Dancing with Neruda’s Bones
Neruda, only known to me in the poet’s words––
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul––
Neruda’s bones have been exhumed for examination.
I did not want his decomposed body uprooted
from its plot, transmogrified into murder mystery.
Poet of eternal present, I cradle his imagined bones
and pull them to me, his tango body’s phalanges
jangling as I cross and giro tibia and fibia––
pinned by the sun between solstice
and equinox, drowsy and tangled together
clanking across tiles of a kitchen floor.
Let Neruda be, I plea, still dancing, his bones tethered
to my body tripping and swaying in tango rhythm,
talking head on the radio droning on
in conspiracy theories of the Pinochet regime
poisoning Neruda, life split in poetry and politics
as the night wind whirls in the sky and sings.
Forecast of ill fortune––to lift bones from the grave––
much like this wave of melancholia. In inevitable
surrender, I concede: what does it matter
to have dug them up as his love lyrics resonate
in his monotoned moan, Gardel crooning
behind our bumpy boleo: el dia que me quieras.
Neruda’s unearthed skeleton clings to my arms,
scent of honeysuckle climbing limbs like vines,
as I sweep and dip inside his metaphoric sigh of sea
and our final soltada––voice of the rain crying:
no carnations or barcaroles for me,
only a wound that love had opened.
Neruda, now so mystical and magical,
cloaks his bones in flesh and play, conjures
a dusty fiddle, leaps and lands on the walkway below,
the violin with its ragged companion...
learning how to befriend lost souls
and sing songs to wandering strangers.
Publication/Award Credit: Apogee Magazine 53, Emily Stauffer Poetry Prize. Franklin College, 2015
In this surreal narrative the Neruda lines are italicized and from his poems in this order:
“Love Sonnet XVII,” “Drunk as Drunk,” “Poem Twenty,” “Lost in the Forest, Come With Me I Said and No One Knew VII,” “Ode to a Violin in California.”
le crayon qui parle
...night will then begin to fade
and chains break and fall––Al-Shabi
When Picasso traded his Pont Neuf
studio paints and brushes for pen to write:
I separate day from night
and the starless sky
from the empty heart,
his canvases turned inky pages of words,
their untamed sketches of dreams winding
paths of thought through summer light
streaming in parlor windows between wars
until Gertrude Stein advised,
“Pablo, go home and paint.”
Then Guernica rose in blacks and whites,
its wild-eyed bull rearing up above
a grief stricken mother with child in arms,
the speared horse, sword sprouting flowers,
dismembered arm bearing a flame lit light of hope.
Troops have since fortressed darkened Parisian rues,
its artist and writers, its families and friends
in retreat from familiar cafés and galleries,
stadiums and concert halls, from jihadists
with kalashnikovs and bomb belts. Everyone
holed up in their ateliers, lofts, and homes
peering out over Seine or Vosges, Tuileries or Bois,
across arrondissements onto blackened views
of a wounded city mourning and left to do
what it must––to witness, to sing or to pray,
to hold vigil, to take up paints or dig hands in clay,
to run fingers across keys, to put pen to paper
to let le crayon parle, as dreary fearsome nights
begin to fade and chains of pain break and fall.
Off the Coast: Maine’s Intl Poetry Journal, “The Things They Imagined,” Fall 2016
After my mother’s death,
I pulled the sheets awash in fleur-de-lis
straight down in a swift swoop of cloud
off the deathbed onto the planked floor
where they lay lifeless spent blossoms.
It seemed just last week, we bundled and carried them
down to the basement Kenmore, she hovering,
breath labored, hands trembling, it gushing,
chuffing, and spinning its way to the end.
Her Ivory Snow made me sneeze the way it did
days we worked the Maytag wringer washer,
she cranking its arm, feeding bedclothes
through the roller, coaxing me to pull pull pull––
my small hands cold and aching, six-year-old legs
shaking, as I pulled and pulled pillow cases through
I would later iron into smooth warm squares
to rest my head, doze into a powdery clean sleep.
Today, years later, as I stand folding my own shams and sheets,
funeral flowers rise up fragrant with upturned earth
where gravediggers put down rose wreaths and lilies,
scents she liked least with so many friends’ burials.
On that day of my mother’s death, I hear her say pull, pull––
then stretch out on her bed imagining the mortician,
the man who knew her least and touched her last,
loading her body into the dark hearse, cold and alone.
I languished there pressing the small of my back
flat against the padded tufts of her bare mattress,
lay the way I saw her there nursing her weak heart
after a hospital stay she said would be her last and was.
Then as suddenly as I imagined that hearse hauling
her body away, I rose up, a Lady Lazarus, pulled the sheets
back onto the bed, burying my nose into their heap,
into a final sweet moment of the last scent of her,
the one I had memorized from birth.
Landings: Poetry by Andrena Zawinski, Kelsay Books, 2017.
Andrena Zawinski is a veteran educator and activist poet whose work has received accolades for lyricism, form, spirituality, and social concern. Her three full poetry collection are Landings, Something About, and Traveling in Reflected Light. Her work has appeared in Nimrod, Rattle, Gulf Coast, Progressive Magazine, Dallas Review, Blue Collar Review and others and has been widely anthologized in Aeolian Harp, Raising Lily Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workplace, Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse, Borderlands and Crossroads: Writing the Motherland, American Society: What Poets See, and more. She founded and runs the San Francisco Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and is Features Editor at PoetryMagazine.com
Neruda, only known to me in the poet’s words––
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul––
Neruda’s bones have been exhumed for examination.
I did not want his decomposed body uprooted
from its plot, transmogrified into murder mystery.
Poet of eternal present, I cradle his imagined bones
and pull them to me, his tango body’s phalanges
jangling as I cross and giro tibia and fibia––
pinned by the sun between solstice
and equinox, drowsy and tangled together
clanking across tiles of a kitchen floor.
Let Neruda be, I plea, still dancing, his bones tethered
to my body tripping and swaying in tango rhythm,
talking head on the radio droning on
in conspiracy theories of the Pinochet regime
poisoning Neruda, life split in poetry and politics
as the night wind whirls in the sky and sings.
Forecast of ill fortune––to lift bones from the grave––
much like this wave of melancholia. In inevitable
surrender, I concede: what does it matter
to have dug them up as his love lyrics resonate
in his monotoned moan, Gardel crooning
behind our bumpy boleo: el dia que me quieras.
Neruda’s unearthed skeleton clings to my arms,
scent of honeysuckle climbing limbs like vines,
as I sweep and dip inside his metaphoric sigh of sea
and our final soltada––voice of the rain crying:
no carnations or barcaroles for me,
only a wound that love had opened.
Neruda, now so mystical and magical,
cloaks his bones in flesh and play, conjures
a dusty fiddle, leaps and lands on the walkway below,
the violin with its ragged companion...
learning how to befriend lost souls
and sing songs to wandering strangers.
Publication/Award Credit: Apogee Magazine 53, Emily Stauffer Poetry Prize. Franklin College, 2015
In this surreal narrative the Neruda lines are italicized and from his poems in this order:
“Love Sonnet XVII,” “Drunk as Drunk,” “Poem Twenty,” “Lost in the Forest, Come With Me I Said and No One Knew VII,” “Ode to a Violin in California.”
le crayon qui parle
...night will then begin to fade
and chains break and fall––Al-Shabi
When Picasso traded his Pont Neuf
studio paints and brushes for pen to write:
I separate day from night
and the starless sky
from the empty heart,
his canvases turned inky pages of words,
their untamed sketches of dreams winding
paths of thought through summer light
streaming in parlor windows between wars
until Gertrude Stein advised,
“Pablo, go home and paint.”
Then Guernica rose in blacks and whites,
its wild-eyed bull rearing up above
a grief stricken mother with child in arms,
the speared horse, sword sprouting flowers,
dismembered arm bearing a flame lit light of hope.
Troops have since fortressed darkened Parisian rues,
its artist and writers, its families and friends
in retreat from familiar cafés and galleries,
stadiums and concert halls, from jihadists
with kalashnikovs and bomb belts. Everyone
holed up in their ateliers, lofts, and homes
peering out over Seine or Vosges, Tuileries or Bois,
across arrondissements onto blackened views
of a wounded city mourning and left to do
what it must––to witness, to sing or to pray,
to hold vigil, to take up paints or dig hands in clay,
to run fingers across keys, to put pen to paper
to let le crayon parle, as dreary fearsome nights
begin to fade and chains of pain break and fall.
Off the Coast: Maine’s Intl Poetry Journal, “The Things They Imagined,” Fall 2016
After my mother’s death,
I pulled the sheets awash in fleur-de-lis
straight down in a swift swoop of cloud
off the deathbed onto the planked floor
where they lay lifeless spent blossoms.
It seemed just last week, we bundled and carried them
down to the basement Kenmore, she hovering,
breath labored, hands trembling, it gushing,
chuffing, and spinning its way to the end.
Her Ivory Snow made me sneeze the way it did
days we worked the Maytag wringer washer,
she cranking its arm, feeding bedclothes
through the roller, coaxing me to pull pull pull––
my small hands cold and aching, six-year-old legs
shaking, as I pulled and pulled pillow cases through
I would later iron into smooth warm squares
to rest my head, doze into a powdery clean sleep.
Today, years later, as I stand folding my own shams and sheets,
funeral flowers rise up fragrant with upturned earth
where gravediggers put down rose wreaths and lilies,
scents she liked least with so many friends’ burials.
On that day of my mother’s death, I hear her say pull, pull––
then stretch out on her bed imagining the mortician,
the man who knew her least and touched her last,
loading her body into the dark hearse, cold and alone.
I languished there pressing the small of my back
flat against the padded tufts of her bare mattress,
lay the way I saw her there nursing her weak heart
after a hospital stay she said would be her last and was.
Then as suddenly as I imagined that hearse hauling
her body away, I rose up, a Lady Lazarus, pulled the sheets
back onto the bed, burying my nose into their heap,
into a final sweet moment of the last scent of her,
the one I had memorized from birth.
Landings: Poetry by Andrena Zawinski, Kelsay Books, 2017.
Andrena Zawinski is a veteran educator and activist poet whose work has received accolades for lyricism, form, spirituality, and social concern. Her three full poetry collection are Landings, Something About, and Traveling in Reflected Light. Her work has appeared in Nimrod, Rattle, Gulf Coast, Progressive Magazine, Dallas Review, Blue Collar Review and others and has been widely anthologized in Aeolian Harp, Raising Lily Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workplace, Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse, Borderlands and Crossroads: Writing the Motherland, American Society: What Poets See, and more. She founded and runs the San Francisco Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and is Features Editor at PoetryMagazine.com