anyway, in honor of the season, and because i haven't posted a Neruda poem in a long time, i give you ....
AUTUMN RETURNS
A day in mourning falls from the bells
like a trembling vague-window cloth,
it is a color, a dream
of cherries buried in the earth,
it is a tail of smoke that restlessly arrives
to change the color of the water and the kisses.
I do not know if I make myself clear:
night approaches, when the solitary poet
at the window hears autumn's steed running
and the leaves of trampled fear rustle in his arteries,
there is something over the sky, like the tongue of a thick
ox, something in the doubt of the sky and the atmosphere.
Things return to their places,
the indispensable lawyer, the hands, the olive oil,
the bottles,
all the traces of life: the beds, above all,
are filled with a bloody liquid,
people deposit their confidences in sordid ears,
assassins go down stairs,
it is not this, however, but the old gallop,
the horse of the old autumn that trembles and endures.
The horse of the old autumn has a red beard
and the foam of fear covers its cheeks
and the air that follows it is shaped like an ocean
and a perfume of vague buried putrefaction.
Every day down from the sky comes an ashen color
that doves must spread over the earth:
the cord that forgetfulness and weeping weave,
time that has slept long years within the bells,
everything,
the old tattered suits, the women who see snow coming,
the black poppies that no one can look at without dying,
everything falls into the hands that I lift
in the midst of the rain.
~ Pablo Neruda, from Residence on Earth
A day in mourning falls from the bells
like a trembling vague-window cloth,
it is a color, a dream
of cherries buried in the earth,
it is a tail of smoke that restlessly arrives
to change the color of the water and the kisses.
I do not know if I make myself clear:
night approaches, when the solitary poet
at the window hears autumn's steed running
and the leaves of trampled fear rustle in his arteries,
there is something over the sky, like the tongue of a thick
ox, something in the doubt of the sky and the atmosphere.
Things return to their places,
the indispensable lawyer, the hands, the olive oil,
the bottles,
all the traces of life: the beds, above all,
are filled with a bloody liquid,
people deposit their confidences in sordid ears,
assassins go down stairs,
it is not this, however, but the old gallop,
the horse of the old autumn that trembles and endures.
The horse of the old autumn has a red beard
and the foam of fear covers its cheeks
and the air that follows it is shaped like an ocean
and a perfume of vague buried putrefaction.
Every day down from the sky comes an ashen color
that doves must spread over the earth:
the cord that forgetfulness and weeping weave,
time that has slept long years within the bells,
everything,
the old tattered suits, the women who see snow coming,
the black poppies that no one can look at without dying,
everything falls into the hands that I lift
in the midst of the rain.
~ Pablo Neruda, from Residence on Earth
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