Love on the Streets: Selected and New Poems

Beneath the World: Two Poems to the Child Never to be Born

• 45 beneath the world: two Poems to the child never to be born 1. I sleep beneath a map of the world. The world glows in the dark. In the furthest place the Northern Lights bear down. In the morning I will bear down. This thing. This fish swollen in the seas, glowing beneath love. Canada and Alaska yearn over me for the Orient. China, as if in flight, flees the map. You must walk south from the dead center, the U.S. The eyes, the heart, the feet must follow the drift to the east, antipodes, Tierra del Fuego: the delicate fire in this painting. O, island. O little land I see your journey on my water’s swift current. Tomorrow I will open. The axis will tilt, the earth will quake and he and I two lonely gods will suck you from gravity. • 46 But I hear, little spirit, your suck, the great song Corazon. Your heart and the world glows. Corazon blue, corazon red, corazon negra. 2. Tomorrow I’ll break I’ll forsake words altogether I will paint with my soul the curvature of Earth, the tipping of her axis, her wobbly pole this pale face, this series of faces that comes now a spermy cloud to cover Her I will spend my life walking your borders these land masses broken for you, these continents and their drift I will wash you in the great mourning in the great morning sea of the East Pacific Rise • 47 I will lose you in the nightsea of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge You will be unknown in the West Wind Drift ...