Oh, dictionary, I love thee.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009


Ode to the Dictionary

Back like an ox, beast of
burden, orderly
thick book:
as a youth
I ignored you,
wrapped in my smugness,
I thought I knew it all,
and as puffed up as a
melancholy toad
I proclaimed: "I receive
my words
in a loud, clear voice
directly from Mt. Sinai.
I shall convert
forms to alchemy.
I am the Magus"

The Great Magus said nothing.

The Dictionary,
old and heavy in its scruffy
leather jacket
sat in silence,
its resources unrevealed

But one day,
after I'd used it
and abused it,
after
I'd called it
useless, an anachronistic camel,
when for months, without protest
it had served me as a chair
and a pillow,
it rebelled and planting its feet
firmly in my doorway,
expanded, shook its leaves
and nests,
and spread its foliage:
it was
a tree,
a natural,
bountiful
apple blossom, apple orchard, apple tree,
and words
glittered in its infinite branches,
opaque or sonorous,
fertile in the fronds of language,
charged with truth and sound.

I
turn
its
pages
caporal,
capote,
what a marvel
to pronounce these explosive
syllables,
and further on,
capsule
unfilled, awaiting ambrosia or oil
and others,
capsicum, caption, capture,
comparison, capricorn,
words
as slippery as smooth grapes,
words exploding in the light
like dormant seeds waiting
in the vaults of vocabulary,
alive again, and giving life:
once again the heart distills them.

Dictionary, you are not a
tomb, sepulcher, grave,
tumulus, mausoleum,
but guard and keeper,
hidden fire,
groves of rubies,
living eternity
of essence,
depository of language.
How wonderful
to read in your columns
ancestral
words,
the severe and 
long-forgotten
maxim,
daughter of Spain,
petrified
as a plow blade,
as limited in use
as an antiquated tool,
but preserved
in the precise beauty and
immutability of a medallion.
Or another
word
we find hiding
between the lines
that suddenly seems
as delicious and smooth on the tongue
as an almond
or tender as a fig.

Dictionary, let one hand
of your thousand hands, one
of your thousand emeralds,
a
single
drop
of your virginal springs,
one grain
from
your
magnanimous granaries,
fall
at the perfect moment
upon my lips,
onto the tip of my pen,
into my inkwell.
From the depths of your
dense and reverberating jungle
grant me,
at the moment it is needed,
a single birdsong, the luxury
of one bee,
one splinter
of your ancient wood perfumed
by an eternity of jasmine,
one
syllable,
one tremor, one sound,
one seed:
I am of the earth and with words I sing.

-Pablo Neruda

1 comments:

Mel said...

Yes!!!

I, too, love my dictionary... and it is old and perfumed... and filled with treasures, and was, in fact, a request, a gift. When asked what I would like one year, once upon a time, I said, an old dictionary, because so many wonderful old words are lost to the newer ones... though that shouldn't be.

I LOVE and greatly identify with this poem; had not seen it before. Thank you!

You've been busy! And I've been, well, "blah". I must catch up!

Circe