a day in my life with Pablo Neruda: a cento
By Dana Kinsey
over my breakfast of grape skins and pink petals / I’ll darn his sea-blue socks with his shark feet still languishing inside / but I’ll be precise and never disturb that one golden thread / and his beauty / twice beauty / knowing he’s doubly good / at rebirthing me / as a horse / my hair a mane of wild salt / my whinny / the laughter / he cannot live without / hearing because its foamy cascade rises / makes me grow / shoulders like honeyed hills / stretching wide above / my new-moon waist / which never expands / under his dove-wing hands / despite the dirt I’ve swallowed / to make my mouth his earth / where we run together like shadows / in the shadows / always holding hands / even when we’re not / and only he can know / of the crystal crown I wear / that no one else sees / the one that never tilts / though dusty winds and brooding waters I’ve faced / to find him / have shrunken me like a little leaf / trembling on his chest / never jealous of other women / who have also cut across his heart / with crepe paper maps and melting pianos / content to kiss only his fingernails or eyelashes / or drown in dreams that spurt from his heart / the heart you must know / stops loving me / drum beat by drum beat by drum / when I try to transplant it / behind ribs / of a lesser man.
Dana Kinsey is an actor and teacher published in Fledgling Rag, Drunk Monkeys, ONE ART, On the Seawall, Sledgehammer Lit, West Trestle Review, Better Than Starbucks, Red Ogre Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Prometheus Dreaming, and Prose Online. Dana's play, WaterRise, was produced at the Gene Frankel Theatre. Her chapbook, Mixtape Venus, is published by I. Giraffe Press. Visit wordsbyDK.com.
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so fabulous to see Dana here! :)
Wonderful poem. Neruda is smiling.