not only the fire

there are other memories
not only flowers from the fire
but little sprouts
that suddenly appear
when i go on trains
or in the streets.

i see you
washing my hankerchiefs,
hanging at the window
my worn-out socks,
your figure on which everything,
all pleasure like a flare-up,
fell without destroying you,
again,

little wife
of every day
again a human being,
humbly human,
proudly poor
as you have to be in order to be
not the swift rose
that love's ash dissolves
but all of life,
all of life with soap and needles,
with the smell that i love
of the kitchen that perhaps we shall not have
and in which your hand among the fried potatoes
and your mouth singing in the winter
until the roast arrives
would be for me the permanence
of happiness on earth.

Ah, my life,
it is not only the fire that burns between us
but all of life,
the simple story,
the simple love,
of a woman and a man
like everyone.

-pablo neruda.

smudges

The Dalmatian woman

Bathed in evening

Walked the dusty back lanes of Poughkeepsie

And watched enviously from the corner

As women with tight dresses hung clothes on their

Tight lines

She dropped her first spot in a yard full of rose petals

Believing the opal would blend with the crimson

Rather than stand out

Like a sore green thumb

A bearded, shirtless man

Splashed stagnant rainwater on her dress

As he spun past

On his bicycle with bells and a basket

One spot lost

Many gained

She shook off her apron in an alley

Behind a restaurant that smelled of

Sirloin and supercilious

Folk

And thus it continued

Until she was almost home

All the wetness that once soaked her

The spots that once marred her

Were slowly drying, fading, dying away

And she walked into her tiny house

The paltriest one on the block

Ran a bath and washed away the last remnants of

Her soul

She drudgingly walked toward bed

Pure

Clean

Ordinary

But before climbing into the cool, pressed sheets

She reached into the nightstand and felt around in the dark for her marker

Gingerly she drew

In her inner elbow crease

The smallest imaginable dot

No larger than a needlepoint

And fell back onto the overstuffed pillows

Content, assured in the fact that

She still had

An identity

A spot

A smudge

Of character.

source one  source two

salt-rose or topaz

"in the gardens of exile"

this is one of my favorite pictures of all time. awkward hand placement on nymph statue aside, this image stirs in me such delight and happiness. on the left is gabriel garcia marquez, author of such life-changing reads as one hundred years of solitude and love in the time of cholera (though my favorite work by him is the much shorter, poignant short story "no one writes to the colonel.") then. there on the right. with his beret tipped just so, is pablo neruda. i was first introduced to neruda in my senior year of high school. nestled between passages from lord of the flies and the joy luck club in my world lit textbook was his sonnet xvii, which begins with this unforgettable killer of an opening line:

i do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,

or the arrows of carnations the fire shoots off.

i love you as certain dark things are to be loved,

in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

with that, i was hooked. volumes upon volumes of neruda poetry line my bookshelves at home. each different translation seems to bring out another side of his intellect, his wit and, of course, his incredibly amorous spirit. 

and i could talk about marquez for days. i affectionately refer to him as gabo, as do his close friends. and shakira. behold this delicious tidbit from love in the time of cholera:

to him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as distracted as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. he had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.

gorgeous, no? and now,-this black and white, tiny print. these two were friends! perhaps not best friends, but close enough to take a picture with a nymph, which says a lot. i love the idea that my two favorite authors not only knew each other, but spent time in each other's company. isn't that the making of any great friendship? that learning from and growing with each other that only strengthens the other person? 

it is with this introduction i present to you, 

our dog, pablo myers, named after neruda. 

not quite as fluent in spanish, but i assure you--every bit as handsome. and sexy.