Thursday, March 27, 2008

The Prediction Of Clara

A Shadow…

It is impossible to forget you
in the vein of the deer,
in the broken vein of the sky,
and I hear a landscape growing in your ear,
where ants commit suicide with their mouths filled with salt,
where the camel’s blood smashes its tonsils against sheetrock,
where the children confess the murders of yesterday’s crickets,
where the fountain seeks the blonde eyes of the volunteers,
and where the magnolia tree weeps inside the tortured fig of the quail.

Twenty computers opened their mouths of burned silver.
Women guided their guilty hands over poisoned throats
and opened the veins of children where it rained shadow and closed lilac.
Bowls of ripe fruit were seeking the blood of mermaids in the heart of the toad.
My death grew and slept in the trunks of dark trees
and near the fountains of moss and marble and tongue.

There is no refuge to be found in the dark lily of the horse,
in the stains of your white walls,
on your dark breasts that moan under the blinds
and cover the sun in vomit and one dried pencil,
in the tasteless marmalade of your profile.

Ancient windows were shouting for the poet’s death.
Deformed elephants, with dead eyes and cold tongue,
celebrated the birth of a thousand dying virgins.
And in the giraffe’s liver, a child wept without his shadow.

Oh!
Worms of dead wounds!
Oh!
Cold column of ash!
Oh!
White street of dull pink, of trembling skulls!
Oh!
Butchered skull without death,
without the putrid mouth of flower,
without the hummingbird’s frozen wings!

There is always a rainbow
on the brows of war
and a pool of live poets.