from Elephant Cemetery

Here Are the Words that Give Me Body

Here is endless sorrow
and the shadow of that sorrow
shaking me
Here’s the heart bursting
and issuing the omen of death 
Heart that’s accomplice to gravediggers
muscle lashing out against blood in the hour of pleasure
and tasting it and making it soft as a silk handkerchief
Heart churning and calling
and recognizing the howl of the other
Heart of goodness opening to let in everything
Apple shining among the bones
Heart of nothing
Heart shining like a fish in the river
Heart escaping
and dissolving like a spoonful of red dust
The heart that does not love
                                            and the one not loved
           that, meekly, into other soft minerals, melts




When I’m Dead 

say you left me alone
left in me the curtain of darkness billowing
spread kisses
far from my land         far from our native land
that you didn’t return until love’s supplies ran out
until something shook you and brought you back to the storm
say you grew tired of waiting for my moorings to let go
that my mouth wouldn’t take any hook
that I lay stranded on a beach
where everything can be seen and everything passes and you don’t come back

That my confinement was necessary
to protect me from myself
to protect me from legacies of love and hate
to keep me just like that from the world
that wanted to break me into all my shining parts
and into all the little constellations my body kept.

Say that you left with the tide and would return
when I was tamed and quiet
that the days’ waters would bring back
your eyes and their prey
                                             the salt
                                                                   the festering
and that you’d come back to see
how your monster had changed
how bit by bit she left the window alone
and no one heard
                                 for one night
                                           a single pane breaking 




I Thought I Was Missing Parts

a nighttime scar on my vertebral line,
filings between my knees,
science books hidden between wall and staircase,
some run-down verse that, from the sunken earth
I bellowed, ridiculous artifacts I stole all along from the world. 

I was not yet a bird then;
only scraps of matter and the house still far away,
in the hands of another silence, in another void that would adapt,
definitively,
to the room of my body-to-be.
 



Lands fertile for snow,

layers and layers of white on white with different names.
You write me of the pain in your kidney, interminable in your back,
of the loneliness weighing down everything, your hat,
your winter gloves,
some of the words,
and about the jam and bread that has no flavor. 

For me it’s all the same in here,
a cold provoked by my own absence.
I no longer move the chair closer to look out through the holes of my eyes,
I’m somewhere else drowning
and still you walk across the dry fields, 
with your body’s truth and the poetry inside you
consumed in a dense and terrible fire that lets you go on.



 
We Talk About Darkness

or about whales who sing near their children
songs of the farthest ocean.
On the same postcard, some couples are naked.
But we also talk about the night, when someone
turns on the houselights to distinguish it,
like a small boat on high seas. 

And no: I turned on no lights,
not even the one inside
or the lamp against the dawn.
Some nights you lit the moon
so that years later it would erase you.  
I thought only: I will go on telling you this story,
I’ll tell you about the craters and the rabbit.

I adjusted my darkness and showed you
how I came to be left among the branches one more owl,
eyes wild through the leaves,
a small beast ready to wound, to annihilate.

I knew I was going to kill you one day; still
the door was the only thing between us.
You protected me from myself, rescued me between your claws,
far from the others’ disappearance, the ones who scrutinize,
who come closer to regard themselves in the dead well.


 

From the Earth of Our Hands

salt is born
guts of a day belonging to us
a moment when the word draws
cords that tighten to catch us
and raise the body to the place the light is set 

Something runs through us so as not to disappear
into the picture’s center
an arcade
and all the melancholy comes off with water