Seaweed (Algas Del Oceano)

SEAWEED (ALGAS DEL OCEANO) / Pablo Neruda translated by Margaret Sayers Peden You may not know the spilling beads of the slopes of the ocean. In my homeland ocean is the light of each new day. We live on the edge of the wave, with the smell of the sea, with its starry wine. At times the high waves bear in the palm of a great green hand a quivering web: the never-finished cloth of seaweeds. They are the mourning gloves of the ocean, hands of the drowned, widow's weeds, 28 · The Missouri Review but when on the crest of a wall of waves, in the bell of the sea, light gleams through them, they shine like necklaces of the islands, bestow their rosaries, and the gentle nautical swell of their nipples sways beneath the touch of the caressing air! Oh, plunder from the great torso of the sea, never unearthed, comet of an underwater sky, beard of planets that orbited blazing in the ocean. Floating on the night and the tide, riding like rafts of gelatinous pearls, shaken by a fish, the sun, the throb of a single siren, suddenly with a bellow of fury, the sea spreads its spoils among the rocks Pablo Neruda The Missouri Review · 29 of the shore like dark tatters of a flag, like flowers fallen from a ship. And there your hands, your eyes, wiU discover a moist universe of coolness, the transparency of the fruit of submerged vines, a drop from a marine bridal couch, the wide blue bed encrusted with coins of gold, miniscule mussels, green protozoa. Orange, rusted spatulate shapes, eggs of date palms, drifting fans flailed by the eternal flux of a marine heart, islands of sargasso that reach my door with the plunder of the rainbow, let me wear around my neck, on my head, the wet vine tendrils 30 ¦ The Missouri Review PaWo Neruda of the ocean, the spent comet of the wave. Pablo Neruda The MISSOURI Review · 31 ...