something flooding and flowing / and falling away

Nighttime: my watch dial
burns in your hand
like a glowworm.
I hear
the stretched filament:
like a dry exhalation
that escapes
your invisible hand.
Then your hand
turning back to my breast in the dark
to gather my dream to its breathing.

A delicate tooth
in the watch
saws at a lifetime.
Somewhere in the forest
the fragments are falling:
splinters of wood,
infinitesimal droppings, parings
and nests in the leafage--
but the stillness is changeless,
the chill in the dark does not lessen.

So
from invisible hands
a wristwatch goes whittling
a lifetime,
a lifetime,
the minutes falling like leaves,
fibers of ruining time,
little black plumules.

As though in a forest
we turned with the odor of roots in our nostrils
and somewhere heard water give way
in thickening droplets
like the ooze of a grape.
The smallest of millstones
is milling the night.
The darkness is murmurous,
sifting down from your hand
and brimming the universe--
distances,
dust, and the earth:
the grindstone goes grinding,
my watch on your hand
in the dark.

Blindly
I steady my arm
for your neck, move
under the warmth and weight of your body,
and into my hands
time topples downward--
a night
of diminutive noises,
wood-noises, tree-noises,
night-noises, dividing,
fragments of darkness,
a falling and falling away of the waters.

Till
out of your watch
and the sleep of your hands
the dream of the sleeper falls downward,
falls darkling, a gush
in the forest;
out of your watch
to your body,
out of your flesh to the
countries of darkening water:
time falling,
time coursing us there
from within.

The whole night was like that.
Spaces and shadows, the turning
of time and the earth:
something flooding and flowing
and falling away.
So pass the nights
of the earth,
leaving no more than a vagrant
black odor:
a leaf falls,
a drop falls
to earth
and the sound of it perishes;
sleep falls on the woods and the waters,
on the meadows,
the bells,
and the eyelids.

Breathe, and I hear you,
my darling.

Let us sleep.
[Pablo Neruda, ‘A Watch in the Night’ from Selected Poems, translated by Ben Belitt]