From 15 Poems II

Negros-full Moon

How long have I waned?

And took the fate of oceans

upon my hand.

I make tides faithful

to the shore, yet I am

without love, and one faith

guides my circles, that perhaps

a new night pure enough to unfurl

the virgin wraps of night-blooms

tilled by the violet fingers

of answerless waiting will wake

you up despite the tender cloth

clinging upon your breasts, the soft air

breathed by a garden nearby thru your

open window will choke your pink dreams

of castles hazy at the tip of cliffs,

your prince upon a silver horse galloping

upon the bog, and bring your eyes to me

white with craving, hanged on a fragile noose.

Reading Her Favorite Poem

I grip at the final odors of your memory

at first as if an infant desperate

to his suckle breast gorging

the fluid he has never seen

except perhaps if he has the stomach

to stop sucking and watch

what he is drinking. Feel.

You love that poem, so I read it

trying to know the language of your heart.

Only to be broken

in the end,

I’ve taken myself

to a place I can ‘t love, here where you are

more— separate

around you the structures crowd

like shell

the away-eyes you can ‘t tear

from a red sun sinking.

You shame my bleeding here

Upon your violet soil

Anywhere,

the nameless graves of your tears

hold the sky broken

on those silent pools,

sometimes an upturned lily floats

across the blue, shading the pebbles.

Meeting the many names you kept from the world

their faces carved upon your peaks

moveless even to fate,

I feel the molecules

of ceaseless air, crashing to the jaws

of grass, me.

I found, going on, a little

cottage about my person.

There, everything I became to you

archived like fossils, manuscripts of dead

words, bodies shrinking into dust.

This one resembled a daisy

most of its petals forgotten colors

a length of stem drowned on the soft water

through its own musk, its age wafts

crawling to a rod of sun.

Your unvisited church, Goddess! See!

I can ‘t bleed here.

Here you own every crying,

All tears carry your name.

Yes, you girl running down the hills

the green refuses my sole

I here can “t be somewhere

The violins of the sea laments from a distance

My fingers are forceless to weild a blade

against your demons

Swept by your shaking my bones

break like dandelions

I burry my ears to the sand

and I still hear you breaking

Here, your voice is every sound I make.

As the poem’ s period

offers exit

I look back to see you wipe the words

of the dirt I brought with my coming

You arrange the ripples on your ponds

comb every blade of your grass

You brush away my footprints to the breeze

the sun bleeds in your eyes.

As I lit pain between my lips

the smoke howls quietly in the night.

La Isla Dolores

1

Dolores, far fetched as water out of the humid

air of the weather that makes women loosen their buttons

to the breeze, with the lingering grip that bursts the swelling

of plants. Always for the pursuit for new body

pinning down the old sockets to the motherly arms

of death on the passionate soil, the waste that sickens the fallen pressure

of leaves into rot. These garden movements run through the blush

on your cheeks. A fountain, a pond or a birdbath of an old kiss

floating on the surface of memory, as I wrap the fog

in my chest, mindless of the stones acting their character

into a pile of numbness, except perhaps the isle of moss

which on their ancient skin a remote forest of touch.

And I sigh loud as the opening hinges of the early bud.

2

Dolores, your warmth walks with me

on the street everytime my feet falls

under the shade the leaves weave

The warmth that suddenly drives sweat

out of my pores, the water cupped from

the moveless lake inside the body

And these are the fluids riding the air with tiny stars

Because you are like the faucet behind the clouds

and Im putting myself now in a memory of a rain

that repeats the wet on my pillow

What are you made of but the bones of children

with little breaths. And I can fold you like a flower

in the womb of my fist. Until you are nothing

but scent. That the only way to forget

is to stare on where my feet falls creating so little sound

to avoid the sight of your flight from my head.

That she may find me among these distances

The summer beneath her skin

wakes sleeping gardens beneath mine.

Never will I be calm or waters be without ripples.

In grief are many poems about sunsets

but on her cheeks alone bleeding reds twice.

How will I be calm or have waters without ripples?

Notice my hands, her textures

are alive in all my fingers.

Never will aging sing in my tree houses!

Never will I be calm or waters be without ripples

or nights without pillows heavy with songs

of her name, her skin, and the summer beneath.

How can I remember her, when I have not forgotten.

I am empty with her, but without her

the world is filled with Chopin and drowned men.

The waters in our eyes does it just remind you

how the sea, to take the bruised body back yearns?

I am empty with her, but without her

I trace the bed at night for depths pressed by absent

stars.

And what relief is longing, when it reminds me

she is not here, but here is not with her

and where she is, is not with me, is lost

in the burden of arriving. For the world is heavy

with restraint and Imagination is a mascular horse.

In the unborn days we are times of rapid waters.

I am empty with her, but without her

I repeat her voice until the flute of my throat

is breaking, is telling of wide fields, of enormous skies.

The summer beneath her skin

awaken sleeping gardens beneath mine

never will I be calm or waters be without ripples.

(BECAUSE I CANNOT TOUCH HER MEMORY WITH FIRE)

Because I cannot touch her memory with fire

from the stalk of fragrant wanting, I consume

my own pale bones; its metal, like the taste

of soil, reminds me not to sleep at night,

and think of her, and her own wakefulness,

or dip my feet on the sheets, wet with moisture

sighed by the grass left by feeling, left

by its love.

Again, I claw the air in silence, with the same fingers

I hush the wind from the flowers.

If the night to her is empty,

it is because day has never forgotten to forget

her name.

But for me it is more than remembering, it is wanting

to be called by that name, beacause it is her.

It is her with the smell of flowers,

she has never smelled.

It is her skies filled with blue,

that to her it is love.

It is the ice in her skin that I have never touched,

but dreaded to press against my weakness.

And it is her that I don’t have.

The tree rooted in imagination. Her fruits falling

on land that knows no feet.

What pain it causes me to think of her

not thinking of me. What more pain

to think about this in silence. In the dark

among everybody felled by the sickness

of sleep. Among all the radios shut off,

among all the syllables uttered in sleep,

among the movements under the sheets, she is

the echo starting from the white throat

of a cat before curling herself into fur.

She is the thought I remembered, and remembering it again

makes me sure it is her.

I cannot stop comparing her to herself,

because to herself alone she is comparable.

All I really want to say are these things,

because these are the things I can’t tell her.

Because these words can’t be anything to her

but the sky that dissolves even the reddest things

into blue.

September 30, 2000. sta. cruz.