Naked, you are simple as one of your hands,
smooth, earthy, small, transparent, round:
you have moon-lines, apple-pathways:
naked, you are slender as a naked grain of wheat.

Naked, you are blue as a night in Cuba;
you have vines and stars in your hair;
naked, you are spacious and yellow
as summer in a golden church.

Naked, you are tiny as one of your nails--
curved, subtle, rosy, till the day is born
and you withdraw to the underground world,

as if down a long tunnel of clothing and of chores:
your clear light dims, gets dressed--drops its leaves--
and becomes a naked hand again.

Image CopyrightŪJonathan Earl Bowser. Used with permission.

Come with me, I said, and no one knew
where, or how my pain throbbed,
no carnations or barcaroles for me,
only a wound that love had opened.

I said it again: Come with me, as if I were dying,
and no one saw the moon that bled in my mouth
or the blood that rose into the silence.
0 Love, now we can forget the star that has such thorns!

That is why, when I heard your voice repeat
Come with me, it was as if you had let loose
the grief, the love, the fury of a cork-trapped wine

that geysers flooding from deep in its vault:
in my mouth I felt the taste of fire again,
of blood and carnations, of rock and scald.

Sonnet 13
by Pablo Neruda - 1960

The light that rises from your feet to your hair,
the strength enfolding your delicate form,
are not mother-of-pearl, not chilly silver:
you are made of bread, a bread the fire adores.

The grain grew high in its harvest, in you,
in good time the flour swelled;
as the dough rose, doubling your breasts,
my love was the coal waiting ready in the earth.

Oh, bread your forehead, your legs, your mouth,
bread I devour, born with the morning light,
my love, beacon-flag of the bakeries:

fire taught you a lesson of the blood;
you learned your holiness from flour,
from bread your language and aroma.

Image CopyrightŪJonathan Earl Bowser. Used with permission.

Sonnet 8
by Pablo Neruda - 1960

If your eyes were not the color of the moon,
of a day full of clay, and work, and fire,
if even held-in you did not move in agile grace like the air,
if you were not an amber week,

not the yellow moment
when autumn climbs up through the vines;
if you were not that bread the fragrant moon
kneads, sprinkling its flour across the sky,

oh, my dearest, I could not love you so!
But when I hold you I hold everything that is --
sand, time, the tree of the rain,

everything is alive so that I can be alive:
without moving I can see it all:
in your life I see everything that lives.