Because I love you, Love, in fire and in blood

It's a Neruda night.

It's a Neruda night when my heart is filled with yearning for something I do not have. For something I have left behind or for something I have yet to hold, to touch, to experience, to feel. 

Right now, it's a Neruda night because I am in a beautiful, new (but very, very old city) with a new friend having new experiences and enjoying them

And I can only write them down.

Language makes my life concrete, but how many times and in how many ways can I say that my heart exists within the paradox of new-but-safe? What can I do to bring life, color, bloom, to my life so that you are in step with me down city streets and in country lanes? How do I describe the beauty of a looming but forgiving church on the backdrop of a storm and properly explain just how different the storm sky is here from home? How many times can I say I love you and I miss you and I wish you were here until it means nothing, until it's merely a conversation piece, a cute trinket?

And then I remember, as I always do, that that's what poets have been doing for centuries. They think around the words, albeit with a liberal splash of the dramatic, which is why I love them so. 

So have a smattering of Neruda for your night, and hopefully you can understand what I mean. Let Pablo take the feelings stuck between my heart and my tongue and put them in your mind.

Merged, you and I, my love, seal the silence
while the sea destroys its continual forms,
collapses its turrets of wildness and whiteness,
because in the weft of those unseen garments
of headlong water, and perpetual sand,
we bear the sole, relentless tenderness.

Or

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

Or the cute

Conspirators in pajamas who exchange deep kisses for passwords

And finally, the title poem, with one of my favorite lines and simplest explanations of love: I love you...because I do. Because you are the one I love.

I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.

I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.

In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.