My Intended Bride - Pablo Neruda

Song

My cousin Isabela…I don’t remember my cousin Isabela. Now, years later, I have walked through the garden patio, where I am told, we saw and loved one another in our childhood. It is a place of shadows: as in cemeteries, the trees are hardened and wintry. Yellow moss encircles the waists of the huge dark-clay flowerpots toppled in this patio of memories…This, then, is where I first saw my cousin Isabela.
I must have looked at her with a child’s eyes that expect something is going to happen, is happening, has happened…

Cousin Isabela, my intended bride, a channel flows steadily, eternally, between our solitudes. I, from my side, set out at a run toward valleys I cannot see; my cries, my movements, return to me, useless, forgotten echoes. You, from the other side…

But, Isabela, I have brushed past you many times. Because you might be anywhere! That reserved woman who, when I walk at dusk, counts, as I do, the first evening stars from her window.

Cousin Isabela, the first evening stars.

~Pablo Neruda
Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
In Passions And Impressions, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux
New York, 1983