Blind Fire

For Vicente Aleixandre

Incinerated weight of the ploughshares.

Wheel of the solar Cyclops.

The humming of ravens and roots.

Darker, a sovereign domain.

Swords, their hasps aglimmer.

Rowel spurs pinned to the hands.

Lambs with their throats slit. Slivers.

Sulfur and scree char the plane.

Without scrap metal, rebar, or rings,

who will know you, my body?

And when naked skin seethes

with this breath, and these bindings

of dark silk grade nightward,

will these arms, these eyes

cede the embers, the ash

of forgotten fires in hand baskets

stoked and scattered by the wind?

We travel, arrayed as harlequins,

over the smoldering sands.

Bronze, neglected bells.

Body bound by foot and hand,

wounded and hanged, do you beg

to salvage the light from before,

the doublet of vainglorious silks,

the chambers and instants,

the falcon’s wings haughty

over faraway shipwrecks?

Pit graves of sea spray and gold.

Jeweled body, stil de grain hand.

And the stars, now decamping

immobile and sepulchral

through the expiatory dome

that annuls ancient crimes

of elegiac armies, green serpent of day

that snuffs out dark beacons,

the stars cast their light on the madness

of a sunset of kettledrums.

Black cohort, affliction of light,

light glowing black on the outcrops.

The soaring of an eagle,

distaff of a sky perplexed,

can it shatter the darkness,

procurer, black panther, ebony,

of a bed of pleasure, a hollow,

man’s succor, derisory

spindle, a body, dreary

dowry, usufruct of shadows

in the abandoned manor?

The moon binds body to body.

For foxes and ferrets

and the scorpion’s claw

have made of the sky

on this bright day their pasture.

Everything is conjury.

I gaze at my frozen hand.

In my heart, countless shadows

come to rest. The horses, the oxen

smell death. Vain fire

consuming an offering impure!

The light vanishes. The tiger’s eye,

the panting of the dog, endure.