Poems

If your eyes were not the color of the moon,of a day full [here, interrupted by the baby waking – continued about 26hours later ]of a day full of clay, and work, and fire,if even held-in you did not move in agile grace like the air,if you were not an amber week, not the yellow … Read more

If suddenly you do not exist,if suddenly you no longer live,I shall live on. I do not dare,I do not dare to write it,if you die. I shall live on. For where a man has no voice,there, my voice. Where blacks are beaten,I cannot be dead.When my brothers go to prisonI shall go with them. … Read more

You swallowed everything, like distance. Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank! It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss. The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse. Pilot’s dread, fury of a blind diver, turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank!

Spain was a taut, dry drum-head Daily beating a dull thud Flatlands and eagle’s nest Silence lashed by the storm. How much, to the point of weeping, in my soul I love your hard soil, your poor bread, Your poor people, how much in the deep place Of my being there is still the lost … Read more

Who ever desired each other as we do? Let us lookfor the ancient ashes of hearts that burned,and let our kisses touch there, one by one,till the flower, disembodied, rises again. Let us love that Desire that consumed its own fruitand went down, aspect and power, into the earth:We are its continuing light,its indestructible, fragile … Read more

An odor has remained among the sugarcane:a mixture of blood and body, a penetratingpetal that brings nausea.Between the coconut palms the graves are fullof ruined bones, of speechless death-rattles.The delicate dictator is talkingwith top hats, gold braid, and collars.The tiny palace gleams like a watchand the rapid laughs with gloves oncross the corridors at timesand … Read more

The tree is here, still, in pure stone,in deep evidence, in solid beauty,layered, through a hundred million years.Agate, cornelian, gemstonetransmuted the timber and sapuntil damp corruptionsfissured the giant’s trunkfusing a parallel being:the living leavesunmade themselvesand when the pillar was overthrownfire in the forest, blaze of the dust-cloud,celestial ashes mantled it round,until time, and the lava, … Read more

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,in secret, between the shadow and the soul. I love you as the plant that never bloomsbut carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;thanks to … Read more

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all dayI hunt for the liquid measure of your steps. I hunger for your sleek laugh,your hands the color of a savage harvest,hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,I want to eat … Read more

This day, Today, was a brimming glass.This day, Today, was an immense wave.This day was all the Earth.This day, the storm-driven oceanlifted us up in a kissso exalted we trembledat the lightning flashand bound as one, fell,and drowned, without being unbound.This day our bodies grewstretched out to Earth’s limits,orbited there, melded thereto one globe of … Read more