I might have been a martyr. Instead I was
A scourge of martyrs, trying souls in fire.
To save my own soul, I tried tears and prayer,

There is so much lonliness in that gold.
The moon of every night is not the moon
That the first Adam saw.

Walking a long time in the fields of the dead
I stopped where the grass
flared thickly, and leaned on a stone

Yesterday rain fell in torrents, 
stripping the branches of leaves and 
deepening the arroyo. Now, 

The time of year when all my blood is thick,
This is the season when my heart must die.

Shortly before the noon is always high—

In the environs of the funeral home 
The smell of death was absent. All I knew 
Were flowers rioting and odors blown