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Out-of-focus photographs in front of equestrian monuments. The fog of the drug, low-impact anecdotes and scenes from badly dubbed films. With this we arrive at our 40s and we shouldn’t be ungrateful. It could be worse. • The year ending with the month of parakeets who didn’t let anyone sleep with their demented squawking. The day we lowered our arms believing we were raising them. • An arm, a fragment of an arm congealed on the left margin: the photograph in which we’re posing like tourists in the ugliest city in the world. An extremity outside the frame pointing toward a place without historical value. That photograph, the mechanics of a smile set in motion by a signal from the stranger who took it. • To keep from dwelling on the imminent let’s speculate about the fate of a friend from elementary school who always covered his notebooks in pink. Or let’s be practical and calculate our taxes. • May God keep you, she thinks. Blessings, she says. • Every four months, with technical precision, Mom asks if I’m gay. • Son (leaving the table): See you tomorrow. Mother (under her breath): God willing. • Vacation of ’91, before nightfall, downloading the catalogue of bootlegs. The Exorcist on repeat for weeks to commit the dialogue to memory: 15 years later, nothing remains. A vacation’s useless exercise. The crisis of our 40s at 22. • The weeds grow when we’re not watching them. Years accumulate while we worry about the weeds. Learning this took longer than we would have liked. • “See you tomorrow.” “If that’s God’s will,” she corrects me. • From the sun, surpassed again by rotation and refraction, a few minutes of orange light are left flattering the silhouettes of the park’s elderly, unmoving. This is how it is or this is how I see it through the extenuating filter of 10mg of Klonopin. • The fog of the drug, low-impact anecdotes and scenes from badly dubbed films. At that hour of the morning when the transvestites begin to grow a beard. • Vices explain the glassy stare of someone who saw someone else ironing the old bills first on the cleared section of a table cluttered with stolen appliances to later, meticulously, restore each one with Scotch tape. • Jorge (the gardener) is weeding. “See you tomorrow.” “God be with you.” • Parents’ house a gluttonous Sunday (pants unbuttoned), every idea is a capital sin on the sofa in front of the TV. They show the movie about someone with the heart of a baboon or that’s what he’d been tricked into believing since he was a child: the weak muscle substituted by a fantasy. • Succumbing to the interruption, he writes this: “Above the bar where joy had been they built a cathedral out of everything that doesn’t belong to me.” • Succumbing to the interruption, he recites this: “Kyrie, rex genitor ingenite, vera essentia, eleyson.” • Statistic: “I have photographs that used to be ours.” A weak heart. No fantasy. • Years and years, hours and hours dedicated to exercising the brain which responds solely to the superficial. An autonomous organ dictates the heart’s — not at all metaphorical — ache. • In my head there’s a homunculus who skips stones, also a cripple who drags his dead leg through the sand of the Pacific and the trail that he’s leaving behind looks like the handwriting of someone who’s hurt you, and the waves come and the waves erase it. • Conversations you can’t participate in. Piles of overdue books. Keychains without working flashlights. The line of ants looks like a crack in the wall. To write on one’s own forearm with the sharp edge of a bitten-off fingernail. Supermarket: rice, mustard, toothpaste, Scotch tape, Tylenol. Jorge (the gardener): 224-5678. Supermarket: salt. Conversations you can’t participate in. • Off-center photographs in front of equestrian monuments. León Cortés’s arm, the shadow of León Cortés’s arm, cast on our 30-year-old biology. Apart from the extras behind us, everything looks like a Photoshopped montage. • The children of the Second Republic reproduced without thinking, fed those who shave heads and chests and armpits. Secretly they know it’s Independence Day, August 2nd. • Every four months, like an auditor, his mother asks if he is an addict. • May God keep you, she thinks. Bless, she says. • Out-of-focus photographs, photographs of people who consume anxiolytics rolled-up in a candy wrapper while they watch badly dubbed films. A cinema in the suburbs, one afternoon, a screening for the unemployed. • I have these photographs that used to be ours. If we superimpose the faces, Linda Blair appears, that transvestite appears, the one we’ve known since elementary school. • In place of the heart, a stone in the shape of La Virgen Criolla who liberated us from the Spanish, from your mother, from your brothers, from obesity, from understanding the mystery of the Trinity. • On the coast of the Pacific we’d watch the fire attentively as if it were an intelligent TV. The glitter of gel in your hair was a host of mortal stars, diminutive, extinguishing themselves. • It could be worse. This is how we arrive at our 40s. By the grace of God, the fog will soon disperse, so that we can take a photograph of the group, of the country, so that we can begin again where the cripple left off. • Off-center photographs every four months, damaged bills in a pants pocket, the sun as seen from a flat planet, the parakeets that month when we lowered our arms believing we were raising them. Translated from the Spanish

Now is the time of year when bees are wild and eccentric. They fly fast and in cramped loop-de-loops, dive-bomb clusters of conversants in the bright, late-September out-of-doors. I have found their dried husks in my clothes. They are dervishes because they are dying, one last sting, a warm place to squeeze a drop of venom or of honey. After the stroke we thought would be her last my grandmother came back, reared back and slapped a nurse across the face. Then she stood up, walked outside, and lay down in the snow. Two years later there is no other way to say, we are waiting. She is silent, light as an empty hive, and she is breathing.

Written in the Autumn of the Year of the Horse 2002 I have run on middle fingernail through Eolithic morning, I have thundered down the coach road with the Revolution’s warning. I have carried countless errant knights who never found the grail. I have strained before the caissons I have moved the nation’s mail. I’ve made knights of lowly tribesmen and kings from ranks of peons I have given pride and arrogance to riding men for eons. I have grazed among the lodges and the tepees and the yurts. I have felt the sting of driving whips, lashes, spurs and quirts. I am roguish – I am flighty – I am inbred – I am lowly. I’m a nightmare – I am wild – I am the horse. I am gallant and exalted – I am stately – I am noble. I’m impressive – I am grand – I am the horse. I have suffered gross indignities from users and from winners, I have felt the hand of kindness from the losers and the sinners. I have given for the cruel hand and given for the kind. Heaved a sigh at Appomattox when surrender had been signed. I can be as tough as hardened steel – as fragile as a flower. I know not my endurance and I know not my own power. I have died with heart exploded ’neath the cheering in the stands - Calmly stood beneath the hanging noose of vigilante bands. I have traveled under conqueror and underneath the beaten. I have never chosen sides – I am the horse. The world is but a player’s stage – my roles have numbered many. Under blue or under gray – I am the horse. So I’ll run on middle fingernail until the curtain closes, And I will win your triple crowns and I will wear your roses. Toward you who took my freedom I’ve no malice or remorse. I’ll endure – This Is My Year – I am the Horse!

—Katounakia, 2007 The cave itself is pleasantly austere, with little clutter—nothing save a narrow slab, a threadbare woolen wrap, and in the chipped-out recess here three sooty icons lit by oil lamp. Just beyond the dim cave's aperture, a blackened kettle rests among the coals, whereby, each afternoon, a grip of wild greens is boiled to a tender mess. The eremite lies prostrate near two books—a gospel and the Syrian's collected prose—whose pages turn assisted by a breeze. Besides the thread of wood smoke rising from the coals, no other motion takes the eye. The old man's face is pressed into the earth, his body stretched as if to reach ahead. The pot boils dry. He feeds on what we do not see, and may be satisfied.

I was out walking, sweaty and with hair plastered to my face when I saw Ernesto Cardenal approaching from the opposite direction and by way of greeting I said: Father, in the Kingdom of Heaven that is communism, is there a place for homosexuals? Yes, he said. And for impenitent masturbators? For sex slaves? For sex fools? For sadomasochists, for whores, for those obsessed with enemas, for those who can't take it anymore, those who really truly can't take it anymore? And Cardenal said yes. And I raised my eyes and the clouds looked like the pale pink smiles of cats and the trees cross-stitched on the hill (the hill we've got to climb) shook their branches. Savage trees, as if saying some day, sooner rather than later, you'll have to come into my rubbery arms, into my scraggly arms, into my cold arms. A botanical frigidity that'll stand your hair on end.

Why hast thou nothing in thy face? Thou idol of the human race, Thou tyrant of the human heart, The flower of lovely youth that art; Yea, and that standest in thy youth An image of eternal Truth, With thy exuberant flesh so fair, That only Pheidias might compare, Ere from his chaste marmoreal form Time had decayed the colours warm; Like to his gods in thy proud dress, Thy starry sheen of nakedness. Surely thy body is thy mind, For in thy face is nought to find, Only thy soft unchristen’d smile, That shadows neither love nor guile, But shameless will and power immense, In secret sensuous innocence. O king of joy, what is thy thought? I dream thou knowest it is nought, And wouldst in darkness come, but thou Makest the light where’er thou go. Ah yet no victim of thy grace, None who e’er long’d for thy embrace, Hath cared to look upon thy face.

Sunset backlights some pine to ... a caped sponge and though I throw my gasp after a monarch there is no hitch, no hitching either to its serape or the echoing orange drawing a rope, horizon’s doubledutch. Mina Loy + Arthur Cravan As blood hits the air & goes red, so I burst outside exhilarated. He has thrown a tippet on the double-bass, which rests on its end-pin the way a singer rests on a glittering stiletto while the other foot slips on a banan—piano. The strings are not the electrified wires of a prison camp, but she’s the instrument of his escape, leaving me to educate my feelings, subtracting the red from night til a winebottle dawns green. Leonora Carrington + Max Ernst I saw the chessplayers over their griddles, all the furor of thinking swallowed like a song in a furred flute; so it must seem when a small daughter disappears with a wife, morning reabsorbed into a lambent priori. Jacqueline Lamba + Andr

She fears him, and will always ask What fated her to choose him; She meets in his engaging mask All reasons to refuse him; But what she meets and what she fears Are less than are the downward years, Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs Of age, were she to lose him. Between a blurred sagacity That once had power to sound him, And Love, that will not let him be The Judas that she found him, Her pride assuages her almost, As if it were alone the cost.— He sees that he will not be lost, And waits and looks around him. A sense of ocean and old trees Envelops and allures him; Tradition, touching all he sees Beguiles and reassures him; And all her doubts of what he says Are dimmed with what she knows of days— Till even prejudice delays And fades, and she secures him. The falling leaf inaugurates The reign of her confusion; The pounding wave reverberates The dirge of her illusion; And home, where passion lived and died, Becomes a place where she can hide, While all the town and harbor side Vibrate with her seclusion. We tell you, tapping on our brows, The story as it should be,— As if the story of a house Were told, or ever could be; We’ll have no kindly veil between Her visions and those we have seen,— As if we guessed what hers have been, Or what they are or would be. Meanwhile we do no harm; for they That with a god have striven, Not hearing much of what we say, Take what the god has given; Though like waves breaking it may be, Or like a changed familiar tree, Or like a stairway to the sea Where down the blind are driven.

I Rose of fate, you looked for ways to wound us yet you bent like the secret about to be released and the command you chose to give us was beautiful and your smile was like a ready sword. The ascent of your cycle livened creation from your thorn emerged the way’s thought our impulse dawned naked to possess you the world was easy: a simple pulsation. II The secrets of the sea are forgotten on the shores the darkness of the depths is forgotten in the surf; the corals of memory suddenly shine purple. . . O do not stir. . . listen to hear its light motion. . . you touched the tree with the apples the hand reached out, the thread points the way and guides you. . . O dark shivering in the roots and the leaves if it were but you who would bring the forgotten dawn! May lilies blossom again on the meadow of separation may days open mature, the embrace of the heavens, may those eyes alone shine in the glare the pure soul be outlined like the song of a flute. Was it night that shut its eyes? Ashes remain, as from the string of a bow a choked hum remains, ash and dizziness on the black shore and dense fluttering imprisoned in surmise. Rose of the wind, you knew but took us unknowing at a time when thought was building bridges so that fingers would knit and two fates pass by and spill into the low and rested light. III O dark shivering in the roots and the leaves! Come forth sleepless form in the gathering silence raise your head from your cupped hands so that your will be done and you tell me again the words that touched and merged with the blood like an embrace; and let your desire, deep like the shade of a walnut tree, bend and flood us with your lavish hair from the down of the kiss to the leaves of the heart. You lowered your eyes and you had the smile that masters of another time humbly painted. Forgotten reading from an ancient gospel, your words breathed and your voice was gentle: ‘The passing of time is soft and unworldly and pain floats lightly in my soul dawn breaks in the heavens, the dream remains afloat and it’s as if scented shrubs were passing. ‘With my eyes’ startling, with my body’s blush a flock of doves awakens and descends their low, circling flight entangles me the stars are a human touch on my breast. ‘I hear, as in a sea shell, the distant adverse and confused lament of the world but these are moments only, they disappear, and the two-branched thought of my desire reigns alone. ‘It seemed I’d risen naked in a vanished recollection when you came, strange and familiar, my beloved to grant me, bending, the boundless deliverance I was seeking from the wind’s quick sistrum. . .’ The broken sunset declined and was gone and it seemed a delusion to ask for the gifts of the sky. You lowered your eyes. The moon’s thorn blossomed and you became afraid of the mountain’s shadows. . . .In the mirror how our love diminishes in sleep the dreams, school of oblivion in the depths of time, how the heart contracts and vanishes in the rocking of a foreign embrace

Then the cicadas again like kindling that won’t take. The struck match of some utopia we no longer remember the terms of— the rules. What was it was going to be abolished, what restored? Behind them the foghorn in the harbor, the hoarse announcements of unhurried arrivals, the spidery virgin-shrieks of gulls, a sideways sound, a slippery utterly ash-free delinquency and then the subaqueous pasturings       inexhaustible phosphorous handwritings the frothings of their own excitements now erase, depth wrestling with the current-corridors of depth ... But here, up on the hill, in town, the clusterings of dwellings in balconied crystal-formation, the cadaverous swallowings of the dream of reason gone, hot fingerprints where thoughts laid out these streets, these braceletings of park and government—a hospital—a dirt-bike run— here, we stand in our hysteria with our hands in our pockets, quiet, at the end of day, looking out, theories stationary, while the freight, the crazy wick, once more slides down— marionette-like its being lowered in— marionette-strung our outwaiting its bloody translation ... Utopia: remember the sensation of direction we loved, how it tunneled forwardly for us, and us so feudal in its wake— speckling of diamond-dust as I think of it now, that being carried forward by the notion of human perfectibility—like a pasture imposed on the rising vibrancy of endless diamond-dust ... And how we would comply, some day. How we were built to fit and comply— as handwriting fits to the form of its passion, no, to the form of its passionate bearer’s fingerprintable i.d., or, no, to the handkerchief she brings now to her haunted face, lifting the sunglasses to wipe away the theory—or is it the tears?—the freight now all in her right hand, in the oceanic place we’d pull up through her wrist—we’d siphon right up— marionette with her leavening of mother-of-pearl— how she wants to be legible, how the light streaking her shades now grows vermilion, which she would capture of course, because that, she has heard, from the rumorous diamond-dust, is what is required, as also her spirit—now that it has been swallowed like a lustrous hailstone by her unquenchable body—suggests—the zero at the heart of the christened bonfire—oh little grimace, kiss, solo at the heart—growing refined, tiny missionary, in your brightskirted host, scorched comprehension—because that is what’s required, her putting down now the sunset onto that page, as an expression of her deepest undertowing sentiment, which spidery gestures, tongued-over the molecular whiteness, squared out and stretched and made to resemble emptiness, will take down the smoldering in the terms of her passion —sunglasses on the table, telephone ringing— and be carried across the tongue-tied ocean, through dusk, right through it, over prisons, over tiny clapboard houses to which the bartender returns, exhausted, after work, over flare-ups of civil strife, skeletons rotting in the arms of skeletons, the foliage all round them gleaming, the green belly-up god we thought we’d seen the last of, shuddering his sleep off, first fruit hanging ripe—oh bright red zero— right there within reach, that he too may be nourished, you know this of course, what has awakened which we thought we’d extinguished, us still standing here sword in hand, hand extended, frail, over the limpid surface of the lake-like page, the sleep-like page, now folded and gently driven into its envelope, for the tiny journey, over offices, over sacrifices, to its particular address, at the heart of the metropolis, where someone else is waiting, hailstone at the core, and the heat is too great, friend, the passion in its envelope, doors slamming, traffic backing-up, the populace not really abandoned, not really, just very tired on its long red errancy down the freeways in the dusklight towards the little town on the hill—the crystal-formation?— how long ago was it we said that? do you remember?— and now that you’ve remembered—and the distance we’ve traveled—and where we were, then—and how little we’ve found—aren’t we tired? aren’t we going to close the elaborate folder which holds the papers in their cocoon of possibility, the folder so pretty with its massive rose-blooms, oh perpetual bloom, dread fatigue, and drowsiness like leavening I feel—