Nuptial Substance by Pablo Neruda — Read

Standing like a cherry tree without bark or flowers, special, burning, with veins and saliva, and fingers and testicles,

I look at a girl of paper and moon, horizontal, trembling and breathing and white and her nipples like two separated ciphers, and the rosy meeting of her legs where her mound flutters with nocturnal eyelashes.

Pale, overflowing,

I feel words sink into my mouth, words like drowned children, and on we go and ships grow teeth, and waters and breadth as if on fire.

I shall place her like a sword or a mirror, and I shall open until death her fearful legs, and I shall bite her ears and her veins, and I shall make her retreat, her eyes closed in a thick river of green semen.

I shall flood her with poppies and lightningbolts,

I shall wrap her in knees, in lips, in needles,

I shall enter her with inches of weeping epidermis and pressures of crime and soaked hair.

I shall make her flee escaping through fingernails and sighs toward never, toward nothing, climbing up the slow marrow and the oxygen, clutching memories and reasons like a single hand, like a cleft finger waving a fingernail of forsaken salt.

She must run sleeping along roads of skin in a country of ashen gum and ashes, struggling with knives, and sheets, and ants, and with eyes that fall on her like dead men, and with drops of black substance slipping like blind fish or bullets of thick water.