typhoid

Carlos was clearly malnourished
everything long-ago-collapsed
writing away morning
writing away eyes
the buried stories
labyrinth-like things
shutters opening often into nowhere
he was roofed into sleeping forever
while illness went on
aimlessly wearing his clothes

while exiled from God

we
     sought sky
     encountered every island
     wrote true inside our own dark places
     grew lost in the shadows of our notebooks

the distance seemed small

once only did we kiss
until the ancient minarets burned
    purple and gold
    purple and gold

you seldom recall

finding the purple of old waters
sketching things far out at sea
writing red mornings
as malaria turned through the sky

the scents wandered green
among malnourished foreigners
their bright hands wounded with gold

on and on she roamed

her heart beat labyrinth-like
for gone men whose notebooks of America
narrowed across the flirting distance
like things growing among grass
worked by tourists’ eyes
scrounging through the city’s shadow

on and on she roamed
until the ocean was nothing new
discarding small possessions
only foreigners tried to understand
more turquoise than true

in the end her rusted eyes closed in on just one man
her unhinged breezes piled up in his sun
during her malnourished days she longed to find his room
its waters near to morning sky
rising gold and exiled
above the hours of her dull and wasted life

time for me

was always a labyrinth

always a bright crack overhead
closing in on three stone things—

     1.) the jagged shadows of a peppercorn vine

     2.) an unknown bird of prey
          passing over my purple notebook

     3.) a ruined fortress hewn from chyrsolite
          from where i wrote inside
          my decrepit tent of empty ribs

zanzibar

those starving kittens,
self-exiled,
recalled the approaches of foreigners,
ate jaggedly, always true,
always among the tattered sleeves,
they spent themselves three stories high
over broad sketches of trash,
broke themselves there
below the minarets,
long they saw across the far nights
that morning steeped in blood.

foreigner

in lonely places of cannons
you sometimes heard
the blue patterns of shadows
as waves beat away the walls

by then you understood

the real island speaks grass and malaria
it is only the foreigner who writes
his long yellow pages of old wounds
shuttering inside his sleeves

by then
the cold white distance of scattered tusks
assailed him

a foreigner
surrounded by odd tessellations

as if the callers
backs scourged
sought him out

it was a much more narrow interpretation of God

always the men
their stories turned Portuguese
the forests dark and filled with disappeared

wounds dark as gold

these wounds dark as gold
and the labyrinth-like fevers
in the foreigner’s coffee—

things sought
until time shakes them
from a structure grown narrow
with uncovered sun

for days he balls tourists

nowhere a stone
ever so blue as this
docked in an odd crack

God has become a small afternoon

as branches burn

the folded flesh remembers
the hard dead stratosphere

hours erupt
out of sudden familiar aromas

weeks limp their way through
old cluttered towers of dirty hands

the strange husk of a soul slowly lifts
above the raw public village

like a leaf
that winds never abandon

want

he wants the slow easing motion
of a dry standing woman
quieting her watery hair

she holds the carved edge
of this gentleman’s glance
as he lifts her from her sleeves

together they fall
forgetting everything else but down

now that your nails are polished

let your woman spill dark
         your nostrils flare

               let fingers erupt
                        stream silver

        let your lady’s aroma
flow sweet into              longing

stone susan stood still

her speech hidden
where  unfired  the blind reside

the light sat brilliant beside her
but lonely

involving visage after visage
easing his long shadows beneath her blouse

his whispers were laden with pollen
were stems calling sun back to the earth

there are some women

for whom age
                 has become
beauty

living east of town

living east of town
   the sun is always behind me

i go to work in the morning
   the sun is behind me

i return in the evening
  the sun behind me

nearly everywhere i go
   sun behind me

but sometimes

i travel east
   in the morning to greet the sun

or west in the evening
   i linger


        just to say so long

the heavens

what was beautiful in the sunshine
turns cruel at night
what dies in the west
on the last day of spring
will be reborn in the east
on the first day of fall

time continually eviscerates itself
and thus we feed
love is nothing more than ruse
a desperation to reproduce
but why survive
it is so we can betray
so we can slaughter
the skies are full of these
the archer and the scorpion
the hunters and the prey
we are the ones
who carved these myths
across the cold vast void
and call it heaven

dusk

i have not sodden my body with you
you have not earned that destruction
the taste of your sundering
long ago shaped in the back of my throat
it is only our bodies that long to exist
what we have been does not need to endure
take this day for instance
how the sun has been given back
to the wool of grey sky
that circle of wind that plumments a bough
your arms are also limbs
if i can’t gather them unto myself
(i have not claimed them)
whose are they
what we lay claim to destroys us
the day is at its end
that gatherer of light
the moon
is already dragging our shadows
across a field

abandoned my dead

I have my grandfather’s pocket watch,
                                                               but where?

Which box,
                                                               inside which drawer?

                                                               i’ve abandoned my dead,
i cannot hear                                                the hours of their unwound clocks.

afternoon now

nothing but sun
that yellow weight of warmth
winter had pilfered
without my knowing what it took
whatever was stolen
the sun returns
full measure
all that's required
is the holding out of hands

she never calls me anymore

i imagine

               feeding a few ruffled sparrows—

                      greyish little creatures
                      with their pointed wings

i lose myself
              in their fork-like prints
                      where scrapping for tid-bits of bread
                      some had lost small feathers
                                                                buried now

                                                                            as the day grows blind with snow

morning

branches of oaks
like fractures
in a pale of perfect sky

the stillness broken
by a tracing of geese—
their imperfect lines of cruxes
echoes of their distant calls

and here i am
among the flurries
world weighed down with dew