My spirit is a canvas that’s been left
out in the rain too long

and now

large umber stains—
revealing mountains, hollows,
heavy clouds—have covered it

and now

the slightest wind can tear it

On that ruddy evening, after our day in the countryside,
at last we reached the spring, together,
which was water in silence, mineralized in the depths
of the earth’s fire, almost wholly in silence.
We reached a dream after the plains. A dream,
but true. Blue and ochre waters surrounding us
on that unreal evening. And I remember other things:
the sweeping land, the color of the salts,
the embraces, the kiss: I closed my eyes
and the world dissolved
into a placid surge of joyful emptiness.
Just two existed, that was all:
the taste of lips, a tender nakedness.
Only two bodies close and loving in the desert
of time and the world,
and overhead, an open skylight
among nitrous trunks
—which once were trees, sweet huizaches
or mezquites of the arduous world—
revealed a purple sky, barely visible.
And a first star came to us from far away: the distant
and fanciful sun of happiness. The gentle fire
that dreamed of forms and bodies
in a ceremony of zenithal golds
making us feel, grow, know each other
to delirium. Wells of holy water and
life’s caress:

this memory
is still a spring.

I stop.
Midday peace among the trees.

And then, not a sound:
a transparent flame
spreads through the air.
Violent and luminous, like the burning
day.
Like sex.
Like the summer sun.

Above the lone street and the gardens:
the eternal sky.

And that light we hear
dripping from nowhere. A stubborn trill
that transcends forms:
the limits of the tree and the earth,
the borders of the body and those of the world,
the weight of things.
Fleeting mystery, at the peak of the day:
the thrilling mystery
of that trill in the light.

for Margaret Feigin

I give you this lotus, as simple as a flower.
It is a flower.
It appeared in the water at the park within some circles, shadowy vegetal rhythms
out of the slow layer of detritus, something
like a fallen black mass: potential flowers. At first it was a bud, closed
coffer, unopened fingers—then
it slowly offered its perfection.
I pulled it toward me with a stick, a modest branch, hunter of symbols.
It is a symbol.
Put some sugar in the water,
place the lotus in the vase. And make sure it has some sun so it can live a little longer,
because
it is just a flower.
It will close at night—it’s tiring, being so much light, but the air is young, the year
begins anew, and tomorrow it will open again
more weakly, more
finally. And when it does

make the flower unfurl
in flames:
star symbol,
lotus perfection.

Moons

Come and look at yourself in the moon, an old voice said, and the moon
was the mirror’s golden vessel, standing tall before me, approaching
from the wall. With iridescent edges and timbers older
than the voice of that aunt who always swayed and smiled.

The mirror left.
Men took it down and covered it with cardboard and paper,
then removed it from the living room. The house had a long hallway.
That moon left. It was definitive.
Because my aunt had already died, and I no longer remember how.
Remote images of furniture departing, some relative asking
for a vase, a crystal to remember her by. That’s it.
And now all of it is dim and mute. The dust of memory.

And now the moon is only the one in the sky, forever.
Beyond my dreams and memories. Beyond this body that
is no longer a boy’s body.
The slow moon, remote.
In the coldest terms, it’s a different use of voice. Words
age, too; this is trivial.
But language lives, plays, and there’s nothing nostalgic
about a chance metaphor that turns the moon, the one in the sky,
into a mirror once more:
Lagoon of Rains, Ocean of Storms, Sea of Serenity
where from closer up
there’s only dust and silence. Aerial silver, the moon
of distant silence.
The one in the evening sky.

The dissolution of Precambrian land masses,
so slow and so long ago by now.
India (unnamed) crashing
into Asia (everything then unnamed).
The emergence of the Himalayas,
such extraordinary mountains.
The change of climates, slow, ironic;
deserts that had been seas, for instance.
The extinction of the dinosaurs (colossal stones
tumbled from the skies).

Or things such as: the arrival of these or those.
The discoveries.
The conquests.
The voyages so many made.
Things like that.

But I was born in the year nineteen hundred and fifty-eight
of the Christian era. I will not live for centuries
and I can barely watch the loss of a majestic jungle.

I’ve been unaware of other great events.

Every evening a young man plays his Tarahumara violin
in his room. Jesús Hielo. Jesus Ice.
My sister remembers him, in Cerocahui.
—Outside the world grows, concrete and vast,
the hills, endlessly trees, conifers
sown fields, grasses, sands, stone.
He died today.
He was mestizo, they tell me.
He has very indigenous features, I answer,
then have to correct myself: had.
How sad, that first time, to use the past tense
when speaking of someone.
The living, solid verb gives way in the end:
he spoke, he said, he had, he was.
Hielo used to play his violin in the mountains.

There it is, all alone, a beautiful word
with its long hair loose, facing the sea

proud to exist, to be on the beach, naked,
all voice, sheer presence, like the sea

with its vocalic breasts and its adjective skin,
transparent word, child of memory

at the mercy of the sand, of the waves and the air,
of everything the sea contains, includes:

What can it do against the water? against the sun that sets it on fire?
against the sound of the wind that silences it?

Could it say at least one word—like sea,
for example—and include all the water?

—which rises up in waves and revels in the foam
and flowers in the sand, in rocks and salt.

Poor word, alone, face-to-face with the sea:
our only eyes, our only voice,

our only way of being, facing the sea.

The Greats commissioned it
as expression and proof of their glory.
It was perfection. A tall monolith
of perfect crystal. Its structures—
hard algebra and transparent stone—
formed invisible iridescent
cathedrals, concentric.

They called it diamond:
an entire diamond obelisk.
It would be a pure fount of reflections,
a deep mirror for the sun.
It would tell time. It would mark solstices.
It would guide nomads. Above all,
it would speak of the Greats for the rest of time.

But the gods, who only contemplate,
deemed otherwise,
giving other names
to the meager materiality of the glinting obelisk:
Ice. Foam.
And they watched it crack, collapse
within a few geological eras.