Do you
only
go to new
places
is it true
did the
planet
just get
born

I read
a book &
then I want
to read
another
one about
Russia

The sun allows you to see only what the sun
falls
upon: the surface. What we wanted was what was elsewhere: cause.

                        *

Or some books say that’s what we once wanted. Prophets of
cause
never, of course, agreed about cause, the uncaused cause: or they

                        *

terribly did. Asleep, I struggle to stay inside sleep, unravaged by
heart-
piercing dreams—craving, wish, desire to remain inside, if briefly,

                        *

obliteration. I cleave to the voice of Poppea’s nurse:
oblivion
soave.

                        *

Not frightening, the word
oblivion
as Oralia Domínguez, hauntingly clinging to the sound, in 1964 sings it.

to Antonio M. Cubero

The flags sang their colors
            and the wind is a bamboo shoot between the hands
The world grows like a bright tree
                                                Tipsy as a propeller

And here, the remains of a field

A path withstands the onslaught of ferns
Mushrooms grow
on contorted limbs of a felled rônier palm
Handles of pruning hooks

I want only to be a worn-down stone
on the ruins of time,

I’ll go plant the tree of my grief
in the wetlands
of silence close to her grave

I’ll live in lantana
shrubs

Yesterday I kicked a tree
a walnut fell in a grave
nobody got hurt

it’s June
the February
of summer

after Valmiki’s Ramayana (Aranya Kanda, Sarga 46)

                                Dressed simply but not
               without elegance, holding ritual
                     staff and parasol

Radiating gloom, like an asteroid with designs on a star
like night’s curved shadow that swims across the Earth
like the darkness of our Sun in its deepest explosions
like the planet Budhan about to take hold of Rohini
like Saturn advancing on Chitra
like the forests and cities and far ridges of infinity
      each planetary body with its moons each moon that governs

Five o’clock on a crisp, star-clear winter evening,
sun just sunk beneath the oyster-blue Pacific Ocean,
a panoramic swath of reflective foil rippling incessantly
as if ants were crawling everywhere across it.