After Pablo Neruda
I.
This time I will write the truest words.
For example: ‘The ocean will always be here, the dunegrass will always bend to the night.’
Simply: The ocean is everywhere, flanked by dunegrass. The wind bites.
This time I can write the truest words.
None of us being here does not mean we never were.
The ocean like this one stared back a thousand faces
last year, and the year before that, too,
and next year it will as well.
II.
remember, remember this is true—
the line between is and was is a sandy one.
the line between the sky and the sea is a sandy one.
the line between the dusk and the night is a sandy one.
the line between now and forever is a sandy one.
something like a middle place.
to hear, to see, to taste the immense night is
is to smell intricacies in fragrance,
to feel the mind itself,
to have your very self laid bare before you
III.
today I am writing the words:
nothing is here, to be certain, but in closed eyes and great nights
somehow the sand forms something in orange—
somehow my head is filled with your sand,
in the manner of sand caught in thick hair,
somehow I can dance on this beach,
somehow every word you ever said is written
in the tides and christened by the moon—
today I am telling you I will always be
listening on the beach with our childhood as falling waves,
searching on the beach for your secrets as spiraling shells,
tasting the salt of your forlorn fears in the wind,
smelling the great black ocean, indivisible from sky, knowing your depth,
dancing
carefully on its coast, flanked by dunegrass,
the ocean throwing a thousand of my own faces at my feet,
and I will be stuck forever in this float, this ataraxia of awed
by the self having been laid bare,
by the goddess amongst the greens.
This time I am writing the words.