Mexico, 1694
No, not dead, say “lost,” but not dead,
say caged with creeping and spitting
jungle horrors that coat the night
like colored vapors on a glass,
but not dead. Dead, so gong-rich
and familiar, the last stroke at midnight
severing every yesterday from today.
The word is the cot of a corpse: dead.
Giorgio, in the bulging cipher
of his grave. Oh, coarse, unsubtle world
to squander such a fortune in the green
bowels of your sea. How shall I walk
from here to there without him,
when the staff of his love led me on,
steadied me. Never again to sit with him
under a night poxed with stars,
never again to find his hand, scuttling
across the blanket like a wayward crab,
never again to gallop through sedgy fields
by his side, a thick vapor of wild scallions
in the air, his laugh realer than the horizon.
“Dead,” you said, and not some other word,
some clot of sounds that means reprieve?
Or perhaps I dreamt him and all of it.
Once in the courtyard, there, I traced
the shadow of a bird across the grass,
knowing by its shadow it was a bird.
If asked what flew, I would have answered “bird”;
but suppose it was a kite, or bit of linen,
suppose it was a leaf, or something else unknown,
a mirage, a stilted wish upon a wing.
There was a man named Giorgio?
A man with whom, and knowledge, I lay,
letting the white fever fill me,
whose white fever I could not have said,
so much like brothers were they.
I remember, by the ocean at Veracruz,
tilting my head far back as we loved,
how clouds tumbled across the sky
like bags of light. Once, only sleep
exiled me from him; and, in the morning,
I’d wake to see his hand hovering
over me like a bird of prey
choosing the best place to land.
How shall I inquire, when he was so curious?
How be merciful, when he was so kind?
How create, when he was so full of art?
How eat and drink without the tonic
of his charm? No, the busier I am
the more I will think of him.
Look there, that light dancing on the floor
like a trembling beast. Even the light
has life, and Giorgio has none.
Giorgio dead, and in a carnal circus,
prey to all the mauve hucksters of the deep
who are silently conning him
out of his cells, under a wide green wink.
The filthiest snout in a burrow has life,
black scabs rolling bits of dung have life,
a clamshell tied together by a yawn,
mosquitoes stilting disease across a pond,
mean men bellying from their dens to strike,
my God, even witless plants
droning green anthems in the sun
have life! Count and critter have life!
And Giorgio is dead. Say the world has stopped,
time floats like a scum on dead water,
time swirls like a collop of sand.
My world that seemed so rich before him,
once I knew him, was not enough.
It changed from a moss that lived
only on air to an Orient of petals.
On the long peninsula of my life,
in whose swamps and meadows flocked tribes
of gorgeous, low-nesting birds,
suddenly love built an aviary—
gone now, flooded back to the sea.
Motion is all, and he will be inert.
He will be a lull where a life was.
He will be a neverthriving of hopes.
He will be less than an inkling.
His mind that could contemplate itself, even,
won’t contemplate the shy hooves
of a goat. What is life,
that it could include this misery,
as well as those radiant flowers outside?
Giorgio is gone, beyond wish,
beyond dredging, and I am alone again
with my solitary mania, but worse,
for knowing it could be otherwise.
Death, that drank the sun from his sky,
you may as well come feast on mine:
scrape off the colored bark of daylight,
and milk the lilies of the night,
for, like Giorgio, I’m lost at sea,
watching, helpless, as the world empties.