with my singular heart and my mournful conceits
for my portion, my forehead despoiled, overtaken by pallors,
a grief-maddened widower bereft of a lifetime;
for every invisible drop that I taste in a stupor, alas,
for each intonation I concentrate, shuddering,
I keep the identical thirst of an absence, the identical chill
of a fever; sounds, coming to be; a devious anguish
as of thieves and chimeras approaching;
so, in the shell of extension, profound and unaltering,
demeaned as a kitchen-drudge, like a bell sounding
hoarsely,
like a tarnishing mirror, or the smell of a house's abandon-
ment
where the guests stagger homeward, blind drunk, in the
night,
and the reek of their clothes rises out of the floor, an absence
of flowers-
could it be differently put, a little less ruefully, possibly?-
All the truth blurted out: wind strikes at my breast like a
blow,
the ineffable body of night, fallen into my bedroom,
the roar of a morning ablaze with some sacrifice,
that begs my prophetical utterance, mournfully;
an impact of objects that call and encounter no answer,
unrest without respite, an anomalous name.
Pablo Neruda translated by Ben Belitt
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