Four Poems

Four Poems

No one knows if the wind is dragging the moon along or if the moon
is tearing the wind through the darkness.
Rooms contemplate the night with ecstatic attention.
We do algebra, astronomy, make music,
an intuitive
map of the world. A jolt,
anguish, at times a monstrous jubilation
abruptly unleash the rhythm.
– A finger touches the temples, plunges so deep
that all the body's blood comes to the mouth
in a single word.
And the wind of that word is an expansion of the earth.

Don't put your hand on objects close to you.
Harmony burns.
No matter how light a teapot or a cup might be,
all objects are insane.
A vase with a transparent chrysanthemum
harbors secret trembling.
It is terrifying in the dark.
Even its name, only in fear can you say it.
The mouth becomes an open sore.

The loneliness of a word. A hill when sea spume
leaps against the written month
of May. The hand that now is writing it.
Until each thing plunges to its own baptism.
Until that word transmutes itself into a name
and settles, through breath, in the center,
as you run filled with savage light,
as if you were wearing a ribbon of water
between
heart and navel.

Spasmodic waters, moons repeated in the waters.
No one knows if the moons observed pulse with the pulsing
of the waters, or if the waters pulse
with the power of exalted
moons. And the world, the mirror that the moons awake from which
the waters overflow, is it I who gaze at it,
or it that gazes at me,
or have we traded places? We live through the power
of images. Through blood and innocence
harsh splendor and a fused shuddering and shared
cardiac matter.
– From name to name breaths flow through me.