A MEMORY
Memory, in the wheat-field’s centre
one purple poppy
even more silken than silk
and with a snake’s aroma.
The rest was the roughness
of cut and golden wheat.
I have been tangled there, more than once
beside a thresher
with a wild apple
opened by sex and sudden
and in the threshed straw remained
an odour of semen and moon.
Pablo Neruda
Translation by A. S. Kline