Here III

Here

The world you lacked and fields
come to teach me poetry,
innocence
meaning take me back

to the naked moon into
a few hours
between dream
and imagination dissolving

thought for
sound masks our animal sense
in each of us hunger
voices. Yer own silence

is in my mouth. The history of you
and yer name
go breathing
you and me

flowers. Our bodies in waves
in specialized means
of experience—duration,
graspable

—was the insides of yer thighs

Here

Sing in a thin voice.
I am aware I want

you, more
than a word

after
tomorrow

Here

Here

Tell me
the beginning

all over
again—

What remains remain from this
war’s a waste. They spread waste and you

bestow life
for me to be

not to be me. I have disappeared
with the voice of a bird.

No, no,
that’s not right.

Let me sleep
on it

and bring me
to a new unknown,

only wake me when
the ship stops—

Here

Here you’ve become
a synonym for sky.

Hurry, lest I forget
how to address you

before the night
tosses morning in my mouth.

Here

Thinking, anyone,
alone

trying to solve a crossword puzzle, not wanting
a cup of coffee

I discover and
then immediately forget

a lock of hair,

anything,

yet still remember jotting down notes
the light is brilliant
with a sour feeling
that is what poetry does

to the song
of two bodies then is an act of freedom
invisible
to tiny secrets.

Here

You are encounter and a short farewell,
a tree and the sea…

The imagination capable of recalling…
but the war took the interior…
the distance between us.

Here

I can no longer
weep [1].

We begin with the tongue
present

and tomorrow’s sun remains
alive in us.

I can no longer look
at the traces.

The sea is no longer
illuminated, no longer

unknown

so long as there is us—

Here

We need rains
from every port we begin us
all the interpretive instruments in our bodies

—from head to hands, legs and toes and lips—we know

because we want
to recall the body’s forest

I say: Pleased to meet you.
Let me
love you,
I am totally up
to the task

when sleepiness slips in
from the numbing wine, meaning

is formed,
made of liquid longing
without assistance or assurance.
Take me to that river
of night. There is so little time
between writing and dream.

The clocks can’t respond enough
to receive us.

You lure meaning into absurdity.
The sea wakes you up and yet
you do not know it. I cannot swim.

Poetry is measured of patching
one mistake with another. Today
to ascertain anything through the field
of your distant yesterday

crisscrossing the fusion of here
with a temporary fire
without maps and identities,
anything,

so we dance
today,here
so as not to die
there, tomorrow.

Here

Perhaps earth is you. Are you
a country
that will accept me?

Here

We wake up with Apocalypse,
wars,
earthquakes,

and floods

and have a cup of coffee.

---

[1] Men don’t cry.

I love the hammer… sonnet (draft)

I love the hammer
of your laugh—
how it breaks
apart
(bit by bit, sound by sound)
the wall I’ve built
around
this heart.               I love the spring day
in your eyes
(all blue, green and gray).
Your lips are a religion
I sacrifice myself to

the altar
of your kiss

(Re)writings of Neruda’s ‘Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair’

I forged you from the depth of the sun. Oh the light wraps your white thighs in roses. I am the stone of the night that you occupy though it is more used to my sadness than you are in this hour where your waist of fog and gold topples me in a quick raid so rich I want to say ‘Listen I love you, love me, follow me in the dying deep hours over fields of wheat.’ I have seen clouds travel like white kisses in the pulsing twilight wind. The earth sings through the rivers of your eyes and fruit falls from the sun

 

I have a language full of wars and songs and birds and flowers flee from me this morning is full of your murmur falling with the summer’s wind

 

I am drunk from the grapes of your eyes

 

You were the gray twilight, lunar, burning like summer. I love you when the night gallops near the sea still (come sleep on your belly here sweet and silent and land in my arms of flames), you are the endless rose and long kisses of darkness, and your slender thighs smell like the first star of summer

 

I cast embers of longings across your eyes the world dropped in the wet streets. No one saw us. Here I am saying I am of smoke and solar currents of bitter sounds like I am crazy I can say nothing of the other side of the moon of your kiss but here girl come smoke the blue twilight in the summer of these eyes let’s see how many stars I have lost and burned

 

I like the morning stroking you, turning like a butterfly your eyes seem to unwind the light over me. I will persist hunting the words that begun on your lips

 

I love your body swamped in the night and I want to be the morning star kissing your eyes with happy flowers and rustic baskets of earth

 

I will go through the white hills of your white thighs woman and hope I am as light as water still songs are drowned in dark hazels of your eyes

 

I rise and flash falling in the twilight of your hair and I am smoke signals near the roses in your lap I am the one who sings drunk with honey from your hips, I am the silent night that flutters in your lips, filled with rivers of song and kisses of shadowy longing

 

I am the sea that beats across your eyes and the currents falling in your thighs

January 11th Sonnet

I cast embers of longings across
your eyes the world dropped
in the wet streets                               Here I am

saying I am of smoke, solar
currents of bitter
sounds                   like I am crazy

      I can say nothing
of the other side
of the moon
of your kiss                but here,
girl, come smoke the blue twilight
of these eyes

let’s see how many stars
I have burned and lost

(constructed from Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair)

 

 

Sonnet II Revisited

I dreamt you were laughing
the other day           I saw a million statues of you naked,
mouth gaping    You were a site of wonder
and impossibility.

I am so ordinary.
I may be crazy and quiet in bed.
I mean reverse that sentence
to find the meaning I’ve been trying to find

a new mouth. I always wanted to learn French
when everything is bright in Paris                                               Teach me
vanished songs from the islands of desire

Speak to me
(exact, uncalibrated)
in iambic pentameter

 

Sonnet III Revisited

I cannot give
up the fluid moon of
your voice
along

the margins              You are
as strange to me as
a name              There is nothing
to write about

on a beautiful day
Can I catch the perfume
of your laughter in a flower?

A phone rings.
I know how I sound,
teach me how to sing.

Sonnet XXXI

I’m getting tired and blind           .
I have no sense of touch at times
I have fits of laughing and crying and I can’t

tell what’s serious and what isn’t much
more immediate, much more local           .           This morning
passed as usual                   .

It was such a great gift to wake
and drink too much
coffee and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much               Here

 I’ll be singing
till the earth and sun
recognize your kiss
and the meadows in your eyes

Sonnet Sequence

I

I throw myself   my poems   at you
if that’s possible.

I have saved a place for you
along the margins,
in the space of a comma
what doesn’t get between the letters

what’s left unsaid   I want to find
the feeling before the utterance
I want to make it seem whole   over
a short period,   with what we end with,

there is nothing left out there
I can’t stop thinking it is not
something seen but something
that can be felt

II

even when I dream
you   it is not
something that can be felt
but something that can be seen.

I dreamed you were laughing.
It was summer.
I’m crossing the line as
I throw myself, my poems, at you

(the line is there for a reason) in each moment
is where everything happens
along the margins,
in the space of a comma

I have saved a place for you
with what we end with. A short period

III

I want to find the feeling before the utterance
in the space of a comma
I know it must be written to know
it exists like the wind

it is not something seen
but something that can be felt
even when I dream you
it’s dispersing already   I have seen

the blue night recede through lost evenings
of my soul. I can’t stop thinking in each moment
is where everything happens
in gold and turquoise. I have saved,

a short period,
a place for you

IV

I have saved a short period for you
I cannot give up the fluid moon
of your voice    along the margins.
I’m wrestling with shadow

in the space of a comma    I want to find
where I left it, if that’s possible,
the feeling before the utterance
the iambs of loneliness.

The line is there
for a reason.
A phone rings. This is
the voice I speak to myself in.

I know how I sound,
teach me how to sing.

The Sea

after Neruda

1

The sea sounds
and resounds
your name
from the west

and, sometimes, my soul
disentangles itself
to cross the sea
like those heavy vessels
to anchor itself
in your kisses.

Sometimes
even the horizon hides
your eyes among the high
dark pines.

2

Sometimes
you are a coin
between my hands

and sometimes
I remember you
like a piece of sun

when you burned
erasing the twilight
of my soul.

3

Here I will be singing till
the earth and sun
recognize your kiss

and the night that flutters in your eyes
and flails
like flowers in the rain.