I recall mouths and quick images
Asking me like ghosts superimposed on one another,
Forwarded in my mind,
What do you like? Who do you love?
I can just bite my lips,
Let the cats take my tongue --
There is nothing I can hold that I like.
Things priced are never worth the bread,
Can be bargained, seeming cheap,
In closing shops.
My heart pours out
To the wind unstirred in summer
By any movement of hair,
Resting by the shore and on every skin --
The things passe, those the hands have not yet formed,
The much-awaited, the long by-gones,
The history of someone I only come to know
By his monochrome face on the cover.
Someone who has not jogged past me,
Nor rubbed my elbows,
Down the road where every father crosses,
Not that I am blessed
Believing in him I have not seen,
But I can only love the body who has opened its skin,
Let loose its soul
Long before Mother blew breath into my bones --
An unborn perhaps for there is no other way
To picture a stillborn but with admiration
By bringing rain in December;
A sterile neighbor’s grandchild expecting marriage,
Or this and that whom I can only hear of,
Talked about in head-huddles at the park --
A child who can only call to me
Through the shell drawn close to my ear,
So elusive in his absence forever.
In this lifespan, I only think
Of the could-have-beens, the beyond.
I was warned not to look through and back
Near the grills, panes, and lonely eaves
By my own mind yet do not succumb,
Hid myself deeper though hidden enough
In skin and earth-colored textiles.
These are God’s only true graces --
The stars explored by chance,
The uninhabitable sand,
The seabed I wish to walk,
The moon-side where nothing falls,
The lost only found by mistake,
Like a key to a hundred closed doors,
Ruined homes, charred flesh,
Burned photographs of stow-aways
Unsearched for, his name on the verge
Of being unspoken
By the brain-part that recalls,
Growing more senile with the greedy, envious time.
