Widower's Tango

Oh Maligna, by this time you must have found the letter, wept

with rage,

and insulted the memory of my mother,

calling her rotten bitch and mother of curs,

and you must have drunk your afternoon tea, all by yourself, alone,

gazing at my old shoes, empty now for ever,

and you can't remember my sicknesses, my nightly dreams, my

meals,

without cursing me aloud as though I were still there

fussing about the tropics, the Coringhi coolies,

the poisonous fevers that did me so much harm,

and the frightful English, whom I detest still.

Maligna, here's the truth: what a huge night! what a solitary

earth!

Tve gone back again to the lonely bedrooms,

I can throw my trousers and shirts upon the floor;

there are no clothes-hangers in my room, no pictures of anybody

on the walls.

How much of the darkness in my soul would I give to regain you,

and how threatening seem to me now the names of the months,

to eating cold meals in cafés, and once more,

and how lugubrious a drum-sound the name of winter has!

Later you will find buried near the coconut tree

the knife that I hid for fear that you'd kill me,

and now, suddenly, I should like to smell its kitchen steel

used to the weight of your hand and the lustre of your foot:

beneath the earth's damp, among the deaf roots,

the poor thing would know, of all human languages, only your

name,

and the thick earth does not comprehend your name

composed of impenetrable heavenly substances.

Just as it troubles me to think of the clear day of your legs

stretched out like arrested and hard solar waters,

and the swallow that sleeping and flying lives in your eyes,

and the dog of madness that you house in your heart,

so also I perceive the deaths existing between us from now on,

and the air I breathe bears ashes and destruction,

the long, lonely space that encircles me for ever.

I would give this wind from the giant sea for your hoarse

breathing ~

heard in the long nights without admixture of oblivion,

combining with the atmosphere like a whip with the hide of

a horse.

And to hear the sound of you, in darkness, at the back of the

house,

like one decanting a delicate, tremulous, silvery, reluctant honey,

how many times over would I give this chorus of shadow that

is mine,

and the noise of useless swords that clash in my heart,

and the dove of blood perching solitary upon my forehead

invoking things gone, beings gone,

substances strangely inseparable and lost.

Pablo Neruda

Translated by Dudley Fitts