The Captive’s Verses
Enemy, my enemy,
has love fallen to dust
and will nothing do save flesh and bone furiously adored
while the fire devours itself
and the red-harnessed horses rush into hell?
Sea moss and evergreen, glistening
Agate and dollar-sized kelp on the rocks,
How much it costs—this holding on,
This five fingered squeeze on the cracks.
Europa and Calafia sleep
In the shadow of liquid
Lost between two blades
Fragrant with mis-desire.
In the clearing of waves
Arbors of whales twist in the spray,
Dolphins lace among the schools and
An abundance sails amid symmetries.
Two figures drowse through centuries;
I have felt her shiver and rouse
A nap of redwoods from her sleeve, and
Beneath me she rises in my bones.
You summon the other, like a shadow
Of light she appears at your window
Golden and speechless, same age
As death, she sings through your pencil.
Fine as an eyelid, these fragile
Crusts endure. Water and a memory
Of birth wills us to dream: the flood
Or the fish greater than the rest.
We lie as two choices. Europa
And Calafia sleep, their calligraphy
Of coast defines the banking surf:
No limits but air, effort and earth.
after Neruda
There is another side to you
un lago where the huesos
border in ripples of hot
and cold water, mammal
breath upon the hair of your
chest, chrysanthemums
in your ears, your pods,
stellular. I would tell
of another isle, another gill
upon the shark’s fin of you,
an infestation of expectations.
Espíritus. Adelantes. Bury
it all! Gold upon break.
You are Captain of it all.
And me, the ship’s booty.
You are brave. Decay.
I’m left my cunning. My
country ruined. My nation
wasted. My wash of it
left wringing in the mud.
My bloodmeal seals the crop.
There is this side to you:
He who doesn’t give her
any pleasure but triggers it,
cocksure by doubt. By love
I swear by it.
Bite by it.
Swear.
after Neruda
Does it fill you with power,
with water, with stone,
to create a want so ceaseless?
Hear the creaking of moon
as she reaches to sea, hair
full of shimmering jellies
and diatoms lost in the craters?
There’s a skull and crossbones
in the fix of the rip, in the breakers
incessant breaking of cradle and rock.
All night, all tide, solstice to solstice,
she bends and bears the bending
of water as you filled me with child
so I felt I would give birth to it.
What do I do with the key
to this city, this door to you
that never opened fully?
Do I change my life into yours?
Do I do what the women dare?
Do I abort it? Now that the earth
rusts with the weight of it?
Do I love you less? Do I spit
in the moon’s single eye?
Do I survive? Do I? Plenos poderes
and singing.
after Neruda
Love, if I die
how do I explain it?
Birds harbor mites
between their breasts
and who knows it?
Who speaks the dark
secret of secretive
dark arbors? Were I a bird
I would be a feather
of a bird, as light
as ash upon your gone
brow, the furrow of lisp
over the fur of your
lips. I would take
my advantage of you,
beetle my legs between
yours. Do all lonesome
penance before the sentence
of your name. Say special
grace to your hope
chest, quake before
thin mountains of
rivering, feathering,
full now, a waking
bird, my murmuring heart,
my quiver and arrow;
my shot—I’m shot
full of you. Dead.
A blast of the bluest
air—my jay sears
across free clouds
with sheer audacity.
I love you like this.
A swoop of the heart
and there it is—a field
so blue I live through
a dense dream of wet
and white. This world
could be a dream, this
dream, a universe.
This season’s flight
I go, holding an in-
efficient compass
of pure heart. Love,
I can’t tell you
how it is to dissolve
out of duty and air
and the thick grief
of the expendable.
Who is to say Love
with her battered face
won’t come? Who’s to know
she won’t rise and run
her comb through clotted
hair and spray the scent
of mysterious apples
between her breasts?
She rises with the strength
of seeds and the rule of roots
riddling the sidewalk.
She is the hag who cries
for hours in the mewing
of lovers. She’s the catch
in their sweaty breath,
the blush of rose wine
on the magnolia in winter.
She is her best in ice
when her swelling abides
and small mirrors litter
the lawns. She is the face
you casually scuff through
in the refuse of a storm.
She can’t ever hear you
but she sings. She feeds
the blooming magpie
death until he’s bloated
with the feast of her
leaving. She is the dried
blood gracing his wings.
Vengeful and forgiving,
her honor weighs in a few
blown stars, in the halo
that lingers in the west
when the launched nightship
she espouses in her heat,
the beat between her thighs,
the veldt where she holds
you when you mean to go
free. Love, in her candor,
can’t explain the attraction
but nuzzles the wild
horse’s mane, and rides.
after García Lorca.
Once I wasn’t always so plain.
I was strewn feathers on a cross
of dune, an expanse of ocean
at my feet, garlands of gulls.
Sirens and gulls. They couldn’t tame you.
You know as well as they: to be
a dove is to bear the falcon
at your breast, your nights, your seas.
My fear is simple, heart-faced
above a flare of etchings, a lineage
in letters, my sudden stare. It’s you.
It’s you! sang the heart upon its mantel
pelvis. Blush of my breath, catch
of my see—beautiful bird—It’s you.
Slender, you are, secret as rail
under a stairwell of snow, slim
as my lips in the shallow hips.
I had a man of gristle and flint,
fingered the fine lineament of flexed
talons under his artifice of grit.
Every perfect body houses force
or deception. Every calculated figure
fears the summing up of age.
You’re a beautiful mess of thread and silk,
a famous web of work and waiting, an
angular stylus with the patience of lead.
Your potent lure links hunger to flesh
as a frail eagle alights on my chest,
remember: the word for machismo is real.
after Neruda
My poet, my fisherman, my lifesaver,
you are freon and ice with the substance
of snow, you, with the bleached wheat
grazing your breath-house.
With my bait and bare bones
I gather your rail. I vibrate
and drum with an inner lightning
listening to your blood talk.
Voyager of elusive passages,
caster of the line and lure, you,
with the silences you never complete,
with your falling net of clothing:
Are you filling in the blanks
on your reports? Are you towing
in the pleasure boats? Uprighting
sunken sails? Am I your sudden accident?
Or paperwork undone? Am I peeling
invisible scales from your reticence?
Should I wet my hands before I touch you?
Is this muscular bullet in the shadows
you muskellunge? Freckle-Back,
German Brown, I am ironing the insignia
off your badges. I’m dissolving hooks,
ripping apart the dreaming gills
only to watch you slither upriver.
This is no catch and release provision.
This is my heart alarming the banks
of its dam. These are my hands
leading me over pastures of silt
from the factories of our muscles
and heat. Beautiful sailor, marshal
of my shallow shoal, what could I love
if not your eyes or the silent house
you wear? My savior of the wild
who would rather die, cold as copper
death to touch; my solitary range,
my pen.
for Jay
Verde, que te quiero verde.
—Federico García Lorca
It is true—I love
the daffodil, her succulent
radiation. All things yellow
are good, the Pueblo people say.
You are blue corn, the color
of the north vein that travels your thigh.
You are blue, the color of new dawn
when the pendulums of the earth desist,
when your love rises from her bed of stones,
and desire, desire’s the sleepwalk of the beast.
I want—it is true—a stalk
of the wheat that grows on your breath-tomb,
which covers your bones, fine as the long
nails that girdle this flower. Green
que te quiero verde and the magic
of fingers digging their way into life,
leaves gone yellow from winter on the willow
tree. My branches are the arms that hold,
my hands complete the river’s chore.
And it’s true, I gather love
as others gather breath for tears
and I love the golden light that weighs
upon the petals of narcissus. I love
your cobalt skies, the lightness of air
you carry in your fists. You hold your head
as a daffodil regales in the sun. Let me be
summer for you, past the profusion of
weeds I once was when my brown soul
huddled in her winter grave of girlish earth.