Chordata : Notochord Treasures:Neruda
Nudes: Richard Meyers, Chordata Studio ...new cathedrals ?
SEX (Pablo Neruda)
(from New Poems 1968-1970 Transl. Ben Belitt Grove Press,1972)
The harems have opened
in this year of our Lord
and Sex has jumped out of the windows,
the executive suites and the doors-
we've seen its breasts,bared
in celestial timidity
like the writing on postcards,
and women keep shedding
like petals in a lighted proscenium,
A great wave of nudes has rolled up
and crashed over the cathedrals.
The hustlers have come
with their books and their screens and revues-
a great Empire of Assholes
drowning the cities
with commercialized sperm.
It's hard to escape
to one's work or one's loves:
the wolf-whistle of promiscuous
sex,stored up in warehouses
or spurting its drops on the media,
hornily nips at our heels,
overtaking the newspaper ads,
tailing one on the freeways
or soaking the least of the villages
with its genital aqueduct.
Literature has crossed
into the century,phallus by phallus,with arabesque
demeaning our anguish
with books- a backwash of filth,all
flooding one way to the sewers
of susceptible spirits.
The garden was good once
in its hairiness,without any gardeners;
but a black tangle of creepers
has unfolded the bush of its fear
in the books of the destitute.
The page that was white
and seemed blank as the moon
has changed its inheritance
for a grimace of dreary immodesty,
There are no longer books,only
lights to be read-
five syllables of sun,
one naked word
in the rational sign of our purity.
