Collected Poems

Pain Songs

12 his universe eyes Can we look through this slanty night without getting dizzy, and barking somewhere? What was it about the first, what wasn’t it? What kind?          Whereat? Then again the clouds are bearable more than before. We’re invited to the river by the river and the wet flowers that go along river might not die again                    tonight. pain songs Back; gone country around, like wind in hollow rabbit. How many steps to take to mud around, across, Ixtapalapa green canal? The cow is green, the flax is brown; brown life of flies, cool color, sickness, eyes. Many over, what then? There Jose stumbled on market stands, dogs bit my clumsy foot. 13 Transport the ground, and trees of olives like mouth of understanding boulevards, of green light mountains where hills are filled with lizards feet near home. A silence as white as hospital clouds. O breeze, when I was young and tried hard, when I was there among 1000 footers, off on off on the bird on in, gone in in in flew. Alone. The straw’s alone, the grave’s alone, the twitch, the switch, the bitch’s alone, above clouds higher than moods. It’s late and the air’s as thin as straw, and hill droves of relativity, of hornet’s hair sleep cool as a quiet nosey rat. Climbing up we passed it by, maybe it was the cactus on the knee or lizard in his pee. It looked straight up as sun boomed in rocks and big zapilote bird made a shadow. They asked me, You going where in leaves? Going when in road? Sitting with all this sidewalk similarity. It’s like a bed unfolding 14 some high transportation of the street. It is too much for street here. How high it seems. Pain, like blue is the strap of night, the goulash of darkness, a pool of energy and green light signs; signs of red, signs of night. I leave, sandals fastened: breeze warm as my hands, warm as these warrior’s hands. I refuse, but accept that if nothing else, there’s breath as thin as paper. The path, the path is where? It’s the cow’s, o but to be near the cow. Let’s be near some old realization that just died. Near some depowdered head that comes around the horseshoe curves of sense. But I discovered along the hedge of waking that this is me, and around my skinniness I place my clothes of disinterest, and I bathe it, and I bathe me anonymous. I am unknown. And in a railroad yard at dawn. Biting a stick wondering what it’s all about under the orange tree gloom bridge. 15 Let’s count and amount to everything we’re not supposed to. That talk is from a young brain, in a rebitten valley of feathers, sky, beach, sea, bush, volcano hump in the distance. It’s the sand perverse on the boulevards that swim Veracruzian desolation in deep vocabulary afternoon: a knot of sun comingles the cactus, the sea, the plateau. The day turns over on its spine. Every faucet’s on. Ah! in the haze, the grip running wall, the sun grouping on the stillness of your dark tide. What sea gull blindness on rocks, dunes, oil pumps of your thoughts. And the builders rinse their mouths and the days of a week go swimming away. There is a creek that passes. It’s a creek that travels and looks like a bone, within which all memory itself has been. There’s no memory outside this. There is only it. I want the creek, the feeling of its depth like a body on the fingers. 16 The morning awakes and leaves me with one hard thing. The summer months sit on a steeple (the only one around), and the magnifying glass of occupation leaves the doors of a monsoon open, growing from ridges of your lips. You are young, all roofs of world cannot crush the highways of your newness. When you’re gone it’s as if someone has taken away the steps to a temple. Wind is warm in the store windows. It’s November. Surprise ducks leave a canopy of a lake over the avenue. To keep these secrets we allay the nobody seen on the...