another neruda tirade

    

________LARYNX                       

Now this is it, said Death,
and as far as I could see
Death was looking at me.

This all happened in hospital,
in washed out corridors,
and the doctor peered at me
with periscopic eyes.
He stuck his head in my mouth,
scratched away at my larynx —
perhaps a small seed
of death was stuck there.

At first, I turned into smoke
so that the cindery one
would pass and not recognize me.
I played the fool, I grew thin,
pretended to be simple or transparent —
I wanted to be a cyclist
torpedoed out of death’s range.

Then rage came over me
and I said, ‘Death, you bastard,
must you always keep butting in?
Haven’t you enough with all those bones?
I'll tell you exactly what I think:
you have no discrimination, you’re deaf
and stupid beyond belief.

‘Why are you following me?
What do you want with my skeleton?
Why don’t you take the miserable one,
the cataleptic, the smart one,
the bitter, the unfaithful, the ruthless,
the murderer, the adulterers,
the two-faced judge,
the deceiving journalist,
tyrants from islands,
those who set fire to mountains,
the chiefs of police,
jailers and burglars?
Why do you have to take me?
What business have I with Heaven?
Hell doesn’t suit me —
I feel fine on the earth.’

With such internal mutterings
I kept myself going
while the restless doctor
went tramping through my lungs
from bronchea to bronchea
like a bird from branch to branch.
I couldn’t feel my throat;
my mouth was open like
the jaws of a suit of armour,
and the doctor ran up and down
my larynx on his bicycle,
till, serious and certain,
he looked at me through his telescope
and pried me loose from death.

It wasn’t what they had thought.
It wasn’t my turn.

If I tell you I suffered a lot,
and really loved the mystery,
that Our Lord and Our Lady
were waiting for me in their oasis,
if I talk of disenchantment,
and being eaten by my distress
at not being close to dying,
if I say like a stupid chicken
that I die by not dying,
give me a boot in the butt,
fit punishment for a liar.

           ...translation?

.....