The Ghost of Pablo Neruda Walks into Hemingway’s Seaside Bar
Liz Chang
with excerpts from “Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market”/a response to La Fábula de La Sirena y Los Borrachos
He appears at the edge of the rocky tide as though he’s walked all day through the sea’s truth. Still, he holds a small conch in the crook of his mouth, as if it grew there after his pipe rotted, as if at any moment he might open a ceremony of some importance. For now, he strides up the waterlogged ramp and crosses to the microphone as a man unfazed by this night, undistracted by the closing eye of salmon-coloured light on the water, the party already in full tilt.
The cover band jams, I’m a picker, I’m a grinner, I’m a lover and I’m a sinner… but Neruda takes centre stage in his sweat-stained work shirt. (It is tucked into the heft of his pants that ride too high on his broad belly, as if someone has tried to saddle a sea cow.) He raises his arms in welcome, in a pose that says, I died and have been resurrected before your eyes tonight. I have come to speak, says the blown open sail of his body, the confidence leaking out of him from every orifice, seeping down to his impossibly shiny shoes that have sprouted like barnacles at the base of muscled, phantasmagoric legs.
The sirena floats just under the dock, out of the reach of even the curious noses of stray dogs who pick along the rocks for chunks of fallen appetisers. The crown of her head is born up through the surf, and her eyes emerge as two tiny gold snails.
The poet begins, “Here, among the market vegetables…” but at last no sound bubbles forth.
She watches him opening and closing his mouth as a confused, caught fish, drawing in air, and the off-tempo guitar continues: play my music in the suuuun. She tracks his expression. He glances at the bar, where he seems sure someone important stands (maybe Anita, the club owner), someone who will realise that all of this is a mistake, will realise that he, the incomparable Neruda, has returned, and that she had better scatter these sad dogs she calls musicians, who seem to be running after the Steve Miller Band without purpose or direction in a jumbled ruin of nature. But Anita cannot see him – no one even sees the clamshell hat he removes and holds lightly in his hands in mock supplication – and he hesitates, then slips unceremoniously into the swaying crowd as if the ground under him is suddenly wet, as if he has grown a tail and it flops.
La sirena assesses the dark night. Her coral lips emerge from the waterline pursed, almost saying, what will you do now, Neruda, now that you are drained of your oratorical magic?
A reedy groupie stands at the railing, wearing a tight woven net of a dress, smoking her cigarette in one cupped hand with the other arm draped self-consciously across her waist. With each drag at her lips, she reaches the flame through Neruda’s absent shoulders, and after a few inhales, the washed-up curve of his body rolls forward in resignation.
The mermaid sees all of this from the safety of the green froth on breaking waves. It is not long before she feels this is too hard to watch; it is enough, this humiliation and silence. With a slash of her tail, she turns into the dark embrace of the sea. With each stroke, the resolved span of her collarbone screams into the water, Now do you see?
Liz Chang was 2012 Montgomery County Poet Laureate in Pennsylvania. Her poems have appeared in Verse Daily, Rock & Sling, Origins Journal, Breakwater Review, and Stoneboat Literary Journal, among others. Her translations from French appeared in The Adirondack Review. She is an Associate Professor of English at Delaware County Community College.
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