The Distances

The accumulation of reefs piling up one over the others like thoughts of the sky increasing as the head rises unto horizons of wet December days perforated with idle motions of gulls . . . and our feelings. I’ve been wondering about what you mean, standing in the spray of shadows before an ocean abandoned for winter, silent as a barque of blond hair. and the way the clouds are bending, the way they “react” to your position, where your hands close over your breasts like an eyelid approving the opening of “an evening’s light.” parasites attach themselves to the moss covering your feet, blind Cubans tossing pearls across the jetty, and the sound of blood fixes our eyes on the red waves. it is a shark! and our love is that rusted bottle . . . pointing north, the direction which we turn, conjuring up our silver knives and spoons and erasing messages in the sand, where you wrote “freezing in the arctic of our dreams,” and I said “yes” delaying the cold medium for a time while you continued to “cultivate our possessions” as the moon probably “continued” to cradle. tan below the slant of all those wasted trees while the scent carried us back to where we were: dancing like the children of great diplomats with our lean bodies draped in bedsheets and leather flags while the orchestra made sounds which we thought was the sky, but was only a series of words, dying in the thick falsetto of mist. for what can anyone create from all these things: the fancied tilt of stars, sordid doves burning in the hollow brick oven, oceans which generalize tears, it is known to us in immediate gestures, like candle drippings on a silk floor. what are we going to do with anything? besides pick it up gently and lay it on the breath of still another morning, mornings which are always remaining behind for one thing or another shivering in our faces of pride and blooming attitude. in the draught of winter air my horse is screaming you are welcoming the new day with your hair leaning against the sand, feet dive like otters in the frost and the sudden blue seems to abandon as you leap. O to make everything summer! soldiers move along lines like wet motions in the violent shade’s reappearance. but what if your shadow no longer extends to my sleeping? and your youth dissolves in my hand like a tongue, as the squandered oceans and skies will dissolve into a single plane (so I’ll move along that plane)                unnoticed and gray as a drift of skulls over the cool Atlantic where I am standing now, defining you in perhaps, the only word I can. as other words are appearing, so cunningly, on the lips of the many strips of light. like naked bodies stretched out along the only beach that remained, brown and perfect below the descending of tides.