There is a glow that surrounds you, perhaps
A slight remnant of time, near-forgotten,
(The stars white scars upon your slender wrists)
Like the wisps of your breath on a mirror.
Through wind, your words like an echo linger-
“You would find a way to murder a stone!”
Cut in half, I am cruel enough for two,
My love, my demon.
In color, a synesthetic flurry
Lurks behind the fury of our lives, warm
Like a woman who has never been touched,
Raw as the roots that feed on human blood.
Is there something in red heat that all crave?
Some elemental truth long neglected,
Like a tree bent by grey, furious wind?
It is not satisfying to call lust
By any lower (and less sinful) name:
Can any primal thing be trapped by words?
Leopards in zoo cages are violence
Within the world. If they were of the gods
They would not find their ends in manacles,
But a slave's life is more than iron bars.
I have found your ashes on scattered paths
And they are three books, and then three again.
No! Do not vanquish the future with flames!
Leave that ignominy for Stilicho.
I. Bitterness
“You have found waves, but Rome does not exist.
Even if you travel beyond water,
Past islands (the blood of the very Earth),
The foreign trees will not give you the death
You crave, they will render all the shadows
Of your nightmares and make you true as rain.
If you think two thousand miles will erase
My words- I tell you, they will leave you caged.
I shall nearly crush you, my beloved,
But a serpent from fragmented stories
Will rise up from the sea in your defense
(The goal of my caress never realized)…”
I reflect my scribbled curses innumerable times
As in my mourning I seek madness contained in grape vines.
At our kiss goodbye the dread river stopped,
Then carried mortals like the desperate rocks
That are shaped into naught by waterfalls.
Should I forsake your name just because you bear me hatred,
Should I despise the birds for flying higher than the stars?
With a friend, I sit. We drink together.
He asks what I intend to do. I shrug.
“I do not love her enough to kill her.
What can I do? What can be done?” He laughs.
“Give her a breath, your Shade will end herself.
Come, have yet another drink, drown sorrow.”
II. Elegy
This is not the sun or the moon: this is infinite, it is everything.
Selling unbelieved things to singing drunks,
Bearded face in mirrors (and refractions
In glasses of beer); give us the dark sleep
That comes to you when you forget our names.
It carves into itself and it mocks
the curves that men would praise.
Did those that fled the gods not
find their fate in trees?
Daphne flees the sun and becomes
the laurel, later Dante iterates
Beatrice and becomes the poet.
Still, the glossed wood shines, the moon courses
through, heroes find flame for their bodies.
From the ashes, eaves.
The appeal of Borges lies in knowing
that elsewhere in the world, when the sunsets
were less bright, there was another man
completely unable to have a normal conversation.
