.

Neruda comes to me, rising out of his Memoirs like
a duck lifting off the lake through a morning mist.
today, the sky is uncharacteristically white for this time
of year. white like winter, white like stillness, even though
colour abounds. although I see him surrounded by lush
greens, large ferns that slowly sway from sixty years of
growth, whiteness is what I feel for his poetry. it is
this sense of place that I carry with me and no matter
where I go, even into his ideas, there is always white.

his sense of place is evocative. it reminds me of one
autumn during the beginning of grade four when, instead
of being in school, I am sitting beside my mother and
sister in the dome car of a canadian train lurching
west towards Banff (and beyond), towards the profound
effect of witnessing geography transform as the train
inches towards the first ridge of Rockie Mountains.
first seeing them from a distance growing larger and
then passing through them, white above and below
causing me to think "this is my country"
with an estranged kind of eight year old familiarity.
a few short months later, I am packed into a car
driving east. two adults, three kids and a dog
navigating treacherous mountain passes in white-out
conditions, taking hair-pin turns on sheer ice and
prayer while my mother screeches "the kids should be
in school!" and my father, with a white-knuckled grip
on the wheel, shouts, "this is more education than
they'll ever get in school!". since then, I have
never liked roller-coasters.

I glance back at Neruda and catch him in mid-sentence,

"Under the volcanoes, beside the snow-capped
mountains, amoung the huge lakes, the fragrant,
the silent, the tangled..."

I know about snow and lakes, fragrance and silence.
but he mentions volcanoes, tangled things I've not yet seen.
he continues,

"My feet sink into the dead leaves, a fragile twig
crackles,the giant rauli trees rise in all their
bristling height, a bird from the cold jungle passes
over, flaps its wings, and stops in the sunless
branches. And then, from its hideaway, it sings
like an oboe ..."

I once wanted to learn to play oboe; a summer spent
in Toronto sharing a huge old victorian house with
five music students and one who played oboe. how
its sound slithered throughout my thoughts like
snakes with cool skin across hot August nights.

Neruda contiues,

"The wild scent of the laurel, the dark scent of the boldo
herb, enter my nostrils and flood my whole being ... The
cypress of the Guaitecas blocks my way ... This is a
vertical world: a nation of birds, a plenitude of leaves ..."

which direction does my world flow?
does it go up, down or across? although certainly
not vertical (at least not in the same vertiginous
sense as his), perhaps it just rolls across
incessantly-gentle planes like sleeping snakes.
non-venemous ones.

he adds,

"A fox cuts through the silence like a flash, sending
a shiver through the leaves, but silence is the law of
the plant kingdom ... The barely audible cry of some
bewildered animal far off ... The piercing interruption
of a hidden bird ... The vegetable world keeps up its
low rustle until a storm churns up all the music of
the earth. Anyone who hasnt been in the Chilean
forest doesn't know this planet. I have come out of
that landscape, that mud, that silence, to roam, to
go singing through the world."

I have had this experience with particular people in
my life, with those unraveling moments when someone
extremely close says something quite unexpected,
something so completely out of character that their
presence immediately becomes that of a stranger's.
those dislocating moments that shake one's sense
of trust are moments that force a relationship
to begin again.

today, this is how I reread Neruda's poetry, from the
juxtaposition of his Memoirs as if from the rainforest
he knew so well, the one I imbibe from his pact with a
wilderness I have yet to learn. through it, I hear his
voice differently.

my white to his green.