1.
The roof tiles are gone from the old house. This is how the mystery faded…
Posts and rafters stand naked, busted—the entire decrepit structure of the roof.
Now it resembles an ancient ship tossed in the storm out to shore,
stamped eternally on the gravure of a bad reverie. Careful, don’t move
a sliver, not one beam stained black from smoke and the soot of years,
until a flash of lightning strikes and preserves the breath of rituals in the skies—
the salt of childhood dreams, sorrows, curses, the unsuppressed tears
that clothed this haven with longing. Before the house is deserted
like Noah’s arc upon new shores, feel the blossoming hope
and the stone-cold heart that pierces like the arrow of a fugitive mind.
2.
The sand, its grainy structure: black and white.
The house sinks a little each day
until the sea rises from the deep in waves and storm
to uncover it again, posts, rafters and all.
Perhaps the wanderer will return to spend the night
in a roofless shelter… a lonely traveler here
will have incoherent, disconnected dreams
of our childhood hungers—ambitions and sin.
Perhaps the mountain birds, like ghosts,
will avoid the storm, chirplessly.
Perhaps UFOs will raise their studios on this very threshold
renewing their earth-sky signals.
In that case, the abstract plasma
of our dreams will return in images of desire…
Defeated and confused, within a night
the cosmic tenants will leave. One way or another…
The sand, its grainy structure: black and white.
The frottage drawing will never fade.
And if imagination colors shadows, this house
will eternally pulsate memories like gravure.
3.
Like bold quotation marks over roof tiles, the cats, stretching;
gardens lush with sweet, moist nectar.
The ivy spreads—a fast notebook drawing
gulping down the corner walls of the house.
The old desolate awning. The emerald window arches sweat
like the foreheads of the dead. Nothing but cold dew on the doorframe…
The void pupils of the windows, like amber spheres
our once-eyes sealed within—forever trapped—
puzzled gazes—hostages, embalmed.
The trellis’s leafy weavings like a flight of swallows
hide those gazes from me… leave me in a dilemma,
uncertain as to which gaze is my own...
