Granted: one poet's experience
with manual metaphysics
doesn't make a poetics;
but I've pared my nails to the quick
to temper my craft
and these shabby prescriptions
I learned for myself, at first hand:
if you find them uncouth
for a poet's vocation,
I agree--no apologies needed!
I smile toward the future
and am gone before you can give me your reasons.
last stanza of "Ars Poetica (I)"
translated from the original Spanish by Ben Belitt
in New Poems (1968-1970) by Pablo Neruda
Grove Press, 1972
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