Pablo Neruda (1904 – 1973), Chilean poet and politician urged us to notice the inconsequential. Odes to Common Things includes Spanish and English odes to quotidian items like salt, a chair, a table, socks, and soap.

1.Lest you imagine Neruda a pithy writer of simple jest, his poem “I’m Explaining a Few Things,” is a visceral description of a people bombed and destroyed: “One morning the bonfires leapt out of the earth…”

Among these words and memories of a war-battered Spain, Neruda’s love of simple elegance makes more sense.

Ode to Clothes

 
Every morning you wait,
clothes, over a chair,
to fill yourself with
my vanity, my love,
my hope, my body.
Barely
risen from sleep,
I relinquish the water,
enter your sleeves,
my legs look for
the hollows of your legs,
and so embraced
by your indefatigable faithfulness
I rise, to tread the grass,
enter poetry,
consider through the windows,
the things,
the men, the women,
the deeds and the fights
go on forming me,
go on making me face things
working my hands,
opening my eyes,
using my mouth,
and so,
clothes,
I too go forming you,
extending your elbows,
snapping your threads,
and so your life expands
in the image of my life.
In the wind
you billow and snap
as if you were my soul,
at bad times
you cling
to my bones,
vacant, for the night,
darkness, sleep
populate with their phantoms
your wings and mine.
I wonder
if one day
a bullet
from the enemy
will leave you stained with my blood
and then
you will die with me
or one day
not quite
so dramatic
but simple,
you will fall ill,
clothes,
with me,
grow old
with me, with my body
and joined
we will enter
the earth.
Because of this
each day
I greet you
with reverence and then
you embrace me and I forget you,
because we are one
and we will go on
facing the wind, in the night,
the streets or the fight,
a single body,
one day, one day, some day, still.
 
 

Ode to a Pair of Sock

My feet were
two woolen
fish
in those outrageous socks,
two gangly,
navy-blue sharks
impaled
on a golden thread.
two giant blackbirds,
two cannons:
thus
were my feet
honored
by
those
heavenly
socks.
They were beautiful
I found my feet
unloveable
for the very first time,
like two crusy old
firemen, firemen
unworthy
of that embroidered
fire,
those incandescent
socks.

ODE TO A BAR OF SOAP

What is it that you bring
to my nose
so early
every day,
bar of soap,
before I climb into my morning
bath
and go into the streets
among men weighted down
with goods?