N
a p a l
m H e
a l t
h S p
a : R
e p o
r t 2
0 0 7
MARTÍN ESPADA
City of Glass
For Pablo Neruda and
Matilde Urrutia
La
Chascona, Santiago
de Chile
The poet’s house was a city of
glass:
cranberry
glass, milk glass, carnival glass,
red
and green goblets row after row,
black
luster of wine in bottles,
ships
in bottles, zoo of bottles,
rooster,
horse, monkey, fish,
heartbeat
of clocks tapping against crystal,
windows
illuminated by the white Andes,
observatory
of glass over Santiago.
When the poet died,
they
brought his coffin to the city of glass.
There was no door: the door was a
thousand daggers,
beyond
the door an ancient world in ruins,
glass
now arrowheads, axes, pottery shards, dust.
There were no windows: fingers of
air
reached
for glass like a missing lover’s face.
There was no zoo: the bottles were
half-moons
and
quarter-moons, horse and monkey
eviscerated
with every clock, with every lamp.
Bootprints spun in a lunatic tango
across the floor.
The poet’s widow said, We will not sweep the
glass.
His wake is here. Reporters, photographers,
intellectuals,
ambassadors stepped across the glass
cracking
like a frozen lake, and soldiers too,
who
sacked the city of glass,
returned
to speak for their general,
three
days of official mourning
announced
at the end of the third day.
In Chile, a river of glass bubbled,
cooled,
hardened,
and rose in sheets, only to crash and rise again.
One day, years later, the soldiers
wheeled around
to
find themselves in a city of glass.
Their rifles turned to carnival
glass;
bullets
dissolved, glittering, in their hands.
From the poet’s zoo they heard
monkeys cry;
from
the poet’s observatory they heard
poem
after poem like a call to prayer.
The general’s tongue burned with
slivers
invisible
to the eye. The general’s tongue
was
the color of cranberry glass.
General Pinochet at the Bookstore
Santiago, Chile, July 2004
The general's limo parked at the
corner of San Diego street
and
his bodyguards escorted him to the bookstore
called
La Oportunidad, so he could browse
for
rare works of history.
There were no bloody fingerprints
left on the pages.
No books turned to ash at his touch.
He did not track the soil of mass
graves on his shoes,
nor
did his eyes glow red with a demon's heat.
Worse: His hands were scrubbed, and
his eyes were blue,
and
the dementia that raged in his head like a demon,
making
the general's trial impossible, had disappeared.
Desaparecido: like thousands dead but not dead,
as
the crowd reminded the general,
gathered
outside the bookstore to jeer
when
he scurried away with his bodyguards,
so
much smaller in person.
[both poems reprinted from The Republic of Poetry (W.W. Norton, October 2006
with permission of the
author]