More from Neruda

Sonnet XLIV

You must know that I do not love and that I love you,
because everything alive has its two sides;
a word is one wing of silence,
fire has its cold half.

I love you in order to begin to love you,
to start infinity again
and never to stop loving you:
that's why I do not love you yet.

I love you, and I do not love you, as if I held
keys in my hand: to a future of joy
-a wretched, muddled fate-

My love has two lives, in order to love you:
that's why I love you when I do not love you,
and also why I love you when I do.


Sonnet LXXXIII

It's good to feel you close in the night, Love,
invisible in your sleep, earnestly nocturnal,
while I untangle my confusions
like bewildered nets.

Absent, your heart sails through dreams,
but your body breathes, abandoned like this,
searching for me without seeing me, completing my sleep,
like a plant that propagates in the dark.

When you arise, alive, tomorrow, you'll be someone else:
but something is left from the lost frontiers of the night,
from that being and nothing where we find ourselves,
something that brings us close in the light of life,
as if the seal of the darkness branded its secret creatures with a fire.