mathematician's prayer

correct us, oh creator, within our lives,
with your measured overlooking presence.
the leaves have fixed themselves in the world intact,
trees towering as the graveyard fills,
souls adapted to so little space.
the turned-out spirit perceives everything,
intensified limbs, cells,
mutable representations,
that old succession of species,
everything numbered by laws.

historian's complaint

curled language lost perhaps
relations undefinable

works forgotten
meaningless discarded

just as something amazing
starts to speak

forms

long towering numbers
embellish metaphors

beyond questions
every incompetency dissolves

just as colored perceptions
model abstractions

forms within things
overlooking their presence

colors remain themselves
free now to possess nature

X simultaneously produces necessity

a contained number schema
radically dissolves the leaves

time’s universal language
speaks of the inviolability of things

we gray ourselves and astonish ourselves
with the forms of flowers

that thing only colors will know

Once

Love said, selfishly,
how woman, if loved first,
loved even the warm thought
of its vain patchwork of tangerine leaves.
It worked its face into flown pictures.
Should one portrait appear, it left again,
They knew how to find each other,
their letters changed their want.
Behind their laughter, after their eyes,
they saw in cumulus shadows
the way wonder might love a night.

Art

Christ’s dead face had once influenced night,
his weird eyes laughing in Corinthians.
That proselytizer's dream of acceptance had left.
As a writer she knew words would one day mean trouble.
Those that made livings of colors,
they said, “Come warm woman, musician of flesh,
rise up out of the leaves.”
They would resurrect her that way,
in all their lurid paintings.

her face

how wrong his selfish eyes
the wonderful day-place
lost again to dusk
the breeze of many voiced loves
all night how the dead argued
while he imagined her face
azure in Africa’s patchwork of flames

writers

many cruel words
behind sunglasses
sunglasses America loved
lost in Summer's orange music
where writers sketched women
in forgotten books
where writers sketched women
on warm afternoons
where writers
trapped in dead realities
of castigated sentences
sketched women in the rain

it was a different kind of seeing

peering into remnants of things-as-they-are
he found and sometimes saw born

places between places
moments rippling into years

he watched dark roads thread off into fields
he fathered frail trees

and after he’d gone
only sunshine shone

deep into the interstices
of where he had been

shine

red-cast
still yellow through leaves
a Sun hangs fantastically
while the decomposition of seeing
what used to be
keeps on

the frail

the frail encounter ghosts that way
never hoping for anything different

threading through branches
to find ripples beyond a cabin

at the quieted pool
sailing away on leaves

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