Don’t go far off, not even for a day, because —
because — I don’t know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.Don’t leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don’t leave me for a second, my dearest,because in that moment you’ll have gone so far
I’ll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?
Neruda writes about longing probably more extensively than any other poet I have read. He is not ashamed to admit his vulnerability and the ‘shameless‘ yearning declared here reaches emotional places we may never confess even to ourselves.
Why can vulnerability be so wrongly deemed weakness?
‘I shall have to learn how to miss you’ , Michael Ondaatje wrote in his Booker Prize winning novel The English Patient. Here Neruda’s missing is physically and psychically felt so vividly that he feels that the lack of his beloved is a form of death. And that this death is ongoing ‘dying’ as it is so vast leading only to obliteration and nothingness.
Need is human and vulnerability makes us real. Neruda’s desolation seems almost biblical as he feels his ‘missing’ renders him an outcast upon the earth. For without the beloved, the earth is a desolate empty place, devoid of meaning and relief.
Fabulous writing.
