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Dawn marks the wall a thin flange of off-blue An imagined silence Always an imagined silence The speed at which sleep’s fogged dialogue withers into the present noun-scape This rift valley A volley of seasonal beacons Window where mind finds orbit + All a world can do is appear The window intones A room whose walls warp with sun What’s seen is dreamed We think ourselves here

1. The Cane Fields There is a parrot imitating spring in the palace, its feathers parsley green. Out of the swamp the cane appears to haunt us, and we cut it down. El General searches for a word; he is all the world there is. Like a parrot imitating spring, we lie down screaming as rain punches through and we come up green. We cannot speak an R— out of the swamp, the cane appears and then the mountain we call in whispers Katalina. The children gnaw their teeth to arrowheads. There is a parrot imitating spring. El General has found his word:perejil. Who says it, lives. He laughs, teeth shining out of the swamp. The cane appears in our dreams, lashed by wind and streaming. And we lie down. For every drop of blood there is a parrot imitating spring. Out of the swamp the cane appears. 2. The Palace The word the general’s chosen is parsley. It is fall, when thoughts turn to love and death; the general thinks of his mother, how she died in the fall and he planted her walking cane at the grave and it flowered, each spring stolidly forming four-star blossoms. The general pulls on his boots, he stomps to her room in the palace, the one without curtains, the one with a parrot in a brass ring. As he paces he wonders Who can I kill today. And for a moment the little knot of screams is still. The parrot, who has traveled all the way from Australia in an ivory cage, is, coy as a widow, practising spring. Ever since the morning his mother collapsed in the kitchen while baking skull-shaped candies for the Day of the Dead, the general has hated sweets. He orders pastries brought up for the bird; they arrive dusted with sugar on a bed of lace. The knot in his throat starts to twitch; he sees his boots the first day in battle splashed with mud and urine as a soldier falls at his feet amazed— how stupid he looked!— at the sound of artillery.I never thought it would sing the soldier said, and died. Now the general sees the fields of sugar cane, lashed by rain and streaming. He sees his mother’s smile, the teeth gnawed to arrowheads. He hears the Haitians sing without R’s as they swing the great machetes: Katalina, they sing,Katalina, mi madle, mi amol en muelte. God knows his mother was no stupid woman; she could roll an R like a queen. Even a parrot can roll an R! In the bare room the bright feathers arch in a parody of greenery, as the last pale crumbs disappear under the blackened tongue. Someone calls out his name in a voice so like his mother’s, a startled tear splashes the tip of his right boot. My mother, my love in death. The general remembers the tiny green sprigs men of his village wore in their capes to honor the birth of a son. He will order many, this time, to be killed for a single, beautiful word.

When others run to windows or out of doors To catch the sunset whole, he is content With any segment anywhere he sits. From segment, fragment, he can reconstruct The whole, prefers to reconstruct the whole, As if to say, I see more seeing less. A window to the east will serve as well As window to the west, for eastern sky Echoes the western sky. And even less— A patch of light that picture-glass happens To catch from window-glass, fragment of fragment, Flawed, distorted, dulled, nevertheless Gives something unglassed nature cannot give: The old obliquity of art, and proves Part may be more than whole, least may be best.

I take pillows outdoors to sun them as my mother did.  “Keeps bedding fresh,” she said.  It was April then, too— buttercups fluffing their frail sails, one striped bee humming grudges, a crinkle of jonquils.  Weeds reclaimed bare ground. All of these leaked somehow into the pillows, looking odd where they simmered all day, the size of hams, out of place on grass.  And at night I could feel some part of my mother still with me in the warmth of my face as I dreamed baseball and honeysuckle, sleeping on sunlight.

Traffic was heavy coming off the bridge, and I took the road to the right, the wrong one, and got stuck in the car for hours. Most nights I rushed out into the evening without paying attention to the trees, whose names I didn't know, or the birds, which flew heedlessly on. I couldn't relinquish my desires or accept them, and so I strolled along like a tiger that wanted to spring but was still afraid of the wildness within. The iron bars seemed invisible to others, but I carried a cage around inside me. I cared too much what other people thought and made remarks I shouldn't have made. I was silent when I should have spoken. Forgive me, philosophers, I read the Stoics but never understood them. I felt that I was living the wrong life, spiritually speaking, while halfway around the world thousands of people were being slaughtered, some of them by my countrymen. So I walked on—distracted, lost in thought— and forgot to attend to those who suffered far away, nearby. Forgive me, faith, for never having any. I did not believe in God, who eluded me.

A doll's hair concealing an eggshell skull delicately throbbing, within which maggots in voluptuous unrest jostle and shrug. Oh, Eileen, my big doll, your gold hair was not more sunny than this human fur, but your head was radiant in its emptiness, a small clean room. Her warm and rosy mouth is telling lies—she would believe them if she could believe: her pretty eyes search out corruption. Oh, Eileen how kindly your silence was, and what virtue shone in the opening and shutting of your ingenious blindness.

Ever since I was a boy, I’ve found names, personalities as brittle, excuse me, as braille hints of interest, latched to the slightest meaning. Not parlance. Let me say power. The days rotate on their hinges. I can say I had friends. Sizable numbers, without delay, we were like, I don’t know, an absence. A civilization. Prompt and unlike ourselves at all times: it was as if we could stand to burst, to rapidly be our own engines, rules, buildings, steel columns, iron beams. This is when I said I had a foundry. I had a scale, a summary and reflection, not the desire, but the capacity to be greater in titles and official things. Then I gave it up. I sunk hillsides and fields and ash dumps. I ran the concrete forth and I became the swarm, the throng, corporate in absurdity. Most people in opposition would say these are the words I’ve prepared, while I am a speaker without my text, let the day surprise me. If it falls, it’s me who gathers from idiosyncrasies sentences to shape a state and city.

Whether it was a particular beauty Stirred the tearfall from the eyelid’s rim, Rinsing the world once more with self, Was it not there the general peered, Thousand-eyed, down from the peak In the last of all imaginary sunsets? The light divided in half, the half Divided again in half, the way Zeno’s paradox makes nothing move Because an infinity of points between Target and arrow, though never seen, Exists. And there is snow in a capsule, A solid floor of individual Flakes that, shaken, settle in a field— Parachutists growing where the grass, One moment before, was only natural. I am speaking now of the diminishment Or enhancement of enchanted objects, Of how they turn into nothingness Or burnish the imagination: A fire at the bottom of the sea, For instance, or a mind in space Thinking its way into science fiction, Or, inside the skull, a little world Clinging, about to be thrown away— Miraculous lint under a bell.

Not knowing in what season this again Not knowing when again the arms outyearning Nor the flung smile in eyes not knowing when Not sure beyond all doubt of full return Not sure of time now nor the film’s reversal This all done opposite, the waif regathered Like our lost parents in the blinded song We bag in hand with wandering steps and slow Through suburbs take our solitary way Not that all clouds are garrisoned and stung Not that horizons loom with coppered legions Not that the year is dark with weird condition All who parted in all days looked back Saw the white face, the waving. And saw the sea Not knowing in what season this again For well they knew, the parters in all evenings Druid and Roman and the rocked Phoenician: The blood flows one imposed way, and no other

Round the cape of a sudden came the sea, And the sun looked over the mountain's rim: And straight was a path of gold for him, And the need of a world of men for me.