B & I went back to the house on the 26th, a week after the fire took basically all of our material possessions. As I walked around the gated exterior this was the only thing I saw laying on the ground just outside of the fence- just the wet page, edges charred, the text still visible, and its meaning immense. It was from an old book of one of my favorite poets, Pablo Neruda, and it made my tears flow for the first time since the fire happened. This is what it reads in English:
Lament
Las manos del dia/The Hands of the Day by Pablo Neruda
A man says: I suffered awful things in the street:
I walked without seeing, endured absence in presence,
extinction without being born, estrangement,
the hostile eyes of the bypasser.
The man keeps complaining:
that he hates the day-in-day-out of his work,
hates the sweat-for-your-dollar, that dreary vendetta,
the rich hate their gold clothing, the colonel, his sidearms,
the poor, their sore feet, the drummer, his heavy valises,
the waiter , the impeccable knot in his tie,
the teller, his cage, the gendarme his uniform,
the nun hates her convent, the green-grocer, his oranges,
the butcher, his meat, the druggist,
the smell of the pharmacy, the whore, her profession
--so says the man on the run
in the watery walks of his hatred, cramming
the street with his footsteps,
rapid, insatiable, equivocal, bitter,
as if the world's weight pressed on his shoulders
its invisible hardware of losses.
Each bypasser says: see,
the brave man reneged on his bravery,
the beauty complained that her ankles were ugly,
the fireman hated the water that put out the fire--
till the city becomes on great gnashing of weeds in the ocean,
a suburban wringing of hands,
a seething morass in the waste of the sea
and no man knows he is weeping.
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