Pablo Neruda

Love Sonnet IX

~ Ryan Dowling ~ 2 Comments

Love Sonnet IX
after Pablo Neruda

Love, I am such a central flame, loving solitude
and the way she drives me with her big eyes,
and the violin she burns at the bottom of my well
that fills the stones with your sound of horses.

I thought that together we could be this solitary pain,
one loneliness: a sort of flower on the moon,
drilling its white into our childhood’s windows,
into our entire planet of two people.

But I know you better: seeking love in loud circles
of liars, piling your hair on the slow genitals
of earth, afraid because I have placed this one star

in the palm of your universe: even so, I forgive you.
You could not know what it is to be so alone.
You could not know what it is to be so in love.

by Ryan Dowling

Love Sonnet VIII

~ Ryan Dowling ~ 2 Comments

Love Sonnet VIII
after Pablo Neruda

Nirvana rose through the roots of my legs
and I raised my arms like Heaven’s branches
to offer all gods the fruit of my contempt,
for how could I bear eternity without you, love?

Forsaken, I dove back into that mortal sea
on which I’d left you burning, my Gloria of fire;
for Heaven fizzled like that first cry of sulfur
and Nirvana was but a laughing mouthful of ash.

And I’d follow no religion save the tongued valley
between the mice-bitten hills of your breasts,
and I’d map all the rivers of my life by your veins

until I discovered your shawled heart’s robin,
and I’d rip you from the fetch of the dark,
and we’d fly—two flames—into a single world.

by Ryan Dowling

Love Sonnet VII

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Love Sonnet VII
after Pablo Neruda

Ten buds blossom on my fingertips and twitch:
like a doe you nibble them, grow delirious in my arms,
and passion twists the tangled smoke of our faces,
contorted one minute with joy, the next with agony.

What kind of a world is this?—half-heartedly
mad for its other half, stumbling through the brambles
like a stampede of lepers, of chained evenings,
of hunchbacked matadors with their sluggish hooves?

I stand in open fields, open-hearted, offering myself—
but to whom? A spirit promised me eternal love
and left me more alone than if I’d slept with a whore.

“Until death do us part,” say the priests, but I say
death is the kiss that sends the mountains floating east
on broken seas, and bruises the Book of the west.

by Ryan Dowling

Love Sonnet VI

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Love Sonnet VI
after Pablo Neruda

First-born, a babe newly mooned in my mother’s arms,
I pronounced my first love upon her breast
and she gave me breath. Lullabied years of tribulation
ached over my crib, and I awoke already a man.

Then my mother’s love was divided a hundredfold,
and I, like an insolent child, went around town
looking up every skirt I saw, asking:
“Are you my woman? Am I your man?”

The crescent moon was a hook or a cross, or else
it was the artful enemy that arms the suicidal.
And though I tried again to love only one woman,

others arrived—nightly criminals, excitable panthers—
and I was forced to weep between their legs.
This is the story of how I became alone.

by Ryan Dowling

Love Sonnet V

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Love Sonnet V
after Pablo Neruda

Love, how like a winter we are. You bury me
in white solitudes—under many snows, you keep me.
Love, you regard me coldly, and the one I love
is a wind that howls in my ear its frosts, its ghosts

as stoic as Eskimos in the glacier-faced North.
So my mouth, like a trap, opens to sing;
and in the jaws of my song is your paw, my lynx.
Quit gnawing yourself! I want to set you free.

Botched surgeries, razors, worms, cancers, aches:
we undressed and paid violence to our vulnerabilities;
you made me want to live like a cold planet,

to ice my doubts in enormous winters of space.
My kiss would only bloody your snow. In your arms,
I grow so old. Look, a chill has taken the moon.

by Ryan Dowling

Love Sonnet IV

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Love Sonnet IV
after Pablo Neruda

Do not leave us like a rose in a vase,
with its roots in the sunset, a slow-dying thing.
Away with you once and for all! Leave me swiftly
as a bullet, a flash at the fall of a guillotine,

a sudden autumn, but no more a rose,
not the stalk of my body nor the petals of your eyes.
See how I set you seaward on a flaming skiff,
pale and without a pulse, your face no face at all?

So wherever I have planted myself, burn it down;
wherever our vines intertwine, burn it away.
Is it true, my love, you’ve swallowed my life seed?

As it swells in your belly, my wheel turns in yours,
inextricably, and you must burn even this
and turn with it in the winter wind.

by Ryan Dowling

Love Sonnet III

~ Ryan Dowling ~ 3 Comments

Love Sonnet III
after Pablo Neruda

Your love is nowhere except where my feet are.
If I dance in China, love; if I climb the Andes, love;
along the bridge between us, every step is love.
While crossing the lily pads of your kisses

in a dream, I could sleepwalk to Paris and back,
and you’d never know I left your side in bed.
You unravel your yarn in this damnable labyrinth,
and the flight of your skirt lights the torch

in my heart as you whip around another corner.
I refuse to take another step without it.
Anywhere I go is only the echo of where you were.

Barefoot, I’ll walk across these bridges ruined
by walking and across your stem of endless thorns,
I’ll walk until I die of it inside your rose.

by Ryan Dowling

Love Sonnet I

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Love Sonnet I
after Pablo Neruda

You needn’t love me as long as I may still love you;
the sun still hatches an Aphrodite from its sea of flame;
a lumberjack is splitting the badly coupled still;
still the stars accumulate in the most avoided corner.

Not a drop of water in all the world will change us,
for as long as what you feel for me is a moon-white child
that has died of her love for thirst, for the sweetness
of absence, love’s fire sleeps in a soft roar.

Take it all away from me, my dear, only not too far;
I want to know that if I drag my heart across this desert
I will find at its end your footprint or a single tear.

Go on looking, my dear, for anyone, anyone but me,
only do not find him; leave me at least the slightest chance
that, of all these drones, I alone may love my queen.

by Ryan Dowling