Free Verse

JC was called the Rack
at the work farm,
aluminum milk pails
dangling from his hands.
Once a sudden fist
crushed the cartilage of nose
across his face,
but JC only grinned,
and the man with the fist
stumbled away.

At sixteen, I worked after high school hours
at a printing plant
that manufactured legal pads:
Yellow paper
stacked seven feet high
and leaning
as I slipped cardboard
between the pages,
then brushed red glue
up and down the stack.
No gloves: fingertips required
for the perfection of paper,
smoothing the exact rectangle.
Sluggish by 9 PM, the hands
would slide along suddenly sharp paper,
and gather slits thinner than the crevices
of the skin, hidden.
Then the glue would sting,

the froth of noise
the undersides of the cedars make,

the windblown dark that hints
and fails for hours at effacement —
maybe I could claim it isn’ t

praying, but it’ s asking,
at the least, begging
that these lungfuls of this blackness

eat whatever keeps on swelling
and collapsing in my chest, and be done
with it, no more noise

left hanging in the spaces
between brake lights than a smothered rush
that sounds like suffering

There might be the quibble of birds and the swag
Of a river and a distantly belled
Altar of animals, softly spoken;
Certainly cattail, sumac, and fern
Would rise from the marshes nearby, revealed
In forms too perfect to envy trees —
Not trying for larger and larger keepsakes.

The startling pleasures all broke down,
It was her first arthritic spring.
Inside her furs, her bones, secure,
Suddenly became a source of pain
And froze on a Saturday afternoon
While she was listening to “La Boheme.”

Strength had been her weakness, and
Because it was, she got to like
The exhilaration of catastrophes
That prove our lives as stupid as we think,
But pain, more stupid than stupidity,
Is an accident of animals in which, once caught,
The distances are never again the same.

1

fat
is the soul of this flesh.
Eat with your hands, slow, you will understand
breasts, why everyone
adores them — Rubens' great custard nudes — why
we can't help sleeping with
pillows.

The old woman in the park pointed,
Is it yours?
Her gold eye-teeth gleamed.

I bend down, taste the fluted
nipples, the elbows, the pads
of the feet. Nibble earlobes, dip
my tongue in the salt fold
of shoulder and throat.

Perfect disc of moon, huge
and simmering
low on the capital’ s filthy horizon — ¡ Ay,
qué luna más hermosa! she says
pushing the stroller slowly down Atocha.
And gorgeous too the firm-thighed

boys from Lisbon
a block away, who work
Kilometer Zero’ s sidewalk, the neon
shoestore they lean against
cupping the flames
of passing strangers.

The tint of the sky between sunset and night.

And wandering with you and your nephew
in that maze, half-lost — Madrid
of the Austrias — looking for Plaza of the Green

Cross where, days before you arrived,
an Opel with false plates was parked, its wheels
straddling the curb, and so the van

heading for the barracks that morning
had to slow to squeeze
past... Back at the hotel your mom

is holding up her gift — Amethyst, she says
admiring how light
when passing through a prism

I

there has never been sunlight for this love,
like a crazed flower it buds in the dark,
is at once a crown of thorns and
a spring garland around the temples

a fire, a wound, the bitterest of fruit,
but a breeze as well, a source of water,
your breath — a bite to the soul,
your chest — a tree trunk in the current

make me walk on the turbid waters,
be the ax that breaks this lock,
the dew that weeps from trees

XII

once again I look out your window
and the world looks oddly different,
maybe the fields have blossomed,
or perhaps more stars have been born

delirious waves caress my feet,
something new, unknown,
sunsets whisper in my ear as well,
everywhere I find your odor, your shape

you are among old-growth pines,
in the fog along the coastal rocks,
around the most somber of afternoons

impossible to wipe away your job
from my eyes, from my sad mouth —
you are the universe made flesh