Pablo Neruda, "Barcarole"

Barcarole

If only you would touch my heart,
if only you were to put your mouth to my heart,
your delicate mouth, your teeth,
if you were to put your tongue like a red arrow
there where my dusty heart is beating,
if you were to blow on my heart near the sea, weeping,
it would make a dark noise, like the drowsy sound of
train wheels,
like the indecision of waters,
like autumn in full leaf,
like blood,
with a noise of damp flames burning the sky,
with a sound like dreams or branches or the rain,
or foghorns in some dismal port,
if you were to blow your heart near the sea,
like a white ghost,
in the spume of the wave,
in the middle of the wind,
like a ghost unleashed, at the seashore, weeping.

Like a long absence, like a sudden bell,
the sea doles out the sound of the heart,
raining, darkening at sundown, on a lonely coast:
no question that night falls
and its mournful blue of the flags of shipwrecks
peoples itself with planets of throaty silver.
And the heart sounds like a sour conch
calls, oh sea, oh lament, oh molten panic,
scattered in the unlucky and disheveled waves:
The sea reports sonorously
on its languid shadows, its green poppies.
if you existed, suddenly, on a mournful coast,
surrounded by the dead day,
facing into a new night,
filled with waves,
and if you were to blow on my cold and frightened heart,
if you were to blow on the lonely blood of my heart,
if you were to blow on its motion of doves in flame,
its black syllables of blood would ring out,
its incessant red waters would come to flood,
and it would ring out with shadows,
ring out like death,
cry out like a tube filled with wind or weeping,
like a shaken bottle spurting fear.

so that's how it is, and the lightning would glint in your
braids
and the rain would come in through your open eyes
to ready the weeping you shut up dumbly
and the black wings of the sea would wheel round you,
with its great talons and its rush and its cawing.

Do you want to be the solitary ghost blowing, by the sea its sad instrument?
If only you would call,
a long sound, a bewitching whistle,
a sequence of wounded waves,
maybe some one would come,
from the peaks of the islands, from the red depths of the
sea,
some one would come, someone would come.

Someone would come, blow fiercely,
so that it sounds like a siren of some battered ship,
like lamentation,
like neighing in the midst of the foam an blood,
like a ferocious water gnashing and sounding.

In the marine season
its conch of shadow spirals like a shout,
the seabirds ignore it and fly off,
its roll call of sounds, its mournful rings
rise on the shores of the lonely sea.

- Pablo Neruda
Translation by Robert Hass


Even better!

Somehow worse.