Love is so short and forgetting is so long.

February 11, 2013 6:08 AM

Pablo Neruda's Body Will Be Exhumed For Autopsy [bbc.co.uk] "A judge in Chile has ordered the exhumation of the remains of the poet Pablo Neruda, as part of an inquest into his death in 1973."
posted by Fizz (8 comments total)

There was thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.
There were grief and ruins, and you were the miracle.

Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me
in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms!

How terrible and brief my desire was to you!
How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid.

Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs,
still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds.

Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs,
oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies.

Oh the mad coupling of hope and force
in which we merged and despaired.

And the tenderness, light as water and as flour.
And the word scarcely begun on the lips.

This was my destiny and in it was my voyage of my longing,
and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank!
posted by ersatz at 6:27 AM on February 11, 2013 [5 favorites]

Chile started investigating allegations that he may have been poisoned in 2011.

I guess I don't see the point of poisoning someone who's been dead for 38 years. Maybe it's like the posthumous trial and execution of Cromwell.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 6:28 AM on February 11, 2013 [10 favorites]

The left-wing Nobel Prize winner died 12 days after a military coup replaced the socialist president Salvador Allende with General Augusto Pinochet.

The poet's family has always maintained that he died in a Santiago clinic of advanced prostate cancer, aged 69.

It would seem the latter might have more to hide than the former. Pinochet was not known for such subtlety, for example.
posted by three blind mice at 6:39 AM on February 11, 2013

Sordel, Sordello, which Sordello?
posted by shakespeherian at 6:42 AM on February 11, 2013

After 40 years, there isn't going to be a lot left. Something like arsenic might be detectible but cyanide wouldn't be.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 6:51 AM on February 11, 2013

Chocolate Pickle: "After 40 years, there isn't going to be a lot left. Something like arsenic might be detectible but cyanide wouldn't be."

I am familiar with the poisons of Pablo Neruda.
posted by barnacles at 7:03 AM on February 11, 2013 [12 favorites]

If we're going to keep digging up famous people, we should start sending them on tour together. Recent stars of the annual Unearthly World Tour could have been Tycho Brahe, Simón Bolívar, Christopher Columbus, Richard III, and Ötzi the Iceman.
posted by pracowity at 7:33 AM on February 11, 2013 [4 favorites]

I was in a stupid but intense (to me) long distance relationship and the girl sent me a book of Pablo Neruda poetry for my birthday. I read it while lying on a hill in springtime, and it was the most romantic gift I ever received.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 1:44 PM on February 11, 2013 [1 favorite]