Plenary Powers

Pablo Neruda
(from: ‘Plenos Poderes’)


For the sun’s pure power, I write, for the full sea,
for the full and open road, wherever I can I sing,
only the vagrant night detains me
but I gain space in that interruption,
I gain shadow for lengths of time.

Night’s black wheat grows
while my eyes measure the field.
I forge keys from dawn to dusk:
I search for locks in the darkness
and I go throwing open ruined gates to the sea
until the wardrobes are full of foam.

I never tire of going and returning,
death does not stop me with its stone,
I never tire of presence and absence.

Sometimes I ask myself if it was from
my father or my mother or the mountains
I inherited these mineral tasks,

veins of a burning ocean,
and I know I go on, and go on to go on,
and I sing to sing on, and to sing.

Nothing explains what happens
when I close my eyes and circle
as if between two undersea channels,
one lifts me up to die in its branches
and the other sings so I might sing.

So then, I am composed of absence
and akin to the sea that assaults the reef
with its briny globules of whiteness

and takes back the stone into the wave.
So that whatever of death surrounds me
opens in me the window on life
and in the full paroxysm I am sleeping.
To the full light I go on through the shadow.