Fully Empowered by Poetry

This is the story of the literary moment that changed me forever. And it centers on a single poem by Pablo Neruda that I stumbled across thirty years ago.

We will never have any memory of dying.

We were so patient
about our being, 
noting down
numbers, days,
years and months,
hair, and the mouths we kiss,

I was 17, taking a college course over the summer at the University of Utah while still in high school. In the bookstore I came across Pablo Neruda's Fully Empowered (from his Plenos Poderes of 1962), a slim volume with the Spanish in a thin column on the left page and Alastair Reid's fine translation on the right. The first poem I opened to was called "Births" ("Nacimientos").

and that moment of dying
we let pass without a note -
we leave it to others as memory,
or we leave it simply to water,
to water, to air, to time.

This poem cast a spell on me, starting off tamely enough as a kind of philosophical musing, taking us outside of time to a place where birth and death are somehow both nostalgically distanced and personally proximate.

Nor do we even keepthe memory of being born,
although to come into being was tumultuous and new;
and now you don’t remember a single detail
and haven’t kept even a trace of your first light.

I know my affectionate response is unlikely to be replicated by others, that this was a personal reading. I know there are greater poems, even among Neruda's works. I know that perhaps this was simply my first introduction to the powerfully lyrical-yet-visceral nature of many South American authors whose works I would later enjoy (like the Peruvian Vallejo or the Colombian Marquez). But whatever the case, "Births" hit me like a bolt of lightning.

It’s well known that we are born.
It’s well known that in the room
or in the wood
or in the shelter in the fishermen’s quarter
or in the rustling canefields
there is a quite unusual silence,
a grave and wooden moment as a woman prepares to give birth.

Could it have been the birth imagery? It would be years before, as a father, I would know birth as that messy miracle, deeply physical and spiritual, both routine and rapturous. Could it have been the pacing of the poem that caught me up, the way it moved from philosophizing into a rapid rhythm?

It’s well known that we were all born.
But of that abrupt translation
from not being to existing, to having hands,
to seeing, to having eyes,
to eating and weeping and overflowing
and loving and loving and suffering and suffering,
of that transition, that quivering
of an electric presence, raising up
one body more, like a living cup,

I'm sure that the the stack of consequences ("to existing" "to having hands" "to seeing" "to having eyes" "to eating") built this feeling up, as did the polysyndeton (the abundance of explicit conjunctions: "to eating and weeping and overflowing / and loving and loving and suffering and suffering") -- though I'm sure it would be many years of literary study before I could consciously analyze those features. I'm sure that the metaphors seized me ("that quivering of an electric presence" or the comparison of a body to a eucharistic cup being raised up).

and of that woman left empty,
the mother who is left there in her blood
and her lacerated fullness,
and its end and its beginning, and disorder
tumbling the pulse, the floor, the covers
till everything comes together and adds
one knot more to the thread of life,

And I'm certain that the vivid image of the mother "left there in her blood / and her lacerated fullness" with its piquant paradox -- lacerated fullness -- took hold of me, an image that would stay with me as I watched four Cesarian sections performed on my wife as she would deliver four sons over 10 years' time. "Lacerated fullness" nailed it. But there was also this tangle of images, imitating the tangle of feelings one has at this liminal moment of creative disorder ("tumbling the pulse, the floor, the covers") leading up to this bizarre climax pairing a very quiet image ("one knot more to the thread of life"), with a violent one about a savage sea:

nothing, nothing remains in your memory
of the savage sea which summoned up a wave
and plucked a shrouded apple from the tree.

The only thing you remember is your life.

What did that mean? What was that wave picking apples from a tree, and what kind of crazy image is that? I couldn't sort out why it worked. I just knew that it did. Now, at some distance, I sense the propriety of the image. The delicacy and fragility of life is like that hidden apple; the savage sea and its wave, connecting so carefully to the precious fruit, is all that mess that surrounds procreation -- from sex and its primal tides and otherworldliness, to gestation and labor with all their brute forces and fan of feelings. Oh yes, now I do know, those cute little babies cooing in their mothers' arms are the quiet side of raging storms and terrific tides whose forces organize and sanctify these tiny yet gigantic lives.

And at that climax of images also came the climaxing ideas of memory, and a kind of awe and terror at how something so purposeful and personal as one's birth, something so momentous and even violent, should be shrouded in obscurity, razed from consciousness, a nothing in the memory. "The only thing you remember is your life" is absolutely right and seems absolutely wrong. But what Neruda implies here, not stated, is our capacity to remember the lives and the deaths of others. Ah, yes. I cannot really know my own entrance or exit. But I am witness to the miracle, to that "quivering of an electric presence," among my own. With them, for them, among them -- I remember everything.

It's taken some time for me to appreciate why that poem meant so much to me. The irony is that my feelings for this poem are so intimately connected to the births of my children and the deaths of those I've loved that I cannot, for the life of me, understand how a 17-year old, insulated from all the serious business of birthing and passing into the next life, could have connected to the poem so fundamentally.

My only answer is that literature can somehow step out of time altogether. My older self, the father who has taken babies to hospitals in the night, the bishop who has ministered to those surrounding caskets and burial plots -- was somehow with me there on a Summer afternoon in 1981, in a university bookstore, holding a slim volume of poetry, blinking into the mute page with spellbound awe. The me-outside-of-time intersected with my teen self long enough to see the poem for what it was.

I bought that book. I memorized that poem. I read it over in the original Spanish and I read the poem aloud to people. They didn't always get it. They weren't always there, present to its powers. But I was. I have been. I am plenos poderes, fully empowered by such poetry.

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Los nacimientos
Pablo Neruda

Nunca recordaremos haber muerto.

Tanta paciencia
para ser tuvimos
anotando
los números, los días,
los años y los meses,
los cabellos, las bocas que besamos,
y aquel minuto de morir
lo dejamos sin anotación:
se lo damos a otro de recuerdo
o simplemente al agua,
al agua, al aire, al tiempo.
Ni de nacer tampoco
guardamos la memoria,
aunque importante y fresco fue ir naciendo;
y ahora no recuerdas ni un detalle,
no has guardado ni un ramo
de la primera luz.

Se sabe que nacemos.

Se sabe que en la sala
o en el bosque
o en el tugurio del barrio pesquero
o en los cañaverales crepitantes
hay un silencio extrañamente extraño,
un minuto solemne de madera
y una mujer se dispone a parir.

Se sabe que nacimos.

Pero de la profunda sacudida
de no ser a existir, a tener manos,
a ver, a tener ojos,
a comer y llorar y derramarse
y amar y amar y sufrir y sufrir,
de aquella transición o escalofrío
del contenido eléctrico que asume
un cuerpo más como una copa viva,
y de aquella mujer deshabitada,
la madre que allí queda con su sangre
y su desgarradora plenitud
y su fin y comienzo, y el desorden
que turba el pulso, el suelo, las frazadas,
hasta que todo se recoge y suma
un nudo más el hilo de la vida,
nada, no quedó nada en tu memoria
del mar bravío que elevó una ola
y derribó del árbol una manzana oscura.

No tienes más recuerdo que tu vida.