is then I see my soul, swiftly unsheathed,like a white cattle bird growing more smallover the ocean of the evening canes,and I sit quiet, waiting for it to returnlike a hog-cattle blistered with mud,because, for my spirit, India is too far.And to that gongsometimes bald clouds in saffron robes assemblesacred to the evening,sacred even to…
Then all the nations of birds lifted togetherthe huge net of the shadows of this earthin multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,stitching and crossing it. They lifted upthe shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill—the net rising soundless as night, the…
broods in her yellow room and won’t come out.Everything goes to hell; the mountains fumelike a kettle, rivers overrun; still,she will not rise and turn off the rain.She is in her room, fondling old things,my poems, turning her album. Even if thunder fallslike a crash of plates from the sky,she does not come out.Don’t you…
brightness; but it tightensagain. When have I ever not lovedthe pain of love? But this has movedpast love to mania. This has the strongclench of the madman, this isgripping the ledge of unreason, beforeplunging howling into the abyss.Hold hard then, heart. This way at least you live.
those volcanoes like ashen roses, or the incurable soreof poverty, around whose puckered mouth thin boys areselling yellow sulphur stonethe burnt banana leaves that used to dancethe river whose bed is made of broken bottlesthe cocoa grove where a bird whose cry sounds green andyellow and in the lights under the leaves crested withorange flame…
it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness, andhave our light in ashes. . .Browne, Urn BurialStones only, the disjecta membra of this Great House,Whose moth-like girls are mixed with candledust,Remain to file the lizard’s dragonish claws.The mouths of those gate cherubs shriek with stain;Axle and coach wheel silted under the muckOf cattle…
Derisive and avuncular at once,Swivelling, fixed me. They’d seenToo many wakes, too many cathouse nights.The bony, idle fingers on the valvesOf his knee-cradled horn could tearThrough ‘Georgia on My Mind’ or ‘Jesus Saves’With the same fury of indifference,If what propelled such frenzy was despair.Now, as the eyes sealed in the ashen flesh,And Eddie, like a…
Requests the lemonade of simple praiseIn scansion gentler than my hammock swingsAnd rituals no more upsetting than aBlack maid shaking linen as she singsThe plain notes of some Protestant hosanna—Since I lie idling from the thought in things—Or so they should, until I hear the criesOf two small children hunting yellow wings,Who break my Sabbath…
that oven-hot summer nightwhistled me over. Niceand friendly. So, I stop.MacDougal or ChristopherStreet in chains of light.A summer festival. Or somesaint’s. I wasn’t too far fromhome, but not too brightfor a nigger, and not too dark.I figured we were allone, wop, nigger, jew,besides, this wasn’t Central Park.I’m coming on too strong? You figureright! They beat…
IIn hill-towns, from San Fernando to Mayagüez,the same sunrise stirred the feathered lances of canedown the archipelago’s highways. The first breezerattled the spears and their noise was like distant rainmarching down from the hills, like a shell at your ears.In the cool asphalt Sundays of the Antillesthe light brought the bitter history of sugaracross the…
