“Twenty eight Chilean women stripped naked in the middle of a busy road in Santiago, Chile, to pay homage to poet Pablo Neruda…”
—UPI, 1/2/2005
“Naked you are simple as one of your hands”
—“Morning: Love Sonnet XXVII,” Neruda
Flustered, without license or sanction, the women
clawed at whispered cotton and lopsided seam,
pushed irritants to their ankles, and stood upright
for whole seconds, just long enough for nipples
to pimple in soft wind. Behind them, a home that
once held his pens, his grimace acknowledging
a tumbled phrase, earthquakes that grew pliant
in him, and now twenty-eight quick asses framed
in the window. Much too rushed for structure, the
photographer did what he could to stun the slow
chaos—heads were twisted, eyes in blink, pubic
hair indistinct and shadowed. As sirens wailed,
the women hurried into their clothes—blouse
with nervy stink circles, skirts accordioned in haste.
Their names were nothing and they were rootless
in their wandering away. There was no sense
to their sacrifice, until the night came and the poet’s
slow remembering hands returned for their souls.