les petits trucs

i have been reading the works of pablo neruda lately and today i stumbled a poem i liked a lot when i was in high school.  reading translations of poetry written in a language you don’t understand is kind of weird, but neruda translates well. 

Naked

Naked, you are simple as a hand,
smooth, earthy, small. . . transparent, round.
You have moon lines and apple paths;
Naked, you are slender as the wheat.

Naked, Cuban blue midnight is your color,
Naked, I trace the stars and vines in your hair;
Naked, you are spacious and yellow
As a summer’s wholeness in a golden church.

Naked, you are tiny as your fingernail;
Subtle and curved in the rose-colored dawn
And you withdraw to the underground world

As if down a long tunnel of clothing and of chores:
your clear light dims, gets dressed, drops its leaves,
And becomes a naked hand again.

***

later, when i was in college, jonathan told me he aspired to be a japanese poet… or something like that.  he read a lot of translated japanese poetry and i made fun of him.  next week i will be in new york and i am looking forward to doing that thing we do whenever i come to visit.  wandering around lower manhattan, in some kind of parallel universe.