The images in the poem are vivid and sensual, with about as many that are positive (toes that speak in verse and “kiss the dirt,” a curved shell, a “multitude / of cricket breaths”) as negative (“nails like teeth,” “tainted future,” “broken window,” “gates of no return”). Some, like “onyx star,” blend positive and negative elements. Such images are posed and countered throughout the poem until its halfway point, when the speaker protests the “brown and black bodies the state murders,” invoking names readers will recognize from the recent scourge of people of color killed by policemen in this country: “Alton Sterling” and “Philando Castile.” The speaker cries against their loss, saying “oh families / donde se diga tu nombre se dira victoria” (“wherever your name is spoken it will be said as victory”), and afterwards bears witness to the massacres in Nicaragua in 1983.

oh the hundreds oh the thousands oh corpses in the heart
and under the ground oh rupture     oh nameless shame

oh tongue and larynx and throat wall stopped for lack
of meaning

At this point, the expression of grief becomes a dirge. But then the sound of “a thousand bullfrogs in a pond” breaks in to remind the speaker that there is, after all, some hope and beauty left in the world. Besides nature, it comes in the form of Neruda’s poetry (“the endless reach of your teaching” and the celebration “of each molecule of daily life”) and also in “work” and the “dream of a ‘we.’” But the poem’s engine is tension, so in the same breath the speaker mourns the “spit of contradiction” and the shortcomings of communication (“broken translation” and “these inadequate ears”). Rather than neatly resolving, it ends in the form of an unanswered question leveled at Neruda: “tell me from the other world: what do we make now?”
I take that word “make” to mean several things. Remembering that “poet” comes from the Greek word for “maker;” it echoes Adorno’s dictum that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric,” questioning whether poetry can or should exist in the face of terrible evil. The speaker also asks, quite earnestly, what we are to make of our lives in the context of global conflict and suffering.  Notwithstanding Adorno, the answer today’s poem seems to pose is art: we turn to visionaries like Neruda, and we make our own poems to help us bear the despair of our flawed world. The speaker in today’s poem is engaged in the activity of “imagining neruda”—imagining how someone of such vision could ever and might again exist—but she is also walking the talk, engaged in the very activity she asks Neruda about: speaking a poem that can give readers hope. It’s not a fond or naïve hope, but an informed and therefore courageous one. And on this, the eve of the election of the next president of our United States, that kind of hope is very much what we need.]]>