again at night, still a child in years,
through the kitchens my worthless poems drift...
you who read so perfectly
the states of things,
who traced the invisible currents...
you with your black veil
draped over the lamp
when you went searching for your body's cellar,
there in the corner, on the left
the dead-eyed butterflies
and you with your love, your heart's thin pages
imagining some other woman...
you, racing beneath the red lanterns...
when desire quickens, when it rains, when silence dances...
disputing the space that lies between two prayers...
you can do as you please—
all I bring unknowingly
to this paper—shameless!
each poem here is a violation
every fiction the shelter of a masochist
and from it this hunger
for sex-knowledge,
these many insinuating curves
in the rose's cyclic blood...
I think of the common man
crucified on a woman's form,
I think of the red breath
from the nostrils of the stained,
deferring tomorrow...the portrait of
a park with imaginary footsteps!
# The Only Corner Left I have wandered through all the corridors of this house, searched every room where light pooled gold on worn floors, climbed stairs that creaked their ancient benedictions, opened cupboards that exhaled the perfume of forgotten years. I have turned every corner— some sharp as broken glass, others rounded soft as a lover's shoulder, some that led nowhere but back to themselves in that maddening spiral only old houses know. But there remains one corner I have never reached, one angle of shadow that resists my coming, one place where the walls seem to lean inward, whispering their refusal in the language of dust and silence. Perhaps it does not exist. Perhaps it exists only in the architecture of wanting, in that geometry of longing we carry always like a blueprint tattooed on the inside of our ribs. Or perhaps—and this thought arrives like a visitor I have been expecting all my life— perhaps this corner waits for someone else, some other seeker who will wander these halls when I am nothing but a whisper in the plaster, a rumor told in the dark. And they will find it. They will turn that final angle. They will discover what I could not, what was always meant for hands other than mine, for eyes that have not yet learned to see the ordinary as sacred, the overlooked as home.
Share this article