a woman who hesitates is lost.

she loved with a skim of ice, with tears
in her hands, as if she had never really
existed or been cast ashore. she went
and came like an animal, an old woman
alone, burning your ships.

her strength was not a fit of laughter,
a mask to conceal what we call life;
it was a place of retreat, a war attended
by the increasing infirmities of all
your philanderings and the wild
gambols of isolated promises.

far different were the remnants of
the night, owned by the gloomy walls
and the secrets of what you have been.

when the deep shadows
of the matter in the sky should
be as active as virtue,
and all the enemies of this world
have been doubly grievous,
there is the cry of an aged
trapper, a name pronounced
in solemn silence.

i have seen forts taken and lost.
i have been overlooked.

the house is a widow, consisting
more of dread than of
poems’ relief to feelings.

there is a proper beginning
in the dawn; it amounts to
a woman wrecked, a new
direction to that narrow and
vulgar acrimony of morals,
acts of valour and
the victories of death.

she was running riot;
a few hours of agony had
succeeded in disarming her.

she continued to bore and plug
holes as new as wisdom teeth.

she was anxiously alive,
blushing a little, abstracted;
rushing into his eyes, his round eyes
fixed precisely on her bones
and bruised nerves.

he had been so careless
of the future, this extraordinary
freedom of action as rapid
as oblique innuendoes.

indulgent to all the moves
in his eyes, she still trusted that
she would desert him.
--

i am a wild foam; i do not sink, thrust
from the watercourses of a world
of final adieus. i fearlessly entrusted you
with all the problems with wisdom,
wasting the few rare things in my life.

you are of the same nature elsewhere,
one of savage ingenuity and the probation
you have passed for property.

you are neither miserable nor ashamed,
following the trail of your burdens of
backslidings; but guilt gives us all dignity,
and doubts cast my lot in life.

they had become acquainted by
letting nature have its way in
an impenetrable darkness

a post mortem walkthrough would
have rendered it a question of fear, of
the peculiar divisions of a wildly
enamoured woman

even the cosmopolite has
a small portion of mankind
in some form or another,
and even bees would have done
many things besides work
in these conferences of night
--

it seems possible
to master fear when
all is confirmed,
half-decided

when we have
sufficient self-command
and resignation

but we lack counter and bass,
and i see nothing of the sun
in our possession

the pilot began to stir.
the paper contained the slightest
movement of his gifts, and we
supposed that the subject was
cruel, and unnecessary to illustrate.

he seldom spoke, coughed,
laughed again, so profound was
this heavy sloop of war.

it is every man's life
when they happen to live,
the officers of warmth
mere vagabonds on the coast
of darkness.

i begin to see him even
at this distance;
the beautiful mouth,
the questionable process of
boasting of youthful histories.

hidden in the common way
in these forests, i look
at my compass only once.

come hither,
all this caution.

the mouth of faith,
whose pictures
she had forgotten.

once within,
the gift of
geniality.

he is a naked reef
on this dry bed
of a prairie.

quickened by the
low islands, wading
in the most melancholy
procession, he flies
high in the hours.

he is indifferent
as a prison, awaiting
the appearance of
brow beating truth,
the whole hundred
bales. phlebotomy,
self-balancing
the colour of the land
of tombstones.

a shadow darkens the golden
days of that first time
i was the labor of his
kindling eye.

he was so, a heart and a human. entirely without the semblance of composure, this human nomenclature. that was what the world left to you; as if you were younger, as if you were any other woman. you were ready to fall by the river, the current ceased, and each movement remaining silent. oh yes, boats; and you, like a duck.

he stood, long regarding the picture of an old well, while he gave you pictures of old men without teeth or beauty; people you sought, who had unavoidably caught some of the day with the finding of hats and the clapping of hands. the mind of a woman hung around his windows, broken by injustice and the folly of anticipation. he was proud; it was his way of making the future. you became firm friends in any case.

you grew up, taking him for a father; you finally abandoned all hope of concealing the effects of parallelograms. writing human skeleton names in despair, almost immediately swallowed in. you were in deep water, observing half starved miscreants, more faithful in matters touching their own welfare. a sudden panic at the culture of simple explanation. your pretensions have seen what should have escaped unnoticed, outside the buildings, in the darkness. in your skeletal diagrams, the manner of the sky.

filling his mind was the imminent and imposing row of shining yellow, red and brown; a hazy, moonlight morning. you couldn't help but keep a sharp intimation that it would have decided antipathies, something like wilderness. you were not mistaken, by methods legitimate or illegitimate. he had been so often uncomfortable in the novelty, in such negligent glimpses of waves; but trifles become liberty and independence, and sleep finally settled down in his hand.

to blend the numerous tribes of heartbeat was natural, and you could be seen holding these things to his eyes over their low parapets. if not ideal, so simple. but you were strangers; to see would have been easier than punishment in this habitual intercourse with the rising sun. quick as language in the clutter of the atmosphere. you would have preferred him drowning himself in a furious descent to having managed to make you indifferent.

the damage was imprinted on the clangor of the sea and in desire under the stairs. a desire that remained mute, like a heart, a vast heart, a stale sea; several seconds passing between extended sicknesses. the threat of sincerity was a question of pride, a question of tragedy. you tempted my intimacy, respected my tears. now my embroidered tears have cut me open, a craving i cannot control turning before my eyes.

we are in an unfamiliar sleep that emanates through the small cracks of a long disease. my irrepressible desire to remain dumb sees a city not trusted and the approach of silence. a structure of yearning where history is declared a characteristic of ardor, an endless loop of compromise. an embracing of irrationalities and mute approximations.

a conclusion had been asserted; the end of history. memories can only momentarily be seized and only in fragments. hope dies in surroundings of pride and in the permanence of exhaustion.

you were oblivious to the peace around us. you are young, all disguise and posture, all feints and gestures.

i am a night watchman moving through a recently vacated building.


-

the uncontainable excess of emotion which bounces in me is an irrepairable collision, this heart a building, a labyrinth of newly appointed happiness. you are a nocturnal guard that moves through the everyday delight in surroundings. you are a bird that is caught accidentally in the permissions of peace. you stop the world in the air.

in order to become the stars, we uncover ourselves for brief moments, the connection of cells a unity which forms in fragments, images romantically stored in our brains. we become optimistic, trusting in luck. we see inside the distance of the night. in the broken temporality of the moment, small universes explosively show their little seconds, those which are seen at intervals in the dark night with a magnified heart.

we are free from myth, separated from reality. we are a detonation of fireworks in the world. happiness pours out along the senses. the stars pass, night observers moving through the vibrating constantness of an uncontainable abundance and the unguarded joy of smiles.

-

there is a ventricle inside this stream of ceremony, and the woman is an artery of poverty; she drowns in this ocean of deranged commonness. she has emptied her own body of unique substance, an instantaneous decision. freedom is a myth that piles up in the enterprise of escape, creating a hanging confusion.

cut off from her confiding happiness, the conflict of simple impatience cannot decompose her surrender to sacrifice, her victim's role; precarious unity and a passionate abandonment to her own structures of desire.

their cherished quietness is a yearning for irrationalities, a silent approach. the information of motion on the skin is an overhauled unyieldingness, an unaccomplished yearning to adapt to that which the world forgets. they do not compromise feeling, but seize the irrationalities that it transforms; largely unsolvable conflicts, a personal solitude of eyes in this incessant river that flows out in mute reveal.