rather than
“entrails” or “core” marks the lost son’s sexual embrace of nature—and with
good cause, since Neruda once translated “womb” in William Blake as entraña.
What ’s more, his own handwork will dig to the city’s human base.
A tension holds death and life together at Machu Picchu. In canto nine a litany
of seventy-two images, half from wild nature, names the lost site. Madrépora del
tiempo sumergido, “Coral of sunken time,” sees it gone under yet growing dura-
bly. Two other images catch the city’s energy arrested in time, like Wordsworth’s
“stationary blasts of waterfalls” and Coleridge ’s “Motionless torrents”:

Vendaval sostenido en la vertiente.

Inmóvil catarata de turquesa.

Gale sustained on a slope.

Immobile turquoise cataract.

An elemental force still not spent, a torrential energy in cut-stone beauty: three-
beat cadences holding nature and history in a single breath.
Ending his epic with a stroke of honesty seldom heard, Neruda urges the