Posts tagged writing

I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the
moon of the jagged suburbs.
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked
long and long at the lonely moon.

I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts
that living men have honoured in bronze:
my father’s father killed in the frontier of
Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs,

bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in
the hide of a cow; my mother’s grandfather
—just twenty-four—heading a charge of
three hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on
vanished horses.

I offer you whatever insight my books may hold,
whatever manliness or humour my life.
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never
been loyal.

I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved,
somehow—the central heart that deals not
in words, traffics not with dreams, and is
untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.

I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at
sunset, years before you were born.
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about
yourself, authentic and surprising news of
yourself.

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the
hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you
with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

The trees are adorned with sparkling leaves, bridges of tightly nestled stems abating one another. My boots crash along the wet grass, sticking my heels into pieces of mud, and slipping against the tenderness of the fallen red and yellow leaves. I don’t know what it is about these bits of color but my eyes can only see them as the distant lines of a painting. Every thought of this place glistens past me with the present adventure of your name at the tip of my brain, my tongue, my heart. The never-ending longing for a ghost whose flesh I will never touch again. I think of your bones beneath the surface, sullen from the dirt of the earth and I think of carrying them to my own grave. Could I bury myself, kill myself with the only tangible piece of you left? I imagine myself bare knees, digging through to your coffin with only my fingers, awaiting to greet you again. It is always raining in my mind, dark and dreary days where my precious sunlight no longer reigns.

In the mornings I want to stay in my dreams, where I am with you and your soft spotted face from too many afternoons in the strong sunlight. Your limbs linked with mine, your hands on my face pulling me in to feel the splendid joy of your breath along the curve of my neck as you tell me you love me. In my dream you tell me that no one has loved you as much as I have, and I tell you there is no doubt for I have never loved anyone as much, nor for as long.  You are not gone to me there in the crescent of my subconscious you survive. I suppose this is the way it is with the dead, moving somewhere in between only to visit the ones they have lost.

The last time you kissed me was at port authority, all eyes on us, a stark beauty enfolding us as our hands lingered on each others backs, necks, cheeks. You smiled at me afterward with a certain hunger, and anger. Had our love betrayed us already? For we would fight violently after that, shocking one another to a state of ugliness that could only be reached together. Our souls like two sinking ships, unable to hold the sails long enough to stay above water. I wish I could have vaporized my soul to fall into your wounded flesh so that no distance, not even death could stiffen our love. Now I struggle to stay above water without you, perhaps I needed the dead weight to keep me alive, and now I feel as though my life depends only on the moments where the tide carries me in.

If questioning would make us wise
No eyes would ever gaze in eyes;
If all our tale were told in speech
No mouths would wander each to each.

Were spirits free from mortal mesh
And love not bound in hearts of flesh
No aching breasts would yearn to meet
And find their ecstasy complete.

For who is there that lives and knows
The secret powers by which he grows?
Were knowledge all, what were our need
To thrill and faint and sweetly bleed?.

Then seek not, sweet, the “If” and “Why”
I love you now until I die.
For I must love because I live
And life in me is what you give.