1 I touch your feet in the shade, your hands in the light, and on the flight your peregrine eyes guide me Matilde, with the kisses your mouth taught me my lips came to know fire. Oh legs bequeathed the creaminess of oatmeal, the battle spread, its heart a meadow, when I put my ears to your breasts, my blood * roused your Araucan syllable. 3 Where did you go What have you done Ay my love when not you but only your shadow came through that door, the day wearing itself down, all that isn''t you, I went searching you out in every corner imagining you might be locked in the clock, that maybe you''d slipped into the mirror, that you folded your ditzy laugh and left it to spring out from behind an ashtray-- you weren''t around, not your laugh or your hair or your quick footsteps coming running 15 Snow-pelted cordilleras, white Andes, walls of my homeland, so much silence, they hem-in the will, the struggles of my people. Above-- the silvered mountains, below-- the green thunder of the ocean. Still these people scratch at their bristling lonelinesses, they steer through sheer waves and in the afternoon they find a guitar, and go for a walk singing. My people never hold back. I know where they come from and where they''ll go some day with that guitar. That''s why I''m not unnerved by the bloody sun hung out over the whiteness, the spectral cordillera shutting down the roads.

My people toughened their hands quarrying jagged minerals, they know hard times, and they go on, they keep on. We Chilenos, a poor people, miners, fishermen, we want a taste of what''s happening apart from the snow, we scan the sea for messages and news, we''re holding on. Come winter the Andes lays out its infinite tablecloth, Mount Aconcagua''s hoary mane freezes to its white head, the grand cordilleras sleep, the peaks covered with the same vast sheet, the rivers harden up, all across the planet snow keeps falling, a multiplicity of shivers. But come spring, death''s mountains are reborn, the water''s once again a living substance, a song, and a forgotten weed pokes up, later everything is scented with sweet mint or heady araucarias, beneath the mournful flight of condors the herons shoot out from the silence. Then the whole cordillera gives itself back to the Chileans, and between the sea and the peaks fires fan out. Spring swishes across the mountain with its suit of breezes, yellow flowers pour gold fragrance into the earth''s old scars, everything moving, everything in flight, coming and going, the news of the world, the tendriling forth of history, footsteps of conquistadors overcome by sheer labor, and taller than the highest rocks is man, at the crest of the Andes mankind, the invincible expansion, the advance of the people. And at the snow-covered pinnacle, lifting his head, his hands still holding a shovel, the Chilean looks up without fear, without sadness. The snow, the sea, the sand all of it is his road.

We''ll struggle on. 11 If they put a boat near a Chilean, he jumps in, he exiles himself and is lost. The rich man heads to Vesuvius, and doesn''t notice the maternal heights, the high Andean flame, he flies to Broadway, to the Mayo Clinic, to the Moulin Rouge, the poor Chilean, with his only shoes crosses into Neuquén, the forsaken territories of Patagonia, he hikes the moonriver shorelines of Peru, he sets his hunger down in Colombia, migrates as he can, changing stars like shirts, the Chilean is a crazy woman with railing eyes, an amiable heart, sky-blue skin or he''s the traveling salesman with his wine, guitars, water pipes or he could be the sailor who gets married in Veracruz and never comes back to his island, to his fragrant oceanic Chiloé. 14 And where are the horses? With so much living and dying, well-schooled people with their good mornings spoken, their clipped so-longs spoken, didn''t have time to say farewell to their root-bound horses. I rode a drop of rain I rode a drop of water but I was so little back then I slid off the earth and my saddle got lost among horseshoes, low vines the man is too hard at work now to glance into the thick forest he no longer checks the leaves nor do leaves fall from the sky for him now the man is hard at work hard at work digging his grave. It''s necessary to see how silence hangs over the quake-rubbled outskirts of Valdivia to know why the buried community won''t recognize the communion of roots because those who fell dead there died before dying. And yet, as they say, the heart is a leaf and the wind makes it throb. 12 I rolled beneath hooves, the horses passed over me like cyclones, the moment clutched its flags, and riding the student fervor it blew into Chile-- sand and blood from niter quarries, coal from back-breaking mines, copper with our blood percolating into the snow and so the map was changed, the pastoral nation bristled into a forest of fists and horses, and before I turned 20 I received, amid the blows of police cudgels, the throbbing of a vast, subterranean heart and to safeguard the lives of others I understood it was my own and I came by friends who will defend me to the last because my poetry, barely even shucked, received the honor of their agonies.