O white little lights at Carney’ s Point,
You shine so clear o’ er the Delaware;
When the moon rides high in the silver sky,
Then you gleam, white gems on the Delaware.
Diamond circlet on a full white throat,
You laugh your rays on a questioning boat;
Is it peace you dream in your flashing gleam,
O’ er the quiet flow of the Delaware?
At dusk, the grandmother sits alone
in the light of the long pale pool and speaks
to the frog who is waiting
by the electric gate of the clubhouse.
It will be all right, she says, leaning out
from her chair. Her voice
is churning, and old, and wet
with advice. Her newly red hair
purples under the bug light. It will be
all right, she says, again, and again
the sky rolls in and out on its journey
across the peninsula, rattling the palms.
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
We’ re headed for empty-headedness,
the featureless amnesias of Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada,
states rich only in vowel sounds and alliteration.
We’ re taking the train so we can see into the heart
of the heart of America framed in the windows’ cool
oblongs of light. We want cottages, farmhouses
with peaked roofs leashed by wood smoke to the clouds;
on the ground can spook a horse who won’ t flinch when faced
with a backhoe or a pack of Harleys. I call it “horse
ophthalmology,” because it is a different kind of system —
not celestial, necessarily, but vision in which the small,
the wispy, the lightly lifted or stirring threads of existence
excite more fear than louder and larger bodies do. It’ s Matthew
who said that the light of the body is the eye, and that if
the eye is healthy the whole body will be full of light. Maybe
& sea swell, hiss ofincomprehensible flat: distance: blue long-fingered ocean and its
nothing else: nothing in the above visible except
water: water and
Intractable between them grows
a garden of barbed wire and roses.
Burning briars like flames devour
their too innocent attire.
Dare they meet, the blackened wire
tears the intervening air.
Trespassers have wandered through
texture of flesh and petals.
Dogs like arrows moved along
pathways that their noses knew.
While the two who laid it out
find the metal and the flower
fatal underfoot.
