Pablo Neruda, poet,
big as an ocean
is a vast blue suit,
maybe the same suit
you celebrated
in one of your odes!:
well, there you stood,
in front of me, you
who had just won
the Nobel Prize for
being vast and blue
as well as for being
a great poet, who had made
so many waves of lines
both big and small
with your fountain pen
that you might have built
your own ocean
out of them...and did!
I've swum in that ink-blue sea
of your lines for forty years,
and one day, when I was
a young man and you had come
to North America, there you
were, standing in front of me!
Pablo Neruda, fat as a bank
of blue bricks, standing
on the corner
of the Main Street
of Poetry, the only
home town I could ever
really live in—Pablo Neruda,
happy as a banker
who has invested
wisely in all
the right images, and now,
from the Banco Popular,
the dividends are pouring in
in young faces
like mine, who love
your poems and the heart
that prints them out
with every beat.
It is 1972; Wallace Stevens
was right! "Poetry is
a kind of money,"
he wrote in Adagia—
or maybe he said it
the other way
around. No matter:
I and my poet friends
don't care about real
estate, only surreal
estate, the kind no one
but poets make
a penny from
with their million-
dollar metaphors.
After all, the sixties
are barely behind us,
and we still entertain
thoughts that together
we young people can
change the world!
And there you are,
Pablo Neruda, in
Low Library at
Columbia University,
where Frank MacShane,
my translation seminar
teacher, leads three or
four of us up to you
after the ceremony is over
and introduces us. Frank
had seen me showing a toy
my wife had brought back
from somewhere
as our group waited
for Neruda to appear.
"Give it to him afterwards,"
Frank whispered to me. "He has
a huge collection of toys
back in Chile. He loves them!"
And so, for a moment, you
and I hold each other's hand,
Pablo Neruda, just
for a moment, then
I offer you
my own investment
in the future—a toy
I don't even know
how to name, so
let me describe it:
a globe of planet Earth
is mounted on a shaft
that's held in the hand
and pushed with the
thumb; and, when pushed
like a pinwheel, the
world spins, gradually
spinning faster, opening
slowly to reveal
the moon's surface
with a U.S. astronaut on
it, holding a tiny American
flag that he is about to plant
right in the moon's eye!
"Señor Neruda," I say,
"I offer you this tribute
from the young poets
of the United States,"
and make a little bow.
The great poet laughs
and takes the toy, pumping
it with his thumb, laughing
some more as the astronaut
appears with his flag
to claim the universe
for North America, just
as at that moment my own
country is trying, with
bullets and bombs, to claim
Vietnam, and so many
young men dying, whose
company I have refused
to join. I would only salute
the sky-long flag of poetry,
alive with moons and suns
and boiling stars. The flag
of poetry that was Pablo
Neruda, blue and white
and red, and not our own flag
whose angry face of bayonet eyes
and teeth chewed bones
and stars to pieces, hungry
for death and dollars and power....
And then, Pablo Neruda,
you were off, carried away
to other important festivities
in New York City
where I would hear you
read your poems again,
thrilled to have touched
your hand for a moment
on this incredible planet
and to have made you laugh!
And one day I remembered
that all of this had happened
when I came upon another
of your odes, in whose
opening lines you told how
when you were very young you
"touched a hand and it was
the hand of Walt Whitman,"
whose old hands both of us
have held our whole lives.
I think back to that day
and sometimes I wonder
what happened
to that little toy. Frank
told me that you played
with it on the airplane
all the way to California,
showing it to the stewardesses
and laughing, making them
laugh at it. A toy like one
of your metaphors, tiny
on the page but bigger than
a cosmos, from
which I've tried to learn
how to be a poet.

                             That toy,
was it among the collection
that lay on the shelves
of your house in Santiago,
where they held your wake,
or did it have a place
in your Valparaiso home
where, after your death,
the right-wing mobs
crashed in to steal and
vandalize? Did some
fascist heel or rifle butt
smash the Yankee astronaut
to kingdom come?
But if I lament
that toy, at least I know
that poetry can never
be destroyed. For it is
poetry that plants
its flag deep
in the heart of the planet,
the new world that
we land on again and
again each time we
open one of your books,
each time we take
your hand in ours,
joining one thing
in the universe
to another—
the handshake, the
sign of the metaphor,
the symbol of a universe
in which everything
wants to shake hands
with everything else,
if only for a moment,
if only the way, Pablo
Neruda, for a moment
thirty-five years ago,
we held each other's hands