Some Beasts

Some Beasts

It was the twilight of the iguana:

From a rainbowing battlement,

a tongue like a javelin

lunging in verdure;

an ant heap treading the jungle,

monastic, on musical feet;

the guanaco, oxygen-fine

in the high places swarthed with distances,

cobbling his feet into gold;

the llama of scrupulous eye

the widens his gaze on the dews

of a delicate world.

A monkey is weaving

a thread of insatiable lusts

on the margins of morning:

he topples a pollen-fall,

startles the violet-flght

of the butterfly, wings on the Muzo.

It was the night of the alligator:

snouts moving out of the slime,

in original darkness, the pullulations,

a clatter of armour, opaque

in the sleep of the bog,

turning back to the chalk of the sources.

The jaguar touches the leaves

with his phosphorous absence,

the puma speeds to his covert

in the blaze of his hungers,

his eyeballs, a jungle of alcohol,

burn in his head.

Pablo Neruda