Valentine's Day: A Translation of Pablo Neruda's Long Poem, "Valentine's Day"

1.  Wine Before Leaving

The morning is an apple full of tempests,

Red as the chorus on the truth of wine.

Like white small breads the ocean’s waves fare young hands

Well to the wind; its handkerchiefs like graying birds.

Numberless chorus of latitude,

Soberly ours and enamored of silence,

Zumba between the sounding trees

Resonant as a tongue fooled of war and songs.

Bear off the arrows of quick milk

And the dead pulsing latent birds.

Wind topples the derided spume of sin

And sustains the volume of kisses.

You combat the door with leaving,

Like an orchestral tree, latent with birds.

Don’t go, now the grapes

See leggings fit to my words

More than I can costume,

Guilty of gavels, noise, and misery on beaches.

2.  To Govern the Sea

Leaning tardy into the tear of my sad readies,

I cast red reeds.

There in the high ardency

Your arms turn bronzed

Distant as a coast

Of spines, tasseling the blue land.

I send out senatorial eyes

The sea gallops to regard but shed.

Stories to tell you...

I who lived in a harbor, trembled

Toy ravens ripe with thirst.

Like a spider able to celebrate

You with a timid deliriousness netted between teeth,

Something sings penned between sadness algebraic and undead words.

Like kisses tremendous with roseate cement,

I steer the fast seal drawn toward death.

Torqued, pale, lashed to agricultural water,

An abandoned chimera mounts my only way.

Becalmed in the throat of your cool hips,

Practice roses on me; parallel the other fish.

3.  Neck of Despair

Anguish twenty in its pain arrests me.

We tumble like hurricanes dreaming of each thumb

We hear supplicate for old blood.

Love me, abandon me.  On this "hello" stained

With your love, pass and occupy everything.

I am making an infinite neck

To stretch like calm water and canvas

Above the blank laced grapes collaring your face.

4.  Hatching

Hatching birds into the laps of broken faces,

You burn like a belfry at the hands of tenderness.

Marking, I have gone across

With trembling cats retaining water

The fugitive map of your body.

My mouth went across: a net of fire, trying to catch

         something or catch on.

5.  Thirst

From the night great roots

Fall like a dark sweatervest.

A butterfly silent as a lap of frightened rose

Has come to hear, pressing, the flutter.

Statuesque and naked as a nose

Your eyes fasten, in search of hastened hope.

But the vast digit of pines, rumors the breaking murmurs,

And the slow juice of light camps solitary

In the closing-coyote of your toy-dolls.

In you the canteen sings like a river;

As you desire, send me out

So I may return a bandage of arrows

Fetching back my aim to your waist of fogged nests.

I caucus with said-thirst in the dark river-beds

Until you look like a world, a white hill of colons.

You have deep hours in which the rose flails.

Cool arms of dark fright and a lap of glued shells.

6.  Here I Love You

At nine, the snow like a cinema makes new figures.

A plated gavel slips the cargo out of the occasion.

Here I love you.

In the pines disrobing the dark of the winds,

The moon soberly errant as phosphorescent waters,

Days, the same iguanas, go chasing their tails

And each others.

Alone, 
Sometimes I get up early.

Where I must put a humidifier to wet my woul

It is black as bark.

Between two motionless gondoliers,

Take yourself between the lips and the voice

As the starting point.

Here I love you--

Clenched in a cape of hurt dog

To learn the sources of sorrow

And roll towards the feet of evening

Erasing statues and coins and mountaintops.