Some Beasts
It was the twilight of the iguana. From the rainbow-arched battlements his tongue like a dart plunged into the greenness, the monastic ant-swarm walked through the jungle with melodious feet, the guanaco, thin as oxygen in the wide gray heights, moved wearing boots of gold, while the llama opened his guileless eyes in the transparency of a world filled with dew The monkeys braided a thread endlessly erotic along the shores of the dawn, demolishing walls of pollen and scaring off the violet flight of the butterflies of Muzo. It was the night of the alligators, the night pure and pullulating with snouts emerging from the slime, and out of the sleepy marshes an opaque noise of armor returned to the earth it came from. The jaguar touched the leaves with his phosphorescent absence, the puma runs on the branches like a devouring fire while inside him burn the jungle's alcoholic eyes. The badgers scratch the feet of the river, sniff out the nest whose throbbing delight they'll attack with red teeth. And in the depths of the all-powerful water, like the circle of the earth, lies the giant anaconda, covered with ritual mud, devouring and religious. Pablo Neruda, translated by Stephen Mitchell