A. Murray Photographs: 02/2007

Monday, February 12, 2007

Barbara King - As Into A Dream

Entrance Into Wood
Pablo Neruda

Scarcely with my reason, with my fingers
with slow waters indolently swamped,
I fall into the realm of forget-me-nots,
into a tenacious air of mournfulness,
a decayed forgotten hall
and a cluster of bitter clover.

I fall into the shadows, to the core,
of shattered things,
and I see spiders, and I graze on thickets
of secret inconclusive woods,
and I pace through soaked, uprooted fibers
at the living heart of matter and silence.

Oh lovely matter, oh rose of dry wings,
as I drown I cling to your petals
my feet are burning with fatigue,
I kneel in your harsh cathedral
beating my lips with an angel.

It is because I am myself
faced with your color of world,
faced with your pale dead swords,
faced with your united hearts,
faced with your silent multitude.

I am the one facing your wave of dying fragrances,
wrapped in autumn and resistance;
about to take a funeral journey
along the ridges of yellow scars;
I with my lamentations that have no genesis
hungry, sleepless, alone
arriving at your mysterious essence.

I see the course of your petrified currents,
the growth of frozen, interrupted hands.
I hear your oceanic vegetation
rustling - shaken by night and fury
and I feel the leaves dying inward - to the very core
fusing their green substances
to your abandoned immobility.

Pores, veins, rings of sweetness,
weight, silent temperatures,
arrows piercing your fallen soul,
beings asleep in your thick mouth
shreds of sweet consumed pulp,
ashes filled with extinguished souls,
gather to me, to my measureless dream,
fall into my bedroom where night falls
and endlessly falls like broken water
and bind me to your life and to your death
to your docile substances,
to your dead neutral doves,
and let us make fire, and silence, and sound,
and let us burn, and be silent, and bells.