Reflections of a Man's Heart

I believe you are more mine than my skin. When I seek

Within me, along my veins, in my blood, my mysterious

Circulatory branches of light that I tell over,

It is you I find, as if you were blood,

As if you were stone or a bite.

I stay outside late, reason, delirium, clothes.

I am of an old race of darkness and forests,

But while I bend down as in a well and enter

Feeling my way like a blind man in my own territory,

I find no railing to direct my steps,

But, instead, the growth of your rose in my own dwelling.

Deep in me you go on growing, unfathomable

In your origin, I cannot touch your eyes

Without burning my fingernails on their petals,

The flames of your form which burn in my thirst,

The leaves of your face which build your absence.

I ask, “Who is there? Who is there?” as if very late,

Very late, somebody knocked

On my door, and then in the middle

Of emptiness there was nothing but air,

Water, trees, the dying daily fire,

As if there was nothing there but everything which exists,

Nothing but all the earth which had rapped on my door.

So, nameless, vague as life, turbid

As the burgeoning mud and vegetation,

You awake in my breast whenever I shut my eyes.

When I lie on the earth you come into being

Like the flowing dust, the river deepening its bed,

Guarding a tangle of naked roots

Which grows as grows your presence in me,

Which accompanies their darkness as you accompany me.

So, here, blood or wheat, earth or fire, we live

Like a single plant which cannot explain its leaves.

 

- Pablo Neruda