I hope and despair at the same moment

I / am stolen splendor on a darkened street

“Roadkill’s something you get used to seeing in America”

Still we couldn't stop writing.

We searched for the words. We sipped our tea / looking down the bitter well of the past . . .

These songs to Mother Earth in a major key / are whispers that come from distant forests

We are life, this way

Are they more beautiful than me?

When the thunder of guns tears out the tongue from the nightingale

Hyacinth! Lift your head your head from within the mud

You kindled hope in me. Now fill my cups.

It's this: we’re seeking water / Where there is only thirst.

Everything—including life— / ends when the hands give up.

Our knees were trusting doves; the ribbons in our hair, delicious bait.

Joseba Sarrionandia’s poem, translated from the Basque, contemplates the problem of suffering and waiting for Icarus to fall.

Hardly anyone comes to visit when you live with a tiger.

The post-war ruins (Roofs ripped off, / The charred walls.)

i know the fear in your eyes at dawn. and the crackle of flames, the hidden creaking of the woods, the madness of the birds beating paths in the air.

The day was silent to distraction, / only the dog’s growl traveled beyond the window

But his dirty ears are resistant to their tender entreating, / And the thick lips will not stretch from these ears into a smile

the voices of a body spent / venture new rhymes, / i can’t fathom what they mean to say

Water drinks me while I drink the water itself.

I cannot promise you much but a gray street and passionate darkness in the Ides of March.

A herald will knock on your door / with news about what is yet to come

Soon I will be leaving this town too

drawn by the myth of the streets of gold / Santiago Nasar arrives on rue Barclay and becomes a pusher

Screaming midnight thoughts plunge down to still

All of us / wait / to receive you.

I strike out, rewrite.

Perhaps she wanted her own fires to burn

Exile is accompanied by the idea of solitude.

on the atlas of my skin / your names

Your ruins no longer enchant me.

Finegolden radiating, bursting— / Multicoloredthoughtingness.

I am willing to carve you a ten-second slice of winter.

I’m the pig, I said, you’re just an idiot

Everything clamors: / an hour hand gone berserk.

if you want to journey to ithaca / call ahead

my children look to me / and grasp after / absolute truths.

it’s still raining / as it did at the beginning of time

the flowers of war / open at night / on boulevard Saint-Laurent

a man standing on the tracks / stares at a train as it advances / with a moan of metal and night

On the banks of the Prypiat a devil is sleeping

Joyful relatives poured vodka for themselves / and for the dead

The whole soldier shrugs off hurt.

How to explain / the heat a language exhales

Have been syntaxed and stirred into a purple.

I open my eyes and see the world

I plugged my poem into a manhole cover

I will paint my death on a canvas of autumn

The blooming petals: a navel.

I would like to hide in your kiss.

One folded like a switchblade, one open like a book

They told you / That your feet should be nailed to the household!

Water in the blood, bread in the flesh, vows in the bone

I was eyemate to a blind one

The world made no promises to anyone

here sentences must disrobe

my swollen tongue twitched / in my dry mouth.

The world has become a graveyard.