Donna Nickerson

“You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Captain's Verses

“I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
Like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.”
― Pablo Neruda

“I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrence
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

and:

No one can stop the river of your hands,
your eyes and their sleepiness, my dearest.
You are the trembling of time, which passes
between the vertical light and the darkening sky.

and:

From the stormy archipelagoes I brought
my windy accordian, waves of crazy rain,
the habitual slowness of natural things:
they made up my wild heart.”
― Pablo Neruda

“And one by one the nights between our separated cities are joined to the night that unites us.”
― Pablo Neruda