The Moon in the Labyrinth by Pablo Neruda

Loves: Terusa (I)

And what has become of it, where is that onetime love?

Now it is the grave of a bird, a drop of black quartz, a chunk of wood eroded by the rain.

And that body which shone like the moon in that remote

Southern spring?

What remains of it?

These hands which held all clearness, the murmur of the gentle river, wide eyes in the wood, petrified like minerals in the night, those feet of the young girl of my dreams, feet of flowers, feet of wheat, feet of cherries, ready, quick, flying, between my timid childhood and the world?

Where is my dead love?

Love, love, where does it go to die?

To secret granaries, under rosebushes which withered beneath some seven feet of ash from those miserable houses burned out by a village fire?

Oh, love of that first dawn light, of fierce noon with its spears, love taking in the whole sky drop by drop when the great ship of night passes over the world.

Oh, that love in the loneliness of adolescence, oh, the violet overflowing with perfume and dew, fresh as stars over the face, those kisses crawling over the skin, entwining, biting, from bodies clear and open to the blue stone of the sailing night.

Terusa, with your wide eyes.

Under the moon or the winter sun, when the provinces take their share of pain, the betrayal of a vast forgetting, and you shine, Terusa, like the burnt crystal of the topaz, like the burn of the carnation, like the metal which flashes under lightning and is swallowed by the lips of night.

Terusa, all open among the poppies, black flash of original pain, star among the fish in the light of a pure genital electricity, purple bird of the first abyss, roomless, in the kingdom of the revealed heart whose honey nourished the almond trees, the fiery pollen of the wild broom, the lemon bush in its tentative greens, kingdom of the mysterious mosses.

The bells of Cautín were sounding, all the petals cried out for something, the earth was giving nothing up, the water was winking endlessly.

It wanted to open up the summer, to deal it a final wound.

The river that tumbled in fury from the Andes turned into a hard star which pierced the jungle, the riverbank, the rocks.

No one lived there- only water and earth and the mournful trains, the winter trains in their courses dissecting the lonely map.

My kingdom, kingdom of roots with the glory of mint, tresses of fern hair, a damp pubis, kingdom of my lost childhood, when I watched the earth being born and I was a part of its earthy damp wholeness.