I need the sea because it teaches me.
I don’t know if I learn music or awareness,
if it’s a single wave or its vast existence,
or only its harsh voice or its shining
suggestion of fishes and ships.
The fact is that until I fall asleep,
in some magnetic way I move in
the university of the waves.
It’s not simply the shells crunched
as if some shivering planet
were giving signs of its gradual death;
no, I reconstruct the day out of a fragment,
the stalactite from the sliver of salt,
and the great god out of a spoonful.
What it taught me before, I keep. It’s air
ceaseless wind, water and sand.
It seems a small thing for a young person,
to have come here to live with his own fire;
nevertheless, the pulse that rose
and fell in its abyss,
the crackling of the blue cold,
the gradual wearing away of the star,
the soft unfolding of the wave
squandering snow with its foam,
the quiet power out there, sure
as a stone shrine in the depths,
replaced my world in which were growing
stubborn sorrow, gathering oblivion,
and my life changed suddenly:
as I became part of its pure movement.
What excruciating beauty
In the used bookstore I saw a complete Pablo Neruda. It was briefly in my hand. Setting the tomb down I reached for a sparkly thin volume by a poet I have since forgotten. Reaching back for the Neruda - it was gone.
There at cash the kindly store owner smiled and said something I could not hear but I caught the word, Neruda. The, perhaps age 20 ?, couple left, the door bell echoing their cooing; his head on his shoulder, arms around wastes.
I bless them for taking 'my' book.
Never hesitate in life, unless of course, you should.
P.S. pardon the comment delete. I forget that when not on the desktop with Substack, the option to also share to Notes does not appear.