The Question

Love, a questionhas destroyed you. I have come back to youfrom thorny uncertainty. I want you straight asthe sword or the road. But you insiston keeping a nookof shadow that I do not want. My love,understand me,I love all of you,from eyes to feet, to toenails,inside,all the brightness, which you kept. It is I, my … Read more

Water

Everything on the earth bristled, the bramblepricked and the green threadnibbled away, the petal fell, fallinguntil the only flower was the falling itself.Water is another matter,has no direction but its own bright grace,runs through all imaginable colors,takes limpid lessonsfrom stone,and in those functionings plays outthe unrealized ambitions of the foam.

Sonnet VIII

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

Tell Me, Is The Rose Naked?

Tell me, is the rose naked Or is that her only dress? Why do trees concealThe splendor of their roots? Who hears the regretsOf the thieving automobile? Is there anything in the world sadderThan a train standing in the rain?

The Saddest Poem

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight. Write, for instance: "The night is full of stars,and the stars, blue, shiver in the distance." The night wind whirls in the sky and sings. I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too. On nights like this, … Read more

We Are Many

Of the many men whom I am, whom we are,I cannot settle on a single one.They are lost to me under the cover of clothingThey have departed for another city. When everything seems to be setto show me off as a man of intelligence,the fool I keep concealed on my persontakes over my talk and … Read more

The Dead Woman

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

The Song of Despair

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!

What Spain Was Like

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