Jane: Final

Here is my painting series, along with the Pablo Neruda poems they illustrate:

Ode to the Book (II)

Book,
beautiful
book,
minuscule forest,
leaf
after leaf,
your paper
smells
of the elements,
you are
matutinal and nocturnal,
vegetal,
oceanic,
in your ancient pages
bear hunters,
bonfires
near the Mississippi,
canoes
in the islands,
later
roads
and roads,
revelations,
insurgent
races,
Rimbaud like a wounded
fish bleeding
thumping in the mud,
and the beauty
of fellowship,
stone by stone
the human castle rises,
sorrows intertwined
with strength,
actions of solidarity,
clandestine
book
from pocket
to pocket,
hidden
lamp,
red star.

We
the wandering
poets
explored
the world,
at every door
life received us,
we took part
in the earthly struggle.
What was our victory?
A book,
a book full
of human touches,
of shirts,
a book
without loneliness, with men
and tools,
a book
is victory.
It lives and falls
like all fruit,
it doesn’t just have light,
it doesn’t just have
shadow,
it fades,
it sheds its leaves,
it gets lost
in the streets,
it tumbled to earth.
Morning-fresh
book of poetry,
again
hold
snow and moss
on your pages
so that footsteps
and eyes
may keep carving
trails:
once more
describe the world to us,
the springs
in the middle of the forest,
the high woodlands,
the polar
planets,
and man
on the roads,
on the new roads,
advancing
in the jungle,
in the water,
in the sky,
in the naked solitude of the sea,
man
discovering
the ultimate secrets,
man
returning
with a book,
the hunter back again
with a book,
the farmer
plowing
with a book.

Ode To Wine

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Day-colored wine, night-colored wine, wine with purple feet or wine with topaz blood, wine, starry child of earth, wine, smooth as a golden sword, soft as lascivious velvet, wine, spiral-seashelled and full of wonder, amorous, marine; never has one goblet contained you, one song, one man, you are choral, gregarious, at the least, you must be shared. At times you feed on mortal memories; your wave carries us from tomb to tomb, stonecutter of icy sepulchers, and we weep transitory tears; your glorious spring dress is different, blood rises through the shoots, wind incites the day, nothing is left of your immutable soul. Wine stirs the spring, happiness bursts through the earth like a plant, walls crumble, and rocky cliffs, chasms close, as song is born. A jug of wine, and thou beside me in the wilderness, sang the ancient poet. Let the wine pitcher add to the kiss of love its own. My darling, suddenly the line of your hip becomes the brimming curve of the wine goblet, your breast is the grape cluster, your nipples are the grapes, the gleam of spirits lights your hair, and your navel is a chaste seal stamped on the vessel of your belly, your love an inexhaustible cascade of wine, light that illuminates my senses, the earthly splendor of life. But you are more than love, the fiery kiss, the heat of fire, more than the wine of life; you are the community of man, translucency, chorus of discipline, abundance of flowers. I like on the table, when we're speaking, the light of a bottle of intelligent wine. Drink it, and remember in every drop of gold, in every topaz glass, in every purple ladle, that autumn labored to fill the vessel with wine; and in the ritual of his office, let the simple man remember to think of the soil and of his duty, to propagate the canticle of the wine.  Ode To The Lemon From blossoms released by the moonlight, from an aroma of exasperated love, steeped in fragrance, yellowness drifted from the lemon tree, and from its plantarium lemons descended to the earth. Tender yield! The coasts, the markets glowed with light, with unrefined gold; we opened two halves of a miracle, congealed acid trickled from the hemispheres of a star, the most intense liqueur of nature, unique, vivid, concentrated, born of the cool, fresh lemon, of its fragrant house, its acid, secret symmetry. Knives sliced a small cathedral in the lemon, the concealed apse, opened, revealed acid stained glass, drops oozed topaz, altars, cool architecture. So, when you hold the hemisphere of a cut lemon above your plate, you spill a universe of gold, a yellow goblet of miracles, a fragrant nipple of the earth's breast, a ray of light that was made fruit, the minute fire of a planet.

Ode to My Socks

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Mara Mori brought me a pair of socks which she knitted herself with her sheepherder's hands, two socks as soft as rabbits. I slipped my feet into them as if they were two cases knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin, Violent socks, my feet were two fish made of wool, two long sharks sea blue, shot through by one golden thread, two immense blackbirds, two cannons, my feet were honored in this way by these heavenly socks. They were so handsome for the first time my feet seemed to me unacceptable like two decrepit firemen, firemen unworthy of that woven fire, of those glowing socks. Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation to save them somewhere as schoolboys keep fireflies, as learned men collect sacred texts, I resisted the mad impulse to put them in a golden cage and each day give them birdseed and pieces of pink melon. Like explorers in the jungle who hand over the very rare green deer to the spit and eat it with remorse, I stretched out my feet and pulled on the magnificent socks and then my shoes. The moral of my ode is this: beauty is twice beauty and what is good is doubly good when it is a matter of two socks made of wool in winter.