Epiphany

You were my Ithaca
but alas, my love,
I was never your Odysseus.

Note to Self (circa 2011)

Forget the sinuousness
of this odyssey of life,
just remember this,

this moment
you were twenty six,
in love,
and in Paris.

All else shall fade.

Origin

Eyes like dark, deep forests.
Fingers like furious rivers.
Tongues like roving doves.
Lips like spinning echoes.

In chorus
they float, flame and flounder
through the mad night

arriving,
again, again and again,
at the tangled pathways of passion

at the ravenous hunger
that is the origin
of all origins.

Dreaming of Rainy Barcelona

"Estoy aquí, dije, con los perros románticos 

y aquí me voy a quedar."

"I'm here, I said, with the romantic dogs
and here I'm going to stay."

- Roberto Bolaño

The sun has disappeared 

down his carafe of daily forgetfulness

and I wander

like a vagrant in a lost myth.

Barcelona,
that womb of boundless freedom,
embraces me whole
like an ancient oath.

The dreamer becomes the dream
in the music of her unrepeatable geometry
as strings of pearls leap from the skies

rain drops,

the unfinished verses of poets.

Rapture descending,
each drop a revolution,
the beginning of a childhood.

The Curiosity of Strangers

An evening
talking to a morning,
adrift between the tenses.

Words ferried across silences
by the curiosity of the other.

The library of memory
ajar
to knowing, unknowing
and all the trifles in between.

Vulnerable mazes and bitter seas
from the restricted sections of adulthood.

Pointless passages no one ever read
in the storied clay of childhood.

Delirious earth and symmetric roses
from the periodicals of dreams.

Each dusty page a discovery
in the echoing intimacy of chance.

Now and then, a loud chuckle.
The sound of the universe
indulging itself.

The Call

Slow, soft words
like a voice from childhood
prying open my morning.

A hovering dream
like the eternity that comes before
and after.

Flutter

The window is aflutter
with the day's newborn rays,
envoys from the heavens
thrust

at the immensity of our existence.

The room fills up
in unhurried moments,
like a schoolboy's watercolour.

The cosmos surges

in fractions of coffee cups and childhoods

as eternity pounds away like a machined heart.

We are surrounded by movement

but we,

we do not move.

The Feast

They can't remember
where the evening began,
the boy
and the girl with the Russian name,

but they remember
where it ended up.

In poetry, as always.

***

Neruda offered his odes,
songs of blood, skin, earth
and the fire of youth.

Brodsky brought his friend Baryshnikov
who recreated
a dance for the ages.

Bukowski made an appearance,
doodles, half-burnt cigarettes,
typewriter and all.

Szymborska stood in the corner
gifting rhymes, nonchalant.

Armitage charmed his way in
with the nostalgia of childhood
and his butter-fingered verse.

Cavafy took them on an odyssey
on the ocean of life
with gods, monsters and wisdom.

Bolaño made an entrance in furious lyric,
strumming on the savagery of the heart.

Borges snuck in his doppelgänger,
mirrors, swords, hourglasses
and the infinite library of chance.

***

Through the pages they strolled the night,
under the high ceiling
that mimicked a constellation.

She closed her eyes,
the girl with the Russian name,
and let his voice fall on her

like rain.

The Makers

Men born with humility
instead of a face
their fingers reach out across the ages
to craft miracles,
the slow song of human ingenuity.

In the quiet corridors of oblivion
they chisel, they weave, they carve

daily
arriving at the truth
that no one can own
but belongs to everyone.

Epilogue

[For S. N. R.]

That was how he
rested his argument with the world.

At the first sunrise of a new year
as the rest of the world burst with optimism
and confetti still wafted on the streets

he succumbed to silence.

Time went on without him
as he slipped into the cradle of the past.
In an instant, he was.

Relinquishing his breath,
he embraced the air's stillness
and left his song behind for others to sing.

He didn't run out of music,
he ran out of time.

The Surrender

We knew so little of each other
yet I did it.

But
who said love was anything more than
a stone thrown at the stars.

The drive on the dark highway,
your playlist,
and the endless promise of that evening...

When I die,
I hope they take me back there.

The Murder of Actaeon

She stands there, her silver bow drawn taut,
back arched in furious grace.
Her nakedness gleams under the sun,
beauty so savage it echoes
through the quietude of the woods.
The flimsy human must pay.

He stands there, fear rippling through his veins,
ensnared 
in the pitiless stare of the eternal virgin.

The cavernous howl of divine arrogance
pierces through the wind's innocence
as his skin quivers,

that feeble garment of mortality.

Ferocious death is at hand,
shadows of its sprinting hooves
screaming through the moist earth like wildfire.
Nostrils flared, fangs bared,
the beasts are coming.