Oh, dictionary, I love thee.

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