Today is the Third Annual Bloggers’ (Silent) Poetry Reading for the Feast of St. Brigid. (Year One; Year Two)
A Smell of Cordwood
Pablo Neruda
Later, when stars
opened out to the cold,
I opened the door
Night:
on an ocean
of galloping hooves.
Then from the dark
of the house, like a hand,
that savage
aroma
of wood on the woodpile.
An odor
that lives
like a tree,
a visible odor.
As if cordwood pulsed like a tree.
Vesture
made visible
A visible
breaking of branches.
I turned back
to
the house
in the circle
of darkening
balsam.
Beyond,
a sparkle
of motes in the sky,
like lodestones.
But the wood-smell
took hold of
my heart,
like a hand and its fingers,
like jasmine,
like a memory cherished.
Not harrowing
pine-odor,
not that way,
not slashed
eucalyptus,
not like
the green
exhalation of arbors —
but
something more recondite,
a fragrance
that gives itself
once, and once
only,
among all things visible,
a world
or a house, a night
by the wintering water;
that awaited me there,
occult in the smell,
of the rose,
an earth-heart plucked out,
dominion
that struck like a wave,
a sundered
duration,
and was lost in my blood
when I opened the door
of the night.
