I woke. A tiny knot of skin on a silver table
Set in the birth-theater, blinking in the glare
Of electric lights and a strange arranged
Passel of faces: huge as gods in their council.
I was the actor who forgets his lines and enters
On stage suddenly wanting to say, I am.
I was almost all eye: they weighed me down,
Two lump-big brown-sugar bags in a face
Which did not yet know struggle, burden;
After our rendez-vous — this the last word he said,
Waving to me as the train pulled away from the station.
And so it seemed: harmless. Till evening brought
The first prick of fever, which soon trellised my veins;
At 2 AM came that knock on the city gates,
Little pig, little pig, let me come in....
Ha! ever a bold and warlike people, we didn’ t.
When I take my scissors to your shirts,
I am frightened: not that they will whimper
But that they won’ t understand the violence I mean.
That kind of violence is the other side of love,
Bright as a light-saber and permanent
As the angel’ s swords above Eden
Barring that couple with a final X,
That violence means a love strong as death.
Once Sie ist mein leben, you said, meaning me
And I took those words personally
And knocked upon the door of my heart
Until all its birds flooded to you, in a rush —
Where was it that we went that night?
That long, low building: floodlights
rimmed in lavender, the moon ringed
in rose. I would rather, then, have stayed
outside, where spiderwebs glowed
like jellyfish in the damp yew hedges,
where the paths were chalky pebbles
set with giant stepping stones.
But the film was starting. In the air-
conditioned dark, a crowd of strangers,
strange families (not from our church)
in rows of metal folding chairs to see
The clockwork saguaros sprout extra faces like planaria stroked by
a razor. Chug
say the sparrows, emitting fluffs of steam. Chug chug say the piston-powered
ground squirrels.
The tumbleweeds circle on retrofitted tracks, but the blue pasteboard welkin
is much dented by little winds.
The yuccas pulse softly under the grow-light sconces.
Here is the door he will paint on the rock.
Here is the glass floor of the cliff.
Then one day she noticed the forest had begun to bleed into her waking life.
There were curved metal plates on the trees to see around corners.
She thought to brush her hand against his thigh.
She thought to trace the seam of his jeans with her thumbnail.
The supersaturated blues were beginning to pixillate around the edges, to
become a kind of grammar.
She placed a saucer of water under her lamp and counted mosquitoes as
they drowned.
(she opens the door)
(he is twelve inches
away) her fingers
still splayed across the
battened-down brass latch
of his sternum (she
closes the door) (he
is eight feet away)
her palm skids down the
banister clings to
the fluted globe of
the finial (he
is twenty-eight feet
away) (she opens
the door) the black air
is fast flowing and
cold (she closes the
door) she clutches her
thin intimacy
tight under her chin
and trips down the steps
If you stand on the corner
of Mabini Street and Legazpi Avenue,
wait for an orchid colored mini-bus
with seven oblong doors,
open the fourth door —
an oscillating electric fan
will be driving, tell her to proceed
to the Escolta diamond district —
you will pass Maneng Viray's Bar,
La Isla de los Ladrones book shop,
the Frederick Funston fish sauce factory,
and as you turn left into Calle de Recuerdos,
you will see Breton, Bataille, and Camus
seated around a card table playing
abecedarian dominoes —
If you come to Mojacar
and peel open an orange full of worms,
count how many there are because
those are the days it will take for your body
to decompose after you are buried.
If you come to Mojacar
and find a small green snake with its back
broken, don't step on it or you'll cause
an earthquake that will catch up to you
while you sleep in a continent far, far away.
I must admit to this outright theft.
Before the crickets could impede me,
I reached outside my window
to grab as much of Andalusia as
I could in the palm of my hand.
I took the evening's silver
from the olive trees, the yellow slumber
from the lemons, the recipe for gazpacho.
I made a small incision in my heart
and slipped in as much as my left
and right ventricles could hold.
I reached for a pen and a piece of paper
to ease-out the land into this poem.
I closed the small incision in my heart
