Silvia Curbelo

There is a music to this sadness. In a room somewhere two people dance. I do not mean to say desire is everything. A cup half empty is simply half a cup. How many times have we been there and not there? I have seen waitresses slip a night's worth of tips into the jukebox, their eyes saying yes to nothing in particular. Desire is not the point. Tonight your name is a small thing falling through sadness. We wake alone in houses of sticks, of straw, of wind. How long have we stood at the end of the pier watching that water going? In the distance the lights curve along Tampa Bay, a wishbone ready to snap and the night riding on that half promise, a half moon to light the whole damned sky. This is the way things are with us. Sometimes we love almost enough. We say I can do this, I can do more than this

Pushing the seed into the ground isn't enough. Whatever blooms in this place is dumb and blind. Foreclosure is a one-eyed man. Nothing falls from a sky like this except a little rain, never enough rain. All night my wife looks down the neck of my guitar passing the bottle back and forth like a story she's been telling for years. So many baskets of hard bread. You take the shovel to the ground. The land stares back at you. The corn drifts towards the sky. You don't know what dirt is until you bury your first daughter.

Some dreams are like glass or a light beneath the surface of the water. A girl weeps in a garden. A woman turns her head and that is all. We wake up a hundred times and don't know where we are. Asleep at the wheel. Saved by the luck of angels. Everyone touching his lips to something larger, the watermark of some great sorrow. Everyone giving himself away. The way the rose gives up the stem and floats completely, without history. In the end every road leads to water. What is left of a garden is the dream, an alphabet of longing. The shadow of the girl. Perfume.