A materialist.
A collector and a collective.
A national museum.
Curator of wordplay and world ego,
luxurious seashells and Guamanian coconut stamps,
bells, figureheads, ships in bottles,
roots and smooth stones.
Nature, but not raw,
nature humanized and ameliorated,
as if he would inhabit it
eye to eye,
erotically coequal to its hand-worked figurations—
driftwood snakes, fruit flies in amber,
horses in a snowy show ring.
Ringmaster,
wielder of the whip.
And, concomitant, essential human forms
and artifacts: carnelian broach,
giant shoe from the village cobbler in Temuco—
but not the vast forests of childhood,
not the cordilleras at dawn.
Not a fact-checker, not a scrupler.
A maestro, an impresario,
president of Pablo Neruda Enterprises,
director of the great public works project: Pablo Neruda.
Always Neruda, never Reyes or Basoalto.
Neruda, Neruda.
Raices y piedras: Neruda.