EXILE
Silence has a way
of returning you
to yourself,
ruthlessly,
like an emperor's fiat
that confines by exile.
The sentence of silence
is executed
by a mirror
recording
the pantomime of metamorphosis
for a future forgetfulness --
what poetry in its wake?
Ovid had been staring
at his dressing mirror,
a delicate gilt thing,
a gift from Rome,
in cold, cold Tomis
before he fell asleep.
His Fasti hadn't yet been written.
SUMMER NIGHT
(For Pablo)
I wake up
often
in the noon
that slouches
a minute
behind midnight
and recollect
that moths die of light, in darkness.
There is a moon
in the sky
and the wind bares
the skeleton chest
of a river
to it:
ribs heave in the moonlight, --
the heart of water
is missing --
a passing note
of lament
left in the shallows
trembles
in the mud.
Quickened
by the sun
delirium
has escaped
the funeral of Casagemas
because it was witness
to memory
blooming on his temple
like a dead carnation,
and now darkens my room
with Picasso's blue.
I sit up
for fear of lying down:
night melts like candy
into day.
How strange,
we remember
all our acts of forgetfulness
so exactly.
HAWK IN THE LANE
"The falcon cannot hear the falconer"
Second Coming,
William Butler Yeats
The hawker's cry
waves
through the sun-dark lane
on a current of sudden warmth.
Afternoon
sits up on a couch of mist
and through blear slumber
wonders
what hope was on sale
on a cold day.
The hawk does hear
the hawker's cry,
but chooses to ignore it.
One lost hawk
that cannot find its way home,
because there is no home to return to,
is no great matter.
The hawker's whistle imagines
there is a hawk listening somewhere,
or someone at least.
The hawk's new freedom
from the headiness of return
to lanes
where afternoon has grown narrow
makes him think of love:
that time when his sky danced
and the earth stood upon its sky,
when barefoot stars
squeezed blood from grapes of light
in earthen tubs
and spilled light,
swilled light,
stained the coming of evening.
But, even the time of love comes to an end
like flight in the hawk's wings.
Without wings
the air refuses to hoist a hawk's reverie.
A hawker's cry
sounds the estrangement of clouds
and measures afternoon.
A hawk is having a dark daydream
of lanes in the sky.
Walking in those lanes
takes time,
time the hawk does not have.
