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The Heights of Machu Picchu, Canto VIII
by Pablo Neruda
translation by Michael R. Burch

Ascend with me, my American love!

Let’s kiss these mysterious stones together!

The Urubamba’s torrential silver
lures pollen to fly from its golden chalice
while above this canyon’s unbroken silence
everything soars: the climbing grapevines,
the shopworn plants, each inflexible garland.

Come, elfin life, test your wings above the earth,
test the cold, crystalline air,
thrust the embrittled emeralds aside,
test even these frigid waters, cascading from the icepacks.

Test love, lambent Love itself, until the night's sudden implosion
over the Andes' atlean peaks,
when, reeling on the reddening knees of dawn,
you feast startled eyes on its snowblind offspring.

Oh Wilkamayu of the sonorous looms,
when you unleash your thunderbursts,
when you crazily rend your thunder’s skeins
leaving gauzy white clouds to bind wounded snow,
when your wild winds whip sheer cliffs into avalanches,
roaring as if to arouse the sky from its sleep,
what language will you awaken at last in the ear,
thus lately freed from your Andean inundations?

Who imprisoned the frigid lightning bolt,
left it chained to these Promethean heights,
scattered its glacial tears,
brandished its mercurial swords,
hammered out the threads of its war-torn stamens,
led it to this warrior's bower
then left it to lie in a rocky fissure?

What do your harried illuminations reveal,
your rebellious lightnings signal?
Must we travel inhibited by words?
Impeded by frozen syllables,
these dark languages, gold-brocaded banners,
fathomless mouths and conquered cries
arising from your silver arterial waters?

Who decapitates lily-like eyelids
of those come to observe the earth’s occupants?
Who scatters dead seeds
flung from your waterfall hands
only to atrophy here
into fossilized coal?

Who flings branches over precipices
only to bury our banal farewells?

On love, Love!, do not approach the boundaries
...
but ascend, blossom by blossom, through the thickets,
clambering up the coiling serpent flung from the crags above.

From this escarpment zone of flint and forest,
from this emerald stardust broken by jungle clearings,
Mantur, the valley, emerges like a living creature
save for its eerie silence.

Ascend to my very being, to my own individual dawn,
even to this higher crown of solitudes.

This fallen kingdom survives in us nonetheless.

While racing across the Andes' sundial the condor's shadow
passes black as a marauder.
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