Bestiary by Pablo Neruda

If I could speak with birds, with oysters and with little lizards, with the foxes of the Dark Forest, with the exemplary penguins; if the sheep, the languid woolly lapdogs, the cart horses would understand me; if I could discuss things with cats, if hens would listen to me!

It has never occurred to me to speak with elegant animals:

I am not curious about the opinion of wasps or of racing mares.

Let them settle matters while flying, let them win decorations by running!

I want to speak with flies, with the bitch that has recently littered, and to converse with snakes.

When I had feet for walking in triple nights now past,

I followed the nocturnal dogs, those squalid travelers that trot in silence with great haste traveling nowhere, and I followed them for many hours.

They mistrusted me, ah, poor stupid dogs, they lost their opportunity to pour out their sorrows, to run through streets of ghosts with grief and tail.

I have always been curious about the erotic rabbit.

Who excites them and whispers in their genital ears?

They procreate endlessly and pay no attention to Saint Francis, they hear no nonsense: the rabbit mounts and remounts with an inexhaustible organism.

I wish to speak with the rabbit,

I like his flighty habits.

Spiders are wasted on exasperating naturalists who in their foolish pages see them with a fly's eyes, describe them as devouring, carnal, unfaithful, sexual, lascivious.

For me this reputation provides a portrait of those who impute it to them: the spider is an engineer, a divine watchmaker, that the idiots detest for a fly more or less.

I want to converse with a spider:

I want her to weave me a star.

Fleas interest me so much that I let them bite me for hours.

They are perfect, ancient, Sanskrit, machines that admit of no appeal.

They do not bite to eat, they bite only to jump; they are the dancers of the celestial sphere, delicate acrobats in the softest and most profound circus; let them gallop on my skin, divulge their emotions, amuse themselves with my blood, but someone should introduce them to me.