The Enigmas

You ask what the lobster weaves with its golden claws,

and I answer, "the ocean knows this."

You ask who is the sea squirt waiting for in its transparent bell?

What does it hope for?

I tell you it waits for the fullness of time, like yourself.

For whom does the alga Macrocystis extend its embrace?

Study it, unriddle it at a time, in a certain sea I know.

You ask me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal?

Though you turn to me for my answer, I tell you

you stay for a stranger reply;

how the sea unicorn suffers the killing harpoon and dies.

Or maybe you look for the kingfisher's feathers,

which tremble in the purest beginning in the tropical water.

Now, on your lucid device of the polyp you tangle a new importunity,

flailing it fine, to the bran:

you would sift the electrical matter that moves on the tines of the void;

the stalagtite's splintering armor that lengthens its crystal;

the barb of the angler fish, the singing extension

that weaves in the depths and is loosed in the waters?

I want to tell you that the ocean knows this:

-That life, in its jewel boxes

is endless as the sea sand, impossible to count, flawless and numberless.

Between cluster and cluster, time among the blood colored grapes, brightens

the flint in the petal, filled the jellyfish with light;

untied its knot, letting its musical threads fall in the skein of the coral

from a horn of plenty made of infinate mother of pearl.

I am the empty net which has gone on ahead of human eyes,

slain in the shadows,

fingers accustomed to the triangle,

longitudes computed in the timid globe of an orange.

Probing the endless stars,

I came, like yourself, through the mesh of my being, and in my net in the night,

I woke up naked-and all that was left of the catch?

a fish trapped inside the wind.

~by Pablo Neruda