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Kate Newmann
Pablo Neruda and Glass
In all your houses
Coloured glass startling the air
Out of its complacency:
Discordant dreams refracting the word,
Warping the flat world into a ghostly psalter.
Water is better drunk
From coloured glass.
Rust of red wine nights and obsidian friendship,
Chandeliers and shatter.
Greens of cactus and figwort and fishing floats.
A dark woman over the blue curacao PacificRaising to her lips a glass of ocean.
Two hundred and eighty-six bottles
Empty with the stale air of French flea-markets,
Naked between the meniscus of blank-staring windows.
Turquoise recycled from Tequila memories,
The glass-blower’s breath still
Haunting the nose with cheap cigarettes and hard-won wisdom.
The hungry neck of a bottle
In the fluted lips of the wind
Like a dulcimer of death
Sings of erosion at the frantic shore of us
Wearing us to sand,
Fusing again to a pristine echo,
A bloodless afterlife,
Neither liquid nor solid nor language,
Renewable as moon,
Transparent as love, as breakable.
All along we drank only
From the inadequate cup of each other and ourselves.
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(Vertaling /
Translation)