Black Pantheress
Neruda
Thirty-one years--
I haven't forgotten it:
In Singapore: a blood heat
of rain
on the mouldering white
of the walls
bitten
with wet
and the leprous kiss
of humidity:
the shadowy pack of the rain
that blazed suddenly back
and bared--in the lightning--
the teeth--
or the eyes--
the sun like implacable
iron,
a lance-point above me.
I loitered in alleyways drowning
in betel, red pods
aloft
on
the sweet-smelling leaf-bud;
the putrified fruit of the Dorian
in its sultry siesta.
And suddenly saw it:
the face in a cage
by my face,
midway in the street--
two circles
of cold,
two magnets,
electric antagonists,
two eyeballs
that drilled into mine
and bolted me there
by the ground
and the leprous stockade.
Saw
the surge of her body
that shaded
to velvet,
the flexing perfection--
darkness made perfect,
Then, in the night of that skin
the tentative sparkle began
like a pollen-fall:
a rhombus of topaz
or the gold of a hexagon
--how could I name it?--
a flashing transparency
as
the tapering
presence
displaced itself:
the pantheress
throbbing and thinking
its thoughts,
a
barbarous
queen
in
a box
midway
on the trash
of the street.
Out of wilderness wasted
by perfidy,
the plunder of space
and the bitterness reek of the living,
to whatever was human
in the powdery houses
only
the panther
of mineral eye
declared
her contempt, in the heat
of her rage.
Her eyes
were
unbreakable
seals
timelessly slammed
on the door
of the jungle.
She walked
like a holocaust; and closing her eyes,
she touched the invisible, boundless as smoke,
and was one with the night. |
