Tonight I Can Write

Edvard Munch

Starry Night

Tonight I Can Write

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is starry

and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.

'The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.

I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.

How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

To think that I do not have her.

To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.

And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.

The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.

My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.

My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.

We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.

My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.

Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms

my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer

and these the last verses that I write for her.

~ Pablo Neruda ~

If You Forget Me

Jan Van Eyck

The Betrothal of the Arnolfini

If You Forget Me

I want you to know

one thing.

You know how this is:

if I look

at the crystal moon,

at the red branch

of the slow autumn at my window,

if I touch

near the fire

the impalpable ash

or the wrinkled body of the log,

everything carries me to you,

as if everything that exists,

aromas, light, metals,

were little boats

that sail

toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,

if little by little you stop loving me

I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly

you forget me

do not look for me,

for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,

the wind of banners

that passes through my life,

and you decide

to leave me at the shore

of the heart where I have roots,

remember

that on that day,

at that hour,

I shall lift my arms

and my roots will set off

to seek another land.

But

if each day,

each hour,

you feel that you are destined for me

with implacable sweetness,

if each day a flower

climbs up to your lips to seek me,

ah my love, ah my own,

in me all that fire is repeated,

in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,

my love feeds on your love, beloved,

and as long as you live it will be in your arms

without leaving mine

~ Pablo Neruda ~

Walking Around

Balthus

The Street

Walking Around

It so happens I am sick of being a man.

And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie houses

dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt

steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.

The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse sobs.

The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool.

The only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens,

no more goods, no spectacles, no elevators.

It so happens that I am sick of my feet and my nails

and my hair and my shadow.

It so happens I am sick of being a man.

Still it would be marvelous

to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,

or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.

It would be great

to go through the streets with a green knife

letting out yells until I died of the cold.

I don't want to go on being a root in the dark,

insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,

going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,

taking in and thinking, eating every day.

I don't want so much misery.

I don't want to go on as a root and a tomb,

alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,

half frozen, dying of grief.

That's why Monday, when it sees me coming

with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline,

and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,

and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the night.

And it pushes me into certain corners, into some moist houses,

into hospitals where the bones fly out the window,

into shoeshops that smell like vinegar,

and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.

There are sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines

hanging over the doors of houses that I hate,

and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot,

there are mirrors

that ought to have wept from shame and terror,

there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical cords.

I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes,

my rage, forgetting everything,

I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic shops,

and courtyards with washing hanging from the line:

underwear, towels and shirts from which slow

dirty tears are falling.

~ Pablo Neruda ~

The Wanderer Returned

Jan Vermeer

Street in Delft

The Wanderer Returned

In the middle of the street, I wonder, Where

is the city? It’s gone, has not come back.

Perhaps this one is the same––it has houses,

it has walls, but I can’t find it.

It isn’t a matter of people––Pedro or Juan––

nor of that woman, nor of that tree;

now that city has buried itself,

has tumbled somewhere underground,

and this is another time, not the same at all,

taking on the same lines of streets,

assuming the same house numbers.

Time then does exist, I realize it.

I know it exists, but I cannot understand

how that city which had warm blood,

which had sky enough for all, and whose midmorning smile

spread like a basketful of plums,

those houses with a forest smell,

wood newly cut at dawn with the saw,

the city that always sang at the water’s edge

of sawmills in the mountains,

all that was yours and mine

of the city and its clarity,

wrapped itself up in love, secretly,

and let itself fall into forgetfulness.

Now where it once was there are other lives,

a different way of being, another hardness.

All is well enough, but why does it not exist?

Why is its old aroma now asleep?

Why did all those bells fall still,

and why did the wooden tower say goodbye?

Perhaps the city fell away in me,

house by house, its warehouses eroded

by the slow damp, by passing time;

perhaps it was I who lost the blue of the pharmacy,

the stored-up wheat, the horseshoe

that hung in the harness store,

and those souls who were always searching

as though in a well of dark water.

Then what am I coming to, what have I come to?

That woman I loved once among the plums

in the stunning summer, clear, clear

as an ax blade catching the moon,

she with the eyes that bit

like acid into the metal of helplessness,

she went away, went away without leaving,

without changing house or country,

went of her own will, tumbling through time

backwards, and did not fall into mine

when she opened, possibly, those arms

which clasped my body, and she was calling me

perhaps at the distance of some many years,

while I, in another corner of the planet,

was drowning in the distance of my age.

I will ask leave of myself to enter,

to return to the missing city.

Inside myself I should find the absent ones,

that smell from the lumberyard;

perhaps the wheat that rippled on the slopes

still goes on growing, but only within me,

and it’s in myself I must travel to find that woman

the rain bore off, and there is no other way.

Nothing can last in any other way.

I am the one who must attend those streets

and somehow or other decide

where the trees should be planted, all over again.

~ Pablo Neruda ~