¿ are you
on the other side
waiting
for alarms
in a desert
of sleepless
evaporations?
¿ are you
beside yourself
in the aisles
that distance
makes shorter
than light waves
in the daylight
that pounds
a lead slab
in the soup
that the winter
dissolves?
i make signs everywhere, with sticks, stones and leaves
for those in the clouds from below the line to arrive
i don’ t have a language to speak to you with, my tongues are all fish
i know that a one is a circle, and that nothing is round,
except every corner i saw by the hearts
lined up on the spine
i know that the winter will finally be here again, and that the summer
will die and be born with its ice
Vulnerable therein & perfectly
relinquished by statis,
object always of my
natal, crepuscular desire,
into the translucent specter,
body’ s blue fossil
of ice, never autochthonous,
still embarked upon
the imperative passage to get
there, to secure a geography
that will beg description,
narrative map, adopted
tentatively; if only to write
the ritual book of what was possible,
but never bound to occur.
We’ d often
been included in
the weather, whose
changes (as in the
still, portending
darknesses of after
noon) were hardly
evident, if even
manifest at all.
The August rain
over Mixcoac
& the deadening
of all aspect
at a distance:
yet our sudden
wet bodies, firm
swelling divested
finally of shirts
& trousers, left
beside turbid
footprints on
the tiled floor;
this tongue, these
lips the lightning
When I stop to consider my calling, remark
the places a wayward temper impelled me
I’ ve found in light of where I wandered lost
the most appalling evils could have befallen;
but when I disregard the journey it’ s hard to
even fathom I endured so much affliction;
what’ s more, my days being spent, I feel I’ ve
seen my wariness go with them. I’ ll come to
my end, for I surrendered artless to someone
with the science to dispel and destroy me if
so inclined, else the know-how to want to;
On the volatile nights of a winter
nature corroborates with magnanimity
a Cuban is in training for amusement or amnesia,
so often and unfairly assumed as the same,
he brings candy to God, he cultivates the vernacular, he fights off
cirrhosis with fruit poached in syrup, he conducts business;
thus research has shown that The Cuban is resourceful.
In the weighty choreographies of a summer
nature authorizes already with suspicion
a Cuban meets the ocean with offerings and harpoons,
so often and unfairly assumed as the same,
“All accounts of the past are made up of possibilities.”
— Dionisio Martinez
for Larry Villanueva
ibeq
Our big city is a city of big bombs and big bicycles, we hire grafters for their pretty art. To force a shoot inside a shoot, to grow an apple on a crab, to grow a plum upon a leprechaun. Dyspepsia is often grafted upon hysteria. To grow a boy inside a belly, cutting capers. Words, through grace, are grafted in our heart and the orange bears a greener fruit that blossoms as it swells. With imperfect grace from that perfect grace from wherever that perfect grace may remain.
adieu
