There Are No Words

you insist somehow
we could find the words,
arrange them like blocks
to spell what love is,
and once we succeed,
for all time we’d know
the magic things to say,
smooth incantations
to lay low our fears
that love will die away.

you persist on how
we should seek the words,
exchange what smacks
of shell and speak love
beyond grunts and needs,
seek the sublime that throws
the tragic stings away,
soothes lamentations
that make flow our tears,
or love will fly away.

you resist it now
but there are no words.
strange that nothing works
to tell what love is,
no hunch,no creed,
no silly rhyme that shows
what gladness brings to play.
only in silence
is all love defined,
what joins sky and earth:
silence is the star
kissing a flower.

Still in Grief

the mouth of the Earth opened wide
and then swallowed you down its throat

it seems that way to us still in grief
after all these twenty years

how wonderful it would be
if you could once more fill the spaces

left behind in your departure
come back and laugh with us again

sometimes in dreams you visit me
red hair bright as flaming fire

it is as if you never died
we’re at the table…brothers again!

For Vallejo

On some downtown cobblestone nightmare street
In ChileI hide in doorways that smell of cheap wine,
watch la policia rush by in search of me,
Listen to my heart boom towards implosion,
And wonder how in God’s name will I find
Csar Vallejo before the end of his next poem,
before they come to close down his life.
These are my nightmares, the horrors of dream,
That ride me in rios of blood, nearly blind
To exit isles, to logic, to alarm clocks
screaming me free of these concrete feet.
Vallejo,where are you hiding? Csar,
If you can hear me thinking, trembling,
Do not call out but let the litany
of your poems rattle off mute lips
Like monks at matins, repentant lovers,
The condemned. I have come a long distance
To track you down in the past of your time,
Hide you in the crook of my shirted arm,
And let Dios grow wings for us, sail us
To the future, a safe house in Brooklyn,
A room with a bath, a place you can write,
But when the police are all gone, your voice,
A coda of silence, your body still as your pen.
Csar, your brother Miguel, tus amigos
en revolucion, the woman you loved––
All of you creak open the door through which
I run, stone feet on stone ground, to freedom.

The Hunters Gone

In quietwoods now dark with night,
The forest creatures unafraid
Now congregate and speak of day,
Of deeds performed and what they’ve seen
In light of day when sun was bright

And sounds that frightened were man-made,
How each with caution went his way
In praise of God Who made woods green.
The hunters gone, they love the night,

They let their footfalls fall away
And each in turn now tells his tales.
From hunters holding them in sights
There is no fear of risking doom.

The forest once again for play,
Released at last as if from jails.
Lift up the veils
That darken the delicate moon!