Barcarole




If only you will touch my heart,
if only you would put your mouth in my heart,
your fine mouth, your teeth,
if you would place your tongue like a red arrow
there where my dusky heart beats,
if you will breathe in my heart, next to the sea, crying,
it would sound with a dark echo; with the sound
of tired train wheels,
like vacillating waters,
like leaves in Autumn,
like blood,
with a sound of humid flames burning the sky,
sounding like dreams or branches or rain,
or horns of a sad port;
if you will breathe in my heart, next to the sea,
like a white ghost,
at the border of foam,
in the middle of wind,
like an unchained ghost, at the banks of the sea, crying.

Like an absence extended, like a sudden bell,
the sea shares the sound of the heart,
raining, darkening, in one coast alone,
night falls without doubt,
and its gloomy blue in the banner of a shipwreck
populates planets of hoarse silver.

And the heart sounds like a bitter snail,
come, oh sea, oh lament, oh molten fright
scattered in misfortunes and rickety waves.

If you would exist suddenly, on a gloomy coast
circled by the dying day,
facing a new night,
full of waves,
and you will breathe in my heart cold with fear,
you will breathe in the flight of a flaming dove,
they would sound their black syllables of blood,
they would grow their incessant red waters,
and I would sound, I would sound in shadows,
I would sound like death,
I would call like a tube filled with wind or sobs
or a bottle spraying shock in gushes.

So it is, and the lightning would cover your braids
and the rain would come in through your open eyes
to prepare the cry that you deafly envelop,
and the black waves of the sea will gyrate around
you, with great claws, and squawks, and flight.

Do you want to be a ghost who breathes, alone,
next to the sea its sterile, sad instrument?
If only you will call,
your prolonged sound, your wicked whistle,
your order of wounded waves,
someone would come,
someone would,
from the heights of islands, from the red depth
of the sea,
someone would come, someone would come.

Someone would come, breathing with fury,
resounding like the siren of a broken boat,
like a lament,
like a neighing amid foam and blood,
like a ferocious water sounding and biting itself.

In the marine season
its snail-shadow gyrates like a shout,
the seabirds look down on it and flee,
their list of sounds, their gloomy jails
stand up to the shores of the lone ocean.


Pablo Neruda