Great Throughts Treasury

"When I got the chance I asked them a slew of questions. They offered to burn me; it was the only thing they knew."

"A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices."

"When I see the sea again has the sea seen me or hasn?t it seen me? Why the waves ask me The same that I ask them? And why do they hit the rock With such a futile enthusiasm? Don?t they get tired of repeating their declaration to the sand?"

"Your house sounds like a train at midday, the wasps buzz, the saucepans sing, the waterfall enumerates the deeds of the dew."

"A book, a book full of human touches, of shirts, a book without loneliness, with men and tools, a book is victory."

"About me, nothing worse they will tell you, my love, than what I told you."

"A song of despair. The memory of you emerges from the night around me. The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea. Deserted like the dwarves at dawn. It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one! Cold flower heads are raining over my heart. Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked. In you the wars and the flights accumulated. From you the wings of the song birds rose. You swallowed everything, like distance. Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank! It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss. The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse. Pilot's dread, fury of blind driver, turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank! In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded. Lost discoverer, in you everything sank! You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire, sadness stunned you, in you everything sank! I made the wall of shadow draw back, beyond desire and act, I walked on. Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost, I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you. Like a jar you housed infinite tenderness. And the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar. There was the black solitude of the islands, and there, woman of love, your arms took me in. There was thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit. There were grief and ruins, and you were the miracle. Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms! How terrible and brief my desire was to you! How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid. Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs, still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds. Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs, oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies. Oh the mad coupling of hope and force in which we merged and despaired. And the tenderness, light as water and as flour. And the word scarcely begun on the lips. This was my destiny and in it was my voyage of my longing, and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank! Oh pit of debris, everything fell into you, what sorrow did you not express, in what sorrow are you not drowned! From billow to billow you still called and sang. Standing like a sailor in the prow of a vessel. You still flowered in songs, you still break the currents. Oh pit of debris, open and bitter well. Pale blind diver, luckless slinger, lost discoverer, in you everything sank! It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour which the night fastens to all the timetables. The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore. Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate. Deserted like the wharves at dawn. Only tremulous shadow twists in my hands. Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything. It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one!"

"A pillar supporting consolations and do not tell me anything. Well? Would you healthy pale metalloid? I have a terrible fear of being an animal i, if after so many words that bankruptcy anger man in children."

"Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air."

"Ah, love is a voyage with water and a star, in drowning air and squalls of precipitate bran; love is a war of lights in the lightning flashes, two bodies blasted in a single burst of honey."

"Am I allowed to ask my book whether it's true I wrote it?"

"And it was at that age... Poetry arrived in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where it came from, from winter or a river. I don't know how or when, no they were not voices, they were not words, nor silence, but from a street I was summoned, from the branches of night, abruptly from the others, among violent fires or returning alone, there I was without a face and it touched me. I did not know what to say, my mouth had no way with names, my eyes were blind, and something started in my soul, fever or forgotten wings, and I made my own way, deciphering that fire, and I wrote the first faint line, faint, without substance, pure nonsense, pure wisdom of someone who knows nothing, and suddenly I saw the heavens unfastened and open, planets, palpitating plantations, shadow perforated, riddled with arrows, fire and flowers, the winding night, the universe. And I, infinitesimal being, drunk with the great starry void, likeness, image of mystery, felt myself a pure part of the abyss, I wheeled with the stars, my heart broke loose on the wind."

"And I watch my words from a long way off. They are more yours than mine. They climb on my old suffering like ivy. It climbs the same way on damp walls. You are to blame for this cruel sport. They are fleeing from my dark lair. You fill everything, you fill everything. Before you they peopled the solitude that you occupy, and they are more used to my sadness than you are. Now I want them to say what I want to say to you to make you hear as I want you to hear me."

"And now you're mine. Rest with your dream in my dream. Love and pain and work should all sleep, now. The night turns on its invisible wheels, and you are pure beside me as a sleeping ember. No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go, we will go together, over the waters of time. No one else will travel through the shadows with me, only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon. Your hands have already opened their delicate fists and let their soft drifting signs drop away; your eyes closed like two gray wings, and I move after, following the folding water you carry, that carries me away. The night, the world, the wind spin out their destiny. Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all."

"And one by one the nights between our separated cities are joined to the night that unites us."

"And our problems will crumble apart, the soul blow through like a wind, and here where we live will all be clean again, with fresh bread on the table."

"And that's why i have to go back to so many places there to find myself and constantly examine myself with no witness but the moon and then whistle with joy, ambling over rocks and clods of earth, with no task but to live, with no family but the road."

"And tell me everything, tell chain by chain, and link by link, and step by step, sharpen the knives you kept hidden away, thrust them into my breast, into my hands, like a torrent of sunbursts, an Amazon of buried jaguars , and leave me cry: hours, days and years, blind ages, stellar centuries."

"And the tenderness, light as water and as flour."

"And the sun is so bad friend walker in the desert? And the sun is so nice in the yard of the hospital? And why is the sun such a bad companion to the traveler in the desert? And why is the sun so congenial in the hospital garden?"

"And something started in my soul, fever or forgotten wings, and I made my own way, deciphering that fire, and I wrote the first faint line, faint, without substance, pure nonsense, pure wisdom of someone who knows nothing, and I suddenly saw the heavens unfastened and open."

"And this is easier than on Thursday and harder to keep being born and is a strange looking craft that you and hides when it is sought and a shadow with the broken roof, but the holes are stars."

"And together we are complete like a single river, as a single arena."

"And what importance do I have in the courtroom of oblivion?"

"And you will ask: why doesn't his poetry speak of dreams and leaves and the great volcanoes of his native land? Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see the bloods in the streets. Come and see the blood in the streets!"

"As far as we in particular are concerned, we writers within the tremendously far-flung American region, we listen unceasingly to the call to fill this mighty void with beings of flesh and blood. We are conscious of our duty as fulfillers - at the same time we are faced with the unavoidable task of critical communication within a world which is empty and is not less full of injustices, punishments and sufferings because it is empty - and we feel also the responsibility for reawakening the old dreams which sleep in statues of stone in the ruined ancient monuments, in the wide-stretching silence in planetary plains, in dense primeval forests, in rivers which roar like thunder. We must fill with words the most distant places in a dumb continent and we are intoxicated by this task of making fables and giving names. This is perhaps what is decisive in my own humble case, and if so my exaggerations or my abundance or my rhetoric would not be anything other than the simplest of events within the daily work of an American. Each and every one of my verses has chosen to take its place as a tangible object, each and every one of my poems has claimed to be a useful working instrument, each and every one of my songs has endeavored to serve as a sign in space for a meeting between paths which cross one another, or as a piece of stone or wood on which someone, some others, those who follow after, will be able to carve the new signs."

"Ask: and where are the lilacs? And the poppy-petalled metaphysics? And the rain that often hit their holes and filling them with words of birds?"

"As if you were on fire from within. The moon lives in the lining of your skin."

"Ask: why does not his poetry speak of dreams and leaves of the great volcanoes of his native land? Come and see the blood in the streets, come and see the blood in the streets, come and see the blood in the streets!"

"As if down a long tunnel of clothing and of chores; your clear light dims, gets dressed, drops its leaves, and becomes a naked hand again."

"At night I dream that you and I are two plants that grew together, roots entwined, and that you know the earth and the rain like my mouth, since we are made of earth and rain."

"At night, beloved, tie your heart to mine and in the dream they defeat the darkness."

"Because I felt that somehow they did share. O my brothers or my enemies and them, so I took nothing out of nowhere, from nothing mine, took something and served them my life."

"Because on nights like this I held her in my arms, my soul is lost without her."

"Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own: I wavered through the streets, among objects: nothing mattered or had a name: the world was made of air, which waited. I knew rooms full of ashes, tunnels where the moon lived, rough warehouses that growled 'get lost', questions that insisted in the sand. Everything was empty, dead, mute, fallen abandoned, and decayed: inconceivably alien, it all belonged to someone else - to no one: till your beauty and your poverty filled the autumn plentiful with gifts."

"Buried next to the coconut tree you will later find the knife that I hid there for fear that you would kill me, and now suddenly I should like to smell its kitchen steel accustomed to the weight of your hand and the shine of your foot: under the moisture of the earth, among the deaf roots, of all human languages the poor thing would know only your name, and the thick earth does not understand your name made of impenetrable and divine substances."

"But from each crime are born bullets that will one day seek out in you where the heart lies."

"But the unforgettable ceremony did not end there. My country friends took off their hats and began a strange dance, hopping on one foot around the abandoned skull, moving in the ring of footprints left behind by the many others who had passed there before them. Dimly I understood, there by the side of my inscrutable companions, that there was a kind of link between unknown people, a care, an appeal and an answer even in the most distant and isolated solitude of this world."

"By extending to these extreme consequences the poet's duty, in truth or in error, I determined that my posture within the community and before life should be that of in a humble way taking sides. I decided this when I saw so many honorable misfortunes, lone victories, splendid defeats. In the midst of the arena of America's struggles I saw that my human task was none other than to join the extensive forces of the organized masses of the people, to join with life and soul with suffering and hope, because it is only from this great popular stream that the necessary changes can arise for the authors and for the nations. And even if my attitude gave and still gives rise to bitter or friendly objections, the truth is that I can find no other way for an author in our far-flung and cruel countries, if we want the darkness to blossom, if we are concerned that the millions of people who have learnt neither to read us nor to read at all, who still cannot write or write to us, are to feel at home in the area of dignity without which it is impossible for them to be complete human beings."

"By night, Love, tie your heart to mine, and the two together in their sleep will defeat the darkness."

"Because in your chest austral are tattooed struggle, hope, solidarity and joy as anchors to resist the waves of the earth."

"Bitter love, a violet with its crown of thorns in a thicket of spiky passions, spear of sorrow, corolla of rage: how did you come to conquer my soul? What brought you?"

"Between the lips and the voice something goes dying. Somewhat winged bird, something of anguish and oblivion"

"Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace."

"Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs, you look like a world, lying in surrender."

"Carnal apple, woman filled, burning moon, dark smell of seaweed, crush of mud and light, what secret knowledge is clasped between your pillars? What primal night does man touch with his senses? Ay, Love is a journey through waters and stars, through suffocating air, sharp tempests of grain: Love is a war of lightning, and two bodies ruined by a single sweetness. Kiss by kiss I cover your tiny infinity, your margins, your rivers, your diminutive villages, and a genital fire, transformed by delight, slips through the narrow channels of blood to precipitate a nocturnal carnation, to be, and be nothing but light in the dark."

"Child who does not play is not a child, but the man who does not play has lost forever the child who lived within him and who he will miss terribly"

"Come with me, I said, and no one knew where, or how my pain throbbed, no carnations or barcaroles for me, only a wound that love had opened. I said it again: Come with me, as if I was dying, and no one saw the moon that bled in my mouth or the blood that rose into the silence. O Love, now we can forget the star that has such thorns! That is why when I heard your voice repeat Come with me, it was as if you had let loose the grief, the love, the fury of a cork-trapped wine the geysers flooding from deep in its vault: in my mouth I felt the taste of fire again, of blood and carnations, of rock and scald."

"Death arrives among all that sound like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it, comes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it, with no finger in it, comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, with no throat. Nevertheless its steps can be heard and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree."

"Death stretches out like a clothesline, and then suddenly blows: blows a dark sound that swells the sheets and beds are sailing into a harbor where death is waiting, dressed as an admiral."