at the end of the garden

[I]
I fell into a darkness
at the end of the garden of Sundays
and ploughed the rows of hours
until I had been made ready
only to hear that the seasons had been conscripted
to die in an alien land

and when they were brought back home
they were dressed in regimental graves
to glorify the myth of heroes

suddenly I was facing the terrible metaphysics in the hours
so I assassinated my soul
and saw my salvation as a future fade away

it is always a god who drives the innocent heart to journey
on the ocean of its tears

from behind curtains
the god given to me was a malicious gossip ---
suffering
both the weight of divine designations
and a policy of murder and pillage

how difficult it is to say goodbye
to dreams
to a nation of longings
so much a naturalism of place


[II]
I went out on the blue road
to stop dreaming of castles palaces
to let the emeralds and diamonds
even the gold teeth
sink or swim by their own efforts

beneath the Caribbean sea
the memory of Columbus Cortez and Raleigh ripples
with dryness ---
my clarity had the feel of canvas
as I entered the mouth of a new horizon


[III]
land
rising like a wall
holding back the sea
a continent
alive with flocks of planes
chromed magnesium bodies ---
stars in the daylight

like ribbons unfurled
wide concrete roads were woven everywhere:
I searched
and observed birds
painting expressions of life with wings

I found
a mountain from which is built the shapes of life
and discovered

we are tigers
forged in the
furnace of the sun
beaten repeatedly with the hammer of the sea
our eyes breed an incalculable vision
a soft light the brick of our bones
and the sound of the voice furious wonder
not the energy of slaves


Envoy

in the vast privacy of solitude
my allegiance is to another sky
where the flowers are beautiful
because of their color


This poem was published in Flowers In the Empty House, Watershed Books, 1998.