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Fall 1999 Volume 3, Issue 4
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that it overleapt in the darkness
Roofs, clouds, and volcanoes.
Sleep, sleep nocturnal cat,
with your ceremonies of a bishop
and your mustache of stone:
supervise all our dreams,
manage the darkness
of our slumbered powers
with your sanguinary heart
and the long collar of your tail.
*This poem is taken from: Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon. Selected poems of Pablo Neruda, Harper Collins, publisher, 1997.
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How nicely a cat sleeps,
sleeps with its paws and its gravity,
sleeps with its cruel claws,
and with its sanguinary bloods,
sleeps with all the rings
which, like burnt circles,
compose the geology
of a tail the color of sand.
I would like to sleep like a cat
with all the hairs of time,
with the tongue of flint,
with the dry sex of fire,
and after speaking myself over the whole world,
over the roof-tiles and the ground,
intensely determined
to go hunting the rats of dream.
I have seen how the cat as it slept
would undulate: the night
flowed in it like dark water,
and at times it was going to fall,
maybe it was going to plunge
into the naked snowdrifts,
or it grew so much as it slept
like a tiger's great-grandfather
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