Explore "Material Manuela" by Pablo Neruda on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
You don't just rest here in the desolate hills.
You didn't choose the still universe of dust.
You aren't a soul's projection in the void.
Your memory is material, flesh, fire, oranges.
Your footsteps won't startle the silent hall.
At midnight, you won't return with the moon.
You won't enter, transparent, without a whisper.
Your hands won't seek out the dreaming zither.
You won't transport a green halo from tower to tower like orange blossoms, extinguished and abandoned.
Your ankles won't stir crystalline melodies at night.
Only death unchained you.
No, not a ghost, shadow, moon above the iciness, not tears, not lamentation, not a fugue of fluttering garments, but rather that body, that body wrapped in love, those eyes sundering the earth.
The legs nestling the hussar's urgent fire, that wandering road captain, the legs mounting a horse in the lush forest, descending in flight the alabaster ladder.
The embracing arms, the fingers, the cheeks, the breasts (two dark hemispheres of magnolia), the bird of her long hair (two great black wings), her round hips of equatorial bread.
So perhaps naked, you travel with the wind and it continues being your stormy lover.
And so you exist now as before: as matter and truth: you are life, never to be lost in death's translation.