where are you now?
here I am under a full midwinter moon,
burning like a sunset,
thinking of how precious moss is,
so unique and crushable. they
reminded me of your eyes, your tender
eyes like a seaweed lasso and
how the fog and wind traces your
steps, binding you and your wild
marine ways. that primal light of winters
in Paris, everlasting nights when we
ignored all the telephone bells, even the
polices’.
o God it was wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much.

at the break of the following day
the sun rose in a deep blueness
right down to the hills. we, who
had been held for so long,
emerged treading as softly
as we could into the
water-sky. forsaking, forsaking
all so that we could hear the
laughter of the wind rustling upwards.
nothing has changed since Virgil -
now far off smoke pearls from homestead rooftops
and from high mountains the greater shadows fall

words mine; palm yours

at breakfast we talked of Kierkegaard and
how he said colour is not a choice.
a venomously yellow feather landed
on your shoulder - ha,
no choice indeed. but then again,
the sun on your mane is more an event
than an image and my kisses are not
a chain but bread for millions. 

weary and sweet you trembled like a cypress.

when the rain comes, i stir like plumes,
i come loose, exhale a lasting deep breath
in readiness for praise.
all seems to crave now as i crave, that
last parting hour. something pensive and
intimate as if underground. haltingly even
the tree stumps darken for the passion
of water.

the nonchalance of clear skies, smallest undulations of spring. they alone know the thoughts of dew. o dew, i confess i allowed myself to be bound in knots of sadness and i looked away from your daring splendour.

they told me, yes the dew told me, to live in a world you must first dream it - and in dreams lie responsibilities. with the smallest hands they pried my eyes open, such a clear feeling now that i see the sky boundless and in poetry is my freedom. a slow unwinding, no memories, no flutter, as if nothing is known.

this sky! these skies with its diaphanous coolness, ignorant like a deer, waits for me to take my place with two arms.

if you think hard about it, everything dissolves
elytis once found our heads in god’s hand
hunter once found his head in the mouth of a whale
time changes everything, and you can change anyone
if you do not exhaust your hope -
though looking at you today
it seems like you wept all night.

i love that our hour is yet to come
these big feelings need a breast
in which everything fits, where
music wars, where mouth
opens to mouth on and on.
one more kiss and i will tell you
the night wishes of simple good men
one more kiss and i shall
shut up the eyelids of the world
for the meek.

the unripe sun near dawn made us all peasants of the boundless blue. and the mist, what can i say of the mist but that they looked like nostalgia escaped from the fissures of dreams of those who were still asleep?

sitting on the balcony, i wait for my soul to echo out the valleys mountains rivers…even if it is for the last time. even if it is immovable. 

it’s early, i know, but hear me out. 

the future requires a kind of credulity. yes, i am untried and brought in from elsewhere and you weren’t expecting my small feet at your doorstep shimmering across your life like a spiderweb,
shaken by an early spring.

hear me out, i won’t go anywhere and will be here to open the light, the shadow and
the pieta locked in a perfect block of untouched marble - for you. let me hold your hand over the flood.

carefully, i pronounced the word ‘sea’ 

so that all the verdant beings 

within it could shine, so every

crest of a new wave would ascend 

steadfastly held by the mid-wintry sun. 

a word could quench all the world’s thirst - 

the world doesn’t need much: a small picasso, 

a few bloodlust hyacinths, as long as

you know how to conduct yourself, 

before a flower. 

for weeks i tried to not write about magnolias
i did not want to say, for example, that their tender blooms
had the casual holiness of swans at dusk.
i don’t like comparing flowers to birds at dusk.

they give the misleading impression that nature herself
was in love with us, when i know, they never
intended use to be here. but we are here all the same.
so why not get started immediately?

i mean, belonging to it.

i mean, admire it, weep over it, touch it
over and over. it must disappoint the gods so,
when we are not dazzled by the earth ten times a day
when we forget so many important things.

at least i listen to the nocturnes like a madman

at least i eat up wild poems when i am hungover,
as time creeps along like a damp worm in grass.

at least i recall perfectly that evening when
your hair was sprayed across my lap, looking like the most
beautiful thing that has ever landed there, and

you told me we must write from the deepest depth of
our sympathies.

i’m trying, i’m trying…

Borges

however, intelligence has little to do with poetry. Poetry springs from something deeper; it’s beyond intelligence. It may not even be linked with wisdom. It’s a thing of its own; it has a nature of its own. Undefinable.

little green sea
worldly things are sad
i know. it is not for you
to save the clouds from
their enslavement from the moon -
they have had leave from
centuries to do so, since
before you were born.

little green sea
trembling in the muddied
lamplight, fearful of cicadas
how i want to, with my
thin hands, speak to you
i tilted three or four times
in the night, wanting to cast
a secret lure.

little green sea
so old and so young. there is
a sensible madness that
language anchors for us.
let it take us to the beginning
naked and miraculous.

watching a full moon howling over

victorian houses, my lips were burnt with 

a sadness for europe. a hunger for 

small instincts of beauty awakened in me, 

past the age of photography. 

i walk along old memories, my form of 

time travel, until the mediterranean appeared

and upon it three stars lit like fireworks!

everything in it, a drop of loveliness:

the tremble (treble?) of your eyelashes, 

time like an old church, things always happening

and unhappening to us. 

o we were just the negatives of dreams, 

black and white. 

after a long war 

where we hurled 

angry pomegranates

like grenades,

i walked out 

and tried to open the sky

like an umbrella 

above me.

the hour of departure

comes and i go again

hiding among 

foreign signs sayings 

‘jaume i’ and 

‘los muertos no mueren’. 

i paved around

i paved on endless tarmacs 

waiting for my turn

to voice miracles

accompanying that

concert of hyacinths. 

This I believe, Fuentes

In Yucatan, you never see the water. It flows underground, beneath a fragile sheath of earth and limestone. Occasionally, that delicate Yucatec skin blossoms in eyes of water, in liquid ponds - the cenotes - that attest to the existence of mysterious subterranean current. For me, love is like those hidden rivers and unexpected streams of Yucatan. On occasion our lives come to resemble those infinite chasms that would be fathomless if we did not find, at the bottom of the void a flowing river, at times placid and navigable, wide or narrow, at time steep, but always a liquid embrace that helps keep us from disappearing forever into the dept gulf of nothingness

Image: Thjorsá River #1, Edward Burntynsky

how lovely
that whitenoise of the line
against your tenor, while
i hear nothing.

i imagine mythical birds go by
as your voice slides along
the telephone
all oblivion and echo. 

right now, you are such a
broken force of nature
like your favourite turner
at the frick. 

how tepid
my evenings will be
when i no longer
adore you.

if i ever possessed a meaning, i gave it
all to this shattered sea swept by half moons.
here are all the dark fireworks; the lower tones
of lovemaking; the moaning shrubs beneath
our feet like how the car kept humming though
the engine was off.

in a bed of herbs and geranium i could speak of
only one regret. to have read elytis all too late.
he alone taught me how transparent love can be
like a glazed fruit or a silk handkerchief in the wind
how else could i have known it? the perfect egoism -
that flesh is heir to.

how beautiful o fuck how beautiful
the night has become.