I am sand. My eyes grainy, tears brown,
and what of the different tones of bees or flies,
how a sting can kill us?
I’m speaking the language of smokers,
lung-full and wary, breathing a refinery chore,
my eyes black pits, Historically
I was fruit, voluptuous and campy, some might say
exotic, cheekbones native, my hips swaying.
“I will be gone from here and sing my songs
In the forest wilderness where the wild beasts are
And carve in letters on the little trees
The story of my love, and as the trees
Will grow the letters too will grow, to cry
In a louder voice the story of my love…”
“…Omnia vincit Amor, et nos cedamus Amori.”
1. “The Eclogues of Virgil”
2.
Once I had a child
She was smiling like sunshine
She could see it all
Like she’d been here before
here before vashti bunyan
Bring me all of your dreams,
You dreamer,
Bring me all your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world.
image: Andrea Islas Garcia, farmer, blind from cataracts, Beunavista 1998.
by Marco A. Cruz.
words: the dreamer by langston hughes
9
These bones glowing in the night
these words like precious stones
in the living throat of a petrified bird,
this very beloved green,
this heated lilac,
this heart only mysterious.
image: siren song by barbie kjar
words: alejandra pizarnik, tree of diana
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
poem: Love after Love by Derek Walcott
image: Graciela Iturbide, Quince años, 1985
The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.
I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
Take, from my palms, for joy, for ease,
A little honey, a little sun,
That we may obey Persephone’s bees.
You can’t untie a boat unmoored.
Fur-shod shadows can’t be heard,
Nor terror, in this life, mastered.
Love, what’s left for us, and of us, is this
Living remnant, loving revenant, brief kiss
Like a bee flying completed dying hiveless
To find in the forest’s heart a home,
Night’s never-ending hum,
Thriving on meadowsweet, mint, and time.
Take, for all that is good, for all that is gone,
That it may lie rough and real against your collarbone,
This string of bees, that once turned honey into sun.
the necklace, osip mandelstam
there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see
or the child’s older self, a poet,
a woman dreaming when she should be typing
the last report of the day. If this were a map,
she thinks, a map laid down to memorize
because she might be walking it, it shows
ridge upon ridge fading into hazed desert
here and there a sign of aquifers
and one possible watering-hole.
image: milena salvano
poem: dreamwood by adrienne rich
