In his immeasurable essays on love as the antidote to human separateness, German psychotherapist Erich Fromm wrote about "Love as a state of being," something to be sought, done, and acted upon.   For more on the physicality of love and its institutions read "The Truth About Marriage" my post about the power of marriage to keep us married.

Pablo Neruda's (July 12, 1904 – September 23, 1973) Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, first published in 1952, carry that same physicality and formation of love as a thing.

Neruda's love poems cling like webs and sting like frost.

The light wraps you in its mortal flame.
Abstracted pale mourner, standing that way
against the old propellers of the twilight
that revolves around you.

Speechless, my friend,
alone in the loneliness of this hour of the dead
and filled with the lives of fire,
pure heir of the ruined day.
From "The Light Wraps You"

"You keep only darkness, my distant female, from your regard sometimes the coast of dread emerges." A storm's arrival off the coast of New Zealand. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

The way Mary Oliver imagined stones under the soil longing to be touched or Coleridge's childhood memory of a river otter, Neruda builds and folds the deeply complex emotions of love into the vast bosom of nature—pines, wind, sea, shore, rocks, and shells.

Transposing physical selves into some conceptual space of nature allows us to expand infinitely in metaphor.     In his study of metaphors in plain sight, James Geary shows how diverting and jumbling our senses allows a more expansive perception of the world.  
"From an evolutionary perspective, it is far safer to automatically attribute agency to inanimate objects that behave like living things than it is to mistake a living thing for a seemingly inanimate object. The swaying in the trees may just be a breeze or it could be a wild beast, coiled and ready to strike. You can misperceive the breeze as a beast or the beast as a breeze. Which mistake would you rather make?"

The body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,
you look like a world lying in surrender.
My rough peasant's body digs in you
and makes the son leap from the depth of the earth.

I was alone like a tunnel. The birds fled from me,
and night swamped me with its crushing invasion.
To survive myself, I forged you like a weapon,
like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling.
From "Body of a Woman"

Neruda's symbolic complexity - a woman's body is hills, earth, a man a weapon, our place of being a tunnel, a field - allows the Chilean poet to penetrate all aspects of love: sorrow, despair, joy, fatigue, silence. In precious few poems, he delivers this bundle of everything at once, unconsciously perceptive, rocking from heel to toe in some universal pulse.

Like the longing for some indistinct thing that used to be or could be but isn't right now. Is that part of love?

So that you will hear me
my words
sometimes grow thin
as the tracks of the gulls on the beaches.

Necklace, drunken bell
for your hands smooth as grapes.
From "So You Will Hear Me"

Or what about love's relaxed comfort? Pure perfection, yet so poorly held for long, quickly gone once grasped.

Like breath, like day, like dew, like wind.

Your breast is enough for my heart,
and my wings for your freedom.
What was sleeping above your soul will rise
out of my mouth to heaven.

In you is the illusion of each day.
You arrive like the dew to the cupped flowers.
You undermine the horizon with your absence.
Eternally in flight like the wave.

I have said that you sang like the wind
like the pines and like the masts.
Like them you are tall and taciturn,
and you are sad, all at once, like a voyage.
From "Your Breast is Enough"

"Leaning into the afternoons, I cast my sad nets toward your oceanic eyes. There in the highest blaze, my solitude lengthens and flames, its arms turning like a drowning man's." Ebb tide. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Neruda's concept of love is abundant and reparative. It is vast and everything.

While Fromm defined love in clean, almost mutually exclusive categories like brotherly love and motherly love,   I've expanded on both of these loves, apart from Fromm but using his wisdom as guidance, read more in "Brotherly Love" and "What We Write About When We Write About Our Mothers". Neruda lets it swim in conflicted complexity.

Erotic love is exclusive, but it loves in the other person, all of mankind, all that is alive. It is exclusive only in the sense that I can fuse myself fully and intensely with one person only. Erotic love excludes the love for others only in the sense of erotic fusion, full commitment in all aspects of life — but not in the sense of deep brotherly love.
From Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving

It is only fitting that a love that includes everything expands beyond the corporal and the human to some Providence-granted beauty of nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson thought nature led us to an eternal stream of consciousness. Sculptor Barbara Hepworth thought that "our sense of mystery and our imagination is kept alive" in contemplating nature."

"Murmuration" by artist Ann Pease. "I awoke," Neruda wrote, "And at times birds fled and migrated that had been sleeping in your soul."

Neruda is such a layered soul, always besuited. He was from the longest, thinnest country in the world, separated by mountains to the east, the world's largest ocean to the west, and a desert to the north. A Chilean friend once told me Chile had the mental energy of an archipelago, an island nation; mountains took the form of water in their physical separation of space.

In 1971, Neruda fled to Argentina over the Andes as a political refugee and did not return for nearly a decade. He spoke of the flight in his 1971 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and it illuminates his mindset.

Each of us made his way forward filled with this limitless solitude, with the green and white silence of trees and huge trailing plants and layers of soil laid down over centuries, among half-fallen tree trunks, which suddenly appeared as fresh obstacles to bar our progress. We were in a dazzling and secret world of nature, which at the same time was a growing menace of cold, snow, and persecution. Everything became one: the solitude, the danger, the silence, and the urgency of my mission."
From Pablo Neruda's "Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech," 1971.
Read full speech here.

That "oneness" is carried so thoroughly throughout Neruda's love poems and his poetry celebrating things that have been touched and loved.

"Ah, the vastness of pines..." wrote Neruda. "The deer go into the unchartered pinewoods... where everything is so quick and uncertain," wrote Mary Oliver. "Reaching the light" Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Oneness with all humankind, with nature - isn't that love? Enable such love with Marcus Aurelius on how our bodies were made for cooperation, Frans de Waal on our empathy as a biologically-formed aspect of human nature, and consider Ovid's poetry of love, which, 2000 years after its authorship, still sounds witty and fresh.