Appointment With Winter

I

I have waited for this winter as no winter
has been waited for by any man before me.
Everyone else had an appointment with joy.
I was the only one waiting for you, dark time.
Is this one like other winters, father and mother, coal fire,
and the neighing of a horse in the street?
Is this one like a winter in the future,
an absolute cold, in which we don't exist,
and nature not realizing we are gone?
No. I laid claim to a solitude surrounded
by a great sash of sheer rain
and here in my own ocean winter found me, with the wind
flying like a bird between two regions of water.
Everything was ready for the sky to weep.
The vast sky with a single eyelid
let fall its tears like glacial swords
and the world shuttered up like an empty
hotel room: sky, rain, and spaces.

II

Center of things, vessel without latitude or end!
Blue heart of the spread water!
Between air and water quivers and dances
some body seeking
its transparent nourishment
as I arrive and enter with my hat,
my dusty boots
worn out by the thirsty roads.
Nobody had arrived for the solitary ceremony.
I can scarcely feel alone
now that I feel the pureness of the place.
I know I have limitless depths, like the well
which filled us with dread as children;
and that, surrounded by transparency
and the throbbing of the needles,
I am in touch with winter,
with its overwhelming power,
power of its shadowy element,
with the spread and splash
of its late-blooming rose,
until, suddenly, light has gone,
and under the roof
of the dark house
I shall go on speaking to the earth,
although nobody replies.

III

Who doesn't wish for a stubborn spirit?
Who hasn't sharpened the edge of his soul?
When, just as our eyes are opened, we see hate,
and just after learning to walk, we are tripped,
and just for wanting love, we are hated,
and for no more than touching, we are hurt,
which of us hasn't started to arm himself,
to make himself sharp, somehow,
like a knife, to pay back the hurt?
The sensitive one tries to be cynical,
the gentlest reaches for his sword.
The one that only wanted to be loved
at least once, with the ghost of a kiss,
turns cold and aloof, and doesn't look at the girl
who was waiting for him, open and unhappy.
There is nothing to do. In the streets,
they set up stalls selling masks
and the dealer tries on everyone
twilight faces, face of a tiger,
faces sober or virtuous, faces of ancestors,
until the moon dies
and in the lampless night we are all equal.

IV

I had a face which I lost in the sand,
a pale and wistful paper face,
and it was hard for my spirit to change its skin
till it found its true nature,
and could claim the sad right;
to wait for winter, alone unwitnessed,
to wait, under the wings
of a dark sea-cormorant,
for a wave to flow, restored
to the fullness of solitude,
to wait and to find myself
with a touch of light of mourning
or nothing:
what my reason is scarcely aware of,
my unreason, my heart, my doubts.

V

By now the water is so very old
that it's new. The ancient water went,
breaking through glass into another life,
and the sand did not save up time.
The new sea has a clean shirt.
Identity lost its mirror
and we grow by changing our ways.

VI

Winter, don't come looking for me. I've left.
I belong to later, to now, when the thin rain
arrives and unlooses
its endless needles, the marriage
of the spirit with the dripping trees,
the sea's ash, the crash
of a gold capsule in the foliage,
and my belated eyes
preoccupied with earth, with earth alone.

VII

With earth alone, with earth, wind, sand, and water,
which granted me an absolute clarity.

Pablo Neruda

Trans. Alastair Reid