THE SENSES OF SIGHT AND TOUCH
DO NOT ALWAYS AGREE


Her touch gave a sensation
                                          Of band aids
Around each of her fingertips. I

Stared again to see if her hand existed, was fully alive,
Or was
I being touched by someone breathing her last breath
Before becoming a corpse.

What I saw close to me was a
girl with gold twists for hair,
And her posture, upright,
And appearance, the apparitional smile that stretched the skin
Above her lip.

I saw there were no band aids on her fingertips,
But still I feel gauze passionately gripping my wrists.
I did not feel any flesh.

Now her finger was being slid between the pearl buttons
On my light purple shirt,

But I did not feel the warmth of a finger, but I feel
The rough texture of the tape that secured a bandage.

I looked at her again. She was there, young, vital.

I saw no bandages or band aids on her fingers,
But when she touched me, I was certain
there were band aids and bandages.

 

EVERYTHING HAS TO BE DECODED AND THEN RECODED

The bubble, no matter how much
We want this bubble, this soap and water, to be eternal,
A globe with rainbows sliding over its skin,
It burst, it breaks.

It disappears so quickly not even leaving a speck

Of water or soap.
It only leave a phone number in Dallas,
And a poem by Rumi translated by an American
Who has too drunk on cocktails
To even understand what Rumi was saying.

So I gaze at the dust on my shelves, am thrilled
By the silver gray coloring,
And do not want to wipe the dust off.
The dust is the same color as her hair
Where the dye had faded away.

I look at this silver gray dust, hesitate
With my dust cloth,
But I must wipe the dust off.
I must.

I must.

 

THE BIRTH OF DAMNISO LOPEZ

When born, ashes from the hen coop,
Bombed by a helicoper,
Blew across his bed, leaving specks
In the shapes of black hearts.

His one-armed father entered, and shook
The dried gourd in his one hand.
He put the gourd on the ground,
Cracked a long, black, snaked-tongue whip.

His German chorus girl mother, weary,
Reached for the sherry on the side table,
Awkwardly missed, knocked the bottle off
To break and spread its gold on the white rug.

Damniso, blond hair, no features of his father,
Dreamed what babies dream, dreams
Devoid of the sound of castanets,
The swirling skirt, whiplashes across back.

 

EACH ONE HAS HIS OWN CODE

I think now that it is past
What was this moment like
When drinking champagne with her in a parking lot.
It was probably hardly noticed when it happened,
But became only grand
When I was drinking champagne alone,
When the champagne
Revealed its true reality, dull taste.
Now, alone, I drink the same champagne,
Fifty dollars a bottle, it is dull.
But when drunk with her,
It was grand. Or was it.
Perhaps, it was grand only in memory.
Now alone, I question what is reality anyway?

 

OUR SYSTEM IS ALREADY ESTABLISHED,
AND THEN IS RE-ESTABLISHED

I find again myself in a past neighborhood, or was it
Bunch of boys with caps pulled down low over their forehead
Standing in front of a bench
Built to circle an oak tree.
It is vague what is present in memory,
But there were faces,
All the faces looked like knife blades.

The lost of control put snow on the ground, not smooth
Snow,
But chunks of snow, not soft, but hard, snow as hard as stones.
When control returned,
I remember it was a sunny summer day, but each boy
Blade-faced boy had balled up his fists.

So remembering, revising the memories, casting out the memories,
I created still lives:
Ikibana baskets filled with chrysanthemums;
A squat-shaped, blue-gray vase, cracked with thin black lines,
With a coral red, leafless, small tree.

Then I wondered who it was that spoke to me.
The voice had the same tonality it had then,
And had not aged although it was a long time ago.
This intruding voice had no body, and it was
Only vaguely heard at the time of speaking.
The voice brought a rebirth, a type of transfiguration.

The transfiguration became a poster, my portrait,
The knife-blade faces returned
To cut the poster into shreds.