Love Is Not An Easy Thing

Everyone approaches Valentine's Day a different way, from sappy all-out lovers rubbing themselves with oils and oysters to folks who simply ignore (or forget) it or, in an ever popular trend, the anti-Valentine's Day celebrants. However you deal with it, love, or lack thereof, can really kick the shit out of people and leave hellacious scars. We hunger for it. We desire to be desired. Love is not an easy thing, and I think it says something weirdly powerful that Americans actually take a day to celebrate love and love alone. We might as well be celebrating some other force of nature, like tornadoes or hurricanes or earthquakes. "Happy earthquake Day, Sally!" "Oh, thanks Bob! I made you a card with this crushed village on the front!"

So, in honor of love I'm posting a poem by the remarkable Pablo Neruda.

"Ode with a Lament"

Oh girl among the roses, oh crush of doves,
oh fortress of fishes and rosebushes,
your soul is a bottle filled with thirsty salt
and your skin, a bell filled with grapes.

Unfortunately I only have fingernails to give you,
or eyelashes, or melted pianos,
or dreams that come spurting from my heart,
dusty dreams that run like black horsemen,
dreams filled with velocities and misfortunes.

I can love you only with kisses and poppies,
with garlands wet by the rain,
looking at ash-gray horses and yellow dogs.
I can love you only with waves at my back,
amid vague sulphur blows and brooding waters,
swimming against the centuries that flow in certain rivers
with wet fodder growing over the sad plaster tombs,
swimming across submerged hearts
and pale lists of unburied children.

There is much death, many funeral events
in my forsaken passions and desolate kisses,
there is the water that falls upon my head,
while my hair grows,
a water like time, a black unchained water,
With a nocturnal voice, with a shout
of birds in the rain, with an interminable
wet-winged shadow that protects my bones:
while I dress, while
interminably I look at myself in mirrors and windowpanes,
I hear someone who follows me, sobbing to me
with a sad voice rotted by time.

You stand upon the earth, filled
with teeth and lightning.
You spread the kisses and kill the ants.
You weep with health, with onion, with bee,
with burning abacus.
You are like a blue and green sword
and you ripple, when I touch you, like a river.

Come to my heart dressed in white, with a bouquet
of bloody roses and goblets of ashes,
come with an apple and a horse,
because there is a dark room there and a broken candleholder,
some twisted chairs waiting for winter,
and a dead dove, with a number.

Post Script:

Neruda always wrote in green ink because it was the color of Esperanza (hope).