When it hurts we return to the banks of certain rivers.
—Milosz
From the roses that bloom between your lips and your whispers
The blackbird teaches its children the color red,
And the tomatoes learn how to bleed
In their beds of boiling oil.
There is nothing casual in the way you lay your arm across the mountains.
The rivers must suffer your rockslides and shivers.
Your discarded caresses
Carve obsidian out of silence and the Southern Cross, revealing
White tongues, pink welts, evaporated lacerations,
The scars from confessions and pianos.
Your voice, and the voice you hold in your hands, dying,
Sought me and found me in the copper skin of the dead river.
It has come to me and carried me to rooms I could not enter,
Rooms of neither language nor secret crosses,
Not of sacred hearts nor poetry,
Not of trains that arrive full of summer,
Not of ships that leave under banners and songs.
But rooms of snow, of regret, of broken doors and losing propositions,
Of what can never be satisfactorily said.
Over my neighborhood of lost dogs and tired old men
It still hangs, hinged on the furtive sun, timid, enamored,
A rusted key opening in the startled birds,
Touching the stone’s guilty desires
And incriminating the blizzard.
Soon I will rise and go to that window
Through which the rain first summoned me
Calling me love,
The word that April taught you to speak,
The word that created the world, the word
That presides over our comings and goings,
The repeating roofs, the heralded unions.
I will rise in order to rise,
I will return to that window in the afternoons
When the streets are empty and the doorways empty,
The hour when abandoned trees bow before vacant monuments,
The hour in which marble oaths retire to dignified silence.
I will clothe myself in twilight, in the smiling port,
In sweet memories that burn out in my hand,
Founding letters and salutations, sowing slow hours and wine
Whose red is not a red that bullets understand,
Whose red is the badge of one wounded by stars and symphonies.
So let’s fill our glasses and drink,
Wherever we are, under whichever tender sky,
To the pained kings of dawn, to the vagabonds of buses and catacombs,
To the brotherhood of mute birds.
Us, inebriated on oceans, pissing in the shadows,
Us, weak with rivers, sons of goodbye,
Guarding our turbulent touch, our flaming smiles,
Hoarding our strange currency in the drowning castles of the spring.
Spending this baleful gold like the Sun spends its honey,
Like the tulip spends its fire, like the sky spends its breath,
Without reason or regret, with the astonished recitations
Of the awakening heart creating a new heaven and a new Earth
In its raw, pulsating hand.
And I will say your name,
And I will dress myself in your quiet apparition,
And we will converse in dust.
And I will remove my heart, and paint it in flame,
And burn down those distant scaffolds pinning up the frozen firmament.
And we will be trinity, three-in-one,
Baptized in desire, devotion, and solitude.
We will be tongues and smoke, snow and ghosts.
We will herald angels and follow them to starve in the streets,
We will be holy, and we will be free,
Until finally, wrapped in the fallen stars,
Our summer exultations will ripen into slow evening
And, alone again as at the first moment of creation,
The word will return unto itself like the soft night breeze
Whispering love,
That river of fire and ice,
Carrying us through the mourning forest.
2006