A Song Out Of Tune
non visto color de buen verdigay
nin trobo discor ni fago deslay
Juan Alfonso de Baena
The day is short,
the hour long>
Motionless I retrace its steps,
climbing its minor calvaries,
I descend on stairs made of air,
and am lost in transparent galleries
-but I don't find me,
and I don't see you.
The day is short,
the hour long.
I see my stubborn hand that writes
its circular words on the page,
I see my shadow on the page, I see
myself falling through the hour's blank center
-but I don't find you,
and I don't see me.
The day is short,
and the hour long.
Time drags on, hides, and peeks,
time is buries, clods of air,
time sprouts up, a column of air,
it bashes my forehead, scrapes my lids
-but I don't find me,
and I don't see you.
The day is short,
the hour long.
I walk through lots and corridors and echoes,
my hands touch you and you suddenly vanish,
I look in your eyes and suddenly vanish,
the hour traces, erases, invents its reflections
-but I don't find you,
and I don't see me.
The day is short,
the hour long.
There is a seed asleep in time,
that explodes in the air with a burst of syllables,
it is a word, and it speaks without speaking
the names of time, yours and mine,
-but I don't find me,
and I don't see you.
Names are fruit that ripen and fall;
the hours immense, inside itself it falls.
A Tree Within
A tree grew inside my head.
A tree grew in.
Its roots are veins,
its branches nerves,
thoughts its tangled foilage.
Your glance sets it on fire,
and its fruits of shade
are blood oranges
and pomegranates of flame.
Day breaks
in the body's night.
There, within, inside my head,
the tree speaks.
Come closer-can you hear it?
Before The Beginning
A confusion sounds, an uncertain clarity.
Another day begins.
It is a room, half-lit,
and two bodies stretched out.
In my head I am lost
on a plain with no one.
The hours sharpen their blades.
But at my side, you are breathing;
buried deep, and remote,
you flow without moving.
Unreachable as I think of you,
touching you with my eyes,
watching you with my hands.
Dreams divide
and blood unites us:
we are a river of pulsebeats.
Under your eyelids the seed
of the sun ripens.
The world
is still not real;
time wonders:
all that is certain
is the heat of your skin.
In your breath I hear
the tide of being,
the forgotten syllable of the Beginning.
Between Going And Staying
Between going and staying the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.
All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.
Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.
Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.
The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.
I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.
The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.
By The Stream
-How rare, how lovely!
Somebody's wife
washing her white feet
in the dark water.
Moon shines
among the clouds,
so far, so far,
no one can reach it.
-How lovely, how rare!
Somebody's husband goes by
in a white boat
on the dark stream.
I was going to ask him
what he proposed,
but the moon hid
behind the clouds.
Night, Day, Night
1
Stream of light: a bird
singing on the terrace.
In the valleys and mountains
of your body it dawns.
2
Fire asleep in the night,
water that wakes laughing.
3
Under the leafy canopy of your hair,
your forehead:
a bower,
a clarity among the branches.
I think about gardens:
to be the wind that shakes your memories,
to be the sun that clears through your thicket!
4
At the foot of the palm tree,
tall as a savage,
rippling green against the warrior sun,
you rest.
Your body
a backwater in the shadows.
Stillness. Vast noon
barely throbs.
Between your legs time, stubborn, flows.
5
A vein of sun, living gold,
grooves, crosses, spirals,
green constellations:
the triangular insect
moves through the grass
at three of four millimeters an hour.
For an instant you held it
in the palm of your hand
(where fate traces its arabesque secrets):
it is a living jewel, a creature
fallen, perhaps, from Titania,
-and reverently you let it go,
back to the Great All.
6
The day, ultimate flower,
hour by hour it burns.
Another flour, black, sprouts.
Imperceptibly you cross
the shadows and enter,
lady of night.
Barely a wave,
barely aroma, white,
you stretch out on my bed.
And become a woman again.
7
Plain of sheets
and night of bodies,
tide of desire
and grotto of dreams.
8
An intangible village
sleeps under your eyelids:,
avid whirlwinds,
children of touch become flesh,
drink blood, are the changing
forms of desire
and are always the same:
face after face
of the life that is death,
of the death that is life.
Pillars
And whilst our souls negotiate there,
We like sepulchral statues lie...
John Donne
The plaza is tiny.
Four leprous walls,
a fountain with no water,
two cement benches,
some injured ash trees.
The distant commotion
of civic rivers.
Huge and uncertain,
night turns and covers
the solemn architecture.
They have lit the lights.
In the gulfs of shadow,
on corners, in doorways,
columns sprout, alive
and immobile: the couples.
Entwined and hushed,
weaving whispers,
pillars of heartbeats.
In the other hemisphere
night is feminine,
abundant and aquatic.
There are islands that blaze
in the waters of the sky.
The leaves of banana trees
turn shadows green.
In the middle of space,
we are still entwined,
a tree that breathes.
Our bodies are covered
with vines of syllables.
Foliage of murmurs,
crickets insomniac
in the sleeping grass,
the stars are swimming
in a pool of frogs,
summer collects
its pitchers in the sky,
with invisible hands
the air opens a door.
Your forehead's the terrace
the moon prefers.
The moment's enormous,
the world is now small.
I am lost in your eyes,
and lost, I see you
lost in my eyes.
Our names have burned down,
our bodies have gone.
We are in the magnetic
center of-what?
Motionless couples
in a Mexican park,
or in a garden in Asia:
daily Eucharists
under their various stars.
On the ladder of touch
we climb and descend
from top to bottom,
kingdom of roots,
republic of wings.
Knotted bodies
are the book of the soul:
with eyes closed,
with my touch and my tongue,
I write out on your body
the scripture of the world.
A knowledge still nameless:
the taste of this earth.
Brief light yet sufficient
to light and blind us
like the sudden burst
of seedpod and semen.
Between the end and the beginning,
a moment without time,
a delicate arch of blood,
a bridge over the void.
Locked, two bodies
sculpt a bolt of lightning.
Proof
Her skin, saffron toasted in the sun,
eyes darting like a gazelle.
-That god who made her, how could he
have let her go? Was he blind?
-This wonder is not the result of blindness:
she is a woman, and a sinuous vine.
The Buddha's doctrine thus is proven:
nothing in this world was created.
Return
You spread out beneath my eyes,
a land of dunes-ocher, bright.
The wind in search of water stopped,
a land of heartbeats and fountains.
Vast as the night you fit
in the hollow of my hand.
Later, the motionless hurling down,
within and without ourselves.
With my eyes I ate darkness,
drank the water of time. I drank night.
Then I touched the body of music
heard with the tips of my fingers.
Dark boats, together,
moored in the shadows,
our bodies reclined.
Our souls, unlashed,
lamps afloat
in the water of night.
In the end your opened your eyes.
You saw yourself seen by my eyes,
and from my eyes you saw yourself:
falling like fruit on the grass,
like a stone in the pond,
your fell into yourself.
A tide rose within me,
with a weightless fist I beat
at the door of your lids:
my death wanted to meet you,
my death wanted to meet itself.
I was buried in your eyes.
***
Our bodies flow through the plains
of night: they are time wearing itself out,
a presence that dissolves in a caress;
yet they are infinite, to touch them
is to bathe in rivers of heartbeats
and return to the perpetual beginning anew.
Touch
My hands
Open the curtains of your being
Clothe you in a further nudity
Uncover the bodies of your body
My hands
Invent another body for your body.
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