I need an ocean to teach me:
whatever it is that I learn - music or consciousness,
the single wave in the sea, the abyss of my being,
the guttural rasp of my voice, or the blazing
presumption of fishes and navies -
so much is certain: even in sleep, as if
by the trick of a magnet, I spin on the circle
of wave upon wave of the sea, the sea's university.
More than the mash of the sea-conch, as though
worn by a planet's vibrations
that dies by degrees,
I salvage the day with a fragment,
restore the stalactite with a volley of salt
and spoon up a godhead's immensity.
And all that I learn is remembered. It is air,
it is sand, it is water, the interminable wind.
The young think it little,
coming to live here with their fires;
yet out of those recesses where a pulse once
ascended or sank to its void,
the crackle and freeze of the blue,
a star's granulation,
the tender deployment of waves
that squander their snow on the foam,
the reticent power, undeflectable,
a stone throne on the deep,
my wayward despondency, heaping oblivion higher,
turned, until suddenly all my existence was changed:
and I cling with the whole of my being to what is purest
in movement.
-Pablo Neruda
T minus two days (but who's counting?) 'til we head downeast.
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