CANTO II: THE HEIGHTS OF MACHU PICCHU

Flower to flower delivers up its seed
and rock maintains its blossom broadcast
in a bruised garment of diamond and sand
yet man crumples thepetal of the light he skims
from the predetermined sources of the sea
and drills the pulsing metal in his hands.
Soon, caught between clothes and smoke, on the sunken floor,
the soul's reduced to a shuffled pack,
quartz and insomnia, tears in the sea,
like pools of cold--yet this is not enough:
he kills, confesses it on paper with contempt,
muffles it in the rug of habit, shreds it
in a hostile apparel of wire.

No: for in corridors--air, sea or land--
who guards his veins unarmed
like scarlet poppies? Now rage has bled
the dreary wares of the trader in creatures,
while, in the plum tree's coronet, the dew
has left a coat of visitations for a thousand years
pinned to the waiting twig, oh heart, oh face
ground small among the cavities of autumn.

How many times inw intry city streets, or in
a bbus, a boat at dusk, or in the denser solitude
of festive nights, drenched in the sound
of bells and shadows, in the very lair of human pleasure,
have I wanted to pause and look for the eternal, unfathomable
truth's filament I'd fingered once in stone, or in the flash a kiss
released.

(That which in a wheat like yellow history
of small, full breasts repeats a calculus
ceaselessly tender in the burgeoning
and which, always the same way, husks to ivory--
that which is ghost of home in the translucent water
belling from the lone snows down to these waves of blood.)

I could only grasp a cluster of faces or masks
thrown down like rings of hollow gold,
like scarecrow clothes, daughters of rabid autumn
shaking the stunned tree of the frightened races.

I had no place in which my hand could rest--
no place running like harnessed water,
firm as a nugget of anthracite or crystal--
responding, hot or cold, to my open hand.

What was man? In what layer of his humdrum conversation,
among his shops and sirens--in which of his metallic movements
lived on imperishably the quality of life?

-- Pablo Neruda --