Ode to Time by Pablo Neruda — Read

Inside your body, your age is growing, inside my body, my age places foot after wandering foot.

Time is unwavering, it never rings its bell for time out, it increases, it journeys, it shows up within us like water that deepens within our own watching, until next to the chestnut burning that is your eyes a slender grass blade arrives, and the trace of a tiny river, and a small dry star ascends to your lips.

Then time raises its threads in your hair, and still in my heart your fragrance of honeysuckle lives like a fire.

It is beautiful, how, as we live, we grow old in the living.

Each day was a transparent stone, each night for us was a rose of blackness, and this crease that has come to your face, to mine, is its stone or its flower, the souvenir and memory of a bolt of lightning.

My eyes were consumed by your loveliness, but you have become my eyes.

I exhausted your twin breasts under my kisses it seems, but all have viewed in my joy their secret splendor.

Love, it doesn't matter if time

(that same time that lifted my body and your softness as if they were two rising flames or two stalks of wheat growing side by side) tomorrow keeps them aloft and living or mills them away- the same invisible fingers erasing the very existence that kept us apart will give us our victory, of being a single being under the earth.