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In the Forest of    Wearisome Sadness,
Where one day I found myself wandering alone,
I met my heart, who called to me, asking me where I was going.

The path was long and straight, row after row of conifers receding
To a horizon that because of   the geometry
Seemed farther than it really was,
Like the door at the top of a staircase in Versailles.

But as if   the forest’ s maker had been offended by elegance,
A pile of rocks disrupted the rows: the forest once
Had been a field. I remember that field.

I'm Ramón González Barbagelata from anywhere,
from Cucuy, from Paraná, from Rio Turbio, from Oruro,
from Maracaibo, from Parral, from Ovalle, from Loconmilla,
I'm the poor devil from the poor Third World,
I'm the third-class passenger installed, good God!
in the lavish whiteness of snow-covered mountains,

The fury that breaks a grown-up into kids,
a kid into scattered birds
and a bird into limp eggs,
the fury of the poor
takes one part oil to two parts vinegar.

The fury that breaks a tree into leaves,
a leaf into deranged flowers
and a flower into wilting telescopes,
the fury of the poor
gushes two rivers against a hundred seas.

The fury that breaks the true into doubts,
doubt into three matching arches
and the arch into instant tombs,
the fury of the poor
draws a sharpening stone against two knives.

A huge purple door washed up in the bay overnight,
its paintwork blistered and peeled from weeks at sea.
The town storyteller wasted no time in getting to work:
the beguiling, eldest girl of a proud, bankrupt farmer
had slammed that door in the face of a Freemason’ s son,
who in turn had bulldozed both farm and family
over the cliff, except for the girl, who lived now
by the light and heat of a driftwood fire on a beach.

When I read about the garden
designed to bloom only white flowers,
I think about the Spanish friar who saw one
of my grandmothers, two hundred years
removed, and fucked her. If you look
at the word colony far enough, you see it
traveling back to the Latin
of  inhabit, till, and cultivate. Words

This sunlight on snow.

This decrescendo
of covered stumps & brush —
stop for it.

Stop before the sled end-
over-ends down
the chin of the hill —

the way it always will
at the rock ⅔ of the way down.

Stop & shiver in it: the ring
of snow inside gloves,
the cusp of red forehead

like a sun just waiting to top
the hill. Every ill-built

I can’ t swim because I can’ t fit
into the water

I am
two million feet tall

but thank you for inviting me

I am standing in line
inside my giant shirt

If someone wanted to weaponize me
they would tell me to lie down on New York

and the city I destroyed
would hurt me back

I eat stars
It’ s a riot

I know
my big mouth
full of  their light

Every tripod-
toting birder
knows it never
nests on urban

girders. Even
fences set its
scalded-crimson
head askew, its

waddle swinging,
wings akimbo.
Few have got it
on their lists and

fewer still have
caught it singing,
this endangered
North American

candor, cousin
of the done-in
dodo, big-eyed
Big Sur tremor-

tenor — only
ten or twenty
hang glide over
Modoc County,

I. e., the kind of   verse
That doesn’ t try to force
People to their knees
(Seeing as it sees
To people’ s being thrown
By forces of   their own).

Of all living monuments has the fewest
facts attached to it, they slide right off
its surface, no Lincoln lap for them to sit
on and no horse to be astride. Here is what
I know for sure: