On viewing the shell collection of Pablo Neruda
Within the wounds of the sea,
the hardly negligible pain
in the breath of her infinite acceptance,
her secret joy persists
in these little houses of snails, the least of her hidden
consignments where the highest
skills of her pure delight parade
solely to the eyes of fishes
and the shape-shifting octopus.
And when the soft life within withers
or is sucked out for food
as we all must someday feed the other
and what remains is only the poem
that life has inscribed on its house
the shell in its precise cacophony
that the wordless symphony of the sea
deputizes to the shore where the poet
in heartbroken love again as always
stoops to collect another talisman
to decode the tangle of his soul
another spiraled and patterned affirmation
from those upheaving currents
the hidden depths upon which
his very life depends.
David Fetcho