Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair Book

3 THINGS ABOUT THIS BOOK

1. I went to Pablo Neruda's house once. Well, I went to one of his houses. He had three of them. I was teaching English in Santiago, Chile at the time. I went to Neruda's house in Valparaiso, which is a beach town. Weirdly enough, I visited on my twentieth birthday, on a lark, because I just happened to be vacationing in a nearby cabin with my host family.
The thing that I remember about Pablo Neruda's house is that it's set back in a grove of dark pine trees and that there's sand everywhere. The sky was dark that day and it was cold, even though it was in the summer.
What I remember most about the experience wasn't the house itself, or the tour, or the nationalistic trinkets that vendors were trying to sell, but rather the feeling that the pine trees around the house evoked. They were like a dark magic that still sits in my mind six years later. Curious. Because this is the thing that stands out to me most about Neruda's poetry: the magnetic feeling of nature. The dirt and the flesh and the elements and the cold, wet, hot, dry. His poetry is so sensual, so primal, so tied to the earth (I know I sound like a hippie, but its true). When I look at my journal entries from this period in my life they're full of this sort of talk. I wrote about stars and cloud formations and the consistency of mud and the shape of a cheekbone. Southern Chile does this to you. The land casts a spell on you. Neruda put this spell into words.
"Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?


2. I read "Twenty Love Poems" about five years ago, but I thought it was corny at the time. The edition I read had all these terrible erotic etchings in it. I hate that. I almost threw up. I don't believe in illustration much, because it insults the reader's imagination. Especially illustration in poetry, a genre which usually uses abstract images.
This time when I read "Twenty Love Poems" I read it slowly. And it reminded me of southern Chile. It reminded me of gloomy mountains, and the beauty of the rivers and clouds and the darkness of the ocean. It reminded me of that period of time, when I turned twenty, right before my life changed in many ways.
This time when I read "Twenty Love Poems" it meant something to me, because now I have been in love. I have been in love and have experienced all of the sorrows and thrills of love. Mostly sorrows. But the hope of future thrills.

3. I found a musty Time/Life book about South America at a thrift store near my house. In the book there is a photograph of Mr. Neruda seated at a wooden desk at his house in Valparaiso. He is wearing a sweater and staring out the window. He has a pen and ink in front of him and he is holding his head as though he's deep in thought or distressed. Or both. I have hung this picture up in my apartment. It makes me want to write. It makes me remember all of the dark clouds. It makes me remember that "love is so short, forgetting is so long."