海角大神

As April brings another observance of National Poetry Month, I鈥檝e been thinking a lot about Pablo Neruda, the Chilean writer whose work recently reminded me what poetry can do to enlarge our sense of who we are. 听听

A couple of months ago, on a gray winter weekend when the sky was bleak and the headlines were even bleaker, my wife and I curled up on the couch and worked the TV clicker, looking for a movie to cheer us up. It鈥檚 how we ended up watching 鈥淚l Postino,鈥� the 1994 Italian film that fictionalizes a season in Neruda鈥檚 life.

While in political exile from his native country in 1952, Neruda lived for a while in a villa on the island of Capri. In the movie, Massimo Troisi plays Mario Ruopollo , a fisherman bored with his life on Capri, which prompts him to try his hand at delivering letters to the locals. It鈥檚 how he meets Neruda, played by Phillippe Noiret, who uses his gift for language to help Mario see his familiar existence in a new way. In connecting with a poet, Mario comes to think like a poet, his vision refreshed by the possibilities of land and sea, the wind, the faces of family, the beating of the human heart.

I finished 鈥淚l Postino鈥� feeling hopeful, but a little envious, too. Why couldn鈥檛 I also be graced by the personal counsel of a famous poet like Neruda? But then I remembered that Neruda, who died in 1973, was as close as my bookshelf, which contained a copy of his 鈥淥des to Common Things.鈥� One of Neruda鈥檚 continuing themes was the way that basic objects, like tables and chairs, soap and socks, a dictionary or a pair of scissors, can seem magical when glanced at a slightly different angle.

Here鈥檚 part of Neruda鈥檚 鈥淥de to a pair of socks鈥�:

听Maru Mori brought me

听a pair

of socks

that she knit with her

shepherd鈥檚 hands.

Two socks as soft

as rabbit fur.

I thrust my feet

inside them

as if they were

two

little boxes

knit

from threads

of sunset

and sheepskin.

That鈥檚 how Neruda transforms something as simple as socks, which we pull from the drawer daily and slide on without thought, into something to savor and marvel over.

This is really what all good poets can do 鈥� making the mundane into the magical, the everyday into an adventure. This April, along with Neruda, I鈥檝e been reading Billy Collins鈥� new collection, 鈥淭he Rain in Portugal,鈥� as well as 鈥淓nvelope Poems,鈥� a collection of verse fragments that Emily Dickinson scribbled on the backs of envelopes. In one of these musings, Dickinson observes that some of us 鈥渁re only profound by accident.鈥�

If we want those moments of deepened awareness to arrive more often, poetry is there to help 鈥� in April, and beyond.

鈥� Danny Heitman, a columnist for The Advocate newspaper in Louisiana, is the author of 鈥淎 Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House."