Devotion

There was a high wall between our houses.
Difficult to send her a message.
There was no email.
Her father was a jaguar.
We tied notes to a rock bound to a rope
and I threw the rock into her backyard.
It was glorious.
But sometimes the note got stuck in the branches of the guava tree
and then it was agony.
So it was in the time of jaguars.

Portrait

As a child, he lengthened rivers.
He walked slowly, obscurely—half-formed
in silence.
He wanted to be the voice in which stones speak.
Landscapes wandered across his eyes.
His chants were full of fountains.
Like an aroma, he stuck to things.

from Song of Seeing

Having lived many years in the scrub grass in the way of birds
The boy took on a bird’s kind of stare—
He obtained a fountain-esque vision.
He observed things the way birds observed them.
All the unnamed things.
Water wasn’t the word water yet.
Rock wasn’t the word rock.
They just were.
Words were free of grammar and could inhabit any position.
So it was the boy could inaugurate them as he pleased.
He could give rocks the costume of the sun.
He could give song the sun’s format.
And, if he wanted to end up a bee, it was only a matter
of opening the word bee and stepping inside it.
As if it were the infancy of language.

Six or Thirteen Things I Learned by Myself

1.
The necktie of a vulture is colorless.
Leaning into the shadow of a lone nail, the vulture is born.
Moonlight on the rooftops flusters the dogs.
Waters crystallize on the leg of a fly.
June bugs don’t use their wings when they track over excrement.
A poet is a creature who licks words and gets delirious.
In the bone of a lunatic’s speech are the lilies.

3.
There are four tree theories I know well.
First: that a shrub of garbage is mightier for its ants.
Second: that a plant of filth produces the most flaming fruits.
Third: in vines that strike through the cracks in walls a sensual power grows in the cavities.
Fourth: that there are in lone trees a superior rapture for horizons.

7.
Intimate is the rain
If seen from a wall damp with flies;
If beetles appear in the foliage; If geckos stick to the mirrors;
If cigarettes, out of love, get lost in the trees;
And the dark dampens on our skin.

9.
In passing her vaginula over the poor things of the ground,
the slug leaves little liquid prints.
It influences my desire to slobber over words.
In a coitus with letters!
The slug chafes on the stone’s dryness.
It drips over the aridness of the desert that is the life of a stone.
It screws the stone.
The slug requires this desert to live.

11.
That the word “wall” not be a symbol
of obstacles to freedom
of repressed desires of childhood restrictions,
etcetera (those things the explorers find
in the disclosures of mental arcana).
No.
The wall that allures me
is made of tiles, adobe applied
to the abdomen of a house.
I have a crawling taste
for going through entryways
coming down into the cracks in walls
through fissures, through crevices–lascivious
as ivy.
To be the tile’s blind lip.
The worm that glows.

12.
His France is useless.
It’s only good for playing violin.
From drinking water out of a hat the ants already know who he is.
It’s totally useless.
The same as saying:
a dust that likes what’s left of the soup is a fly.
He said one needs to be a nobody his whole life.
To be a developed nothing.
He said the origin of the artist is in this act of suicide.

13.
Place where there is decadence.
In which the houses begin to die and bats inhabit them.
In which the grasses enter, enter men, houses shut from the inside.
The moonlight will find only rocks vagabonds dogs.
Grounds besieged by abandon, given over to poverty.
Where men will have the strength of poverty.
And the ruins will bear fruit.