Look at her now: she's back. Her scarred expression
suggests peripheral vision. She gropes for sound.
It's written on her face: she thinks of dry, sunlit
skeletons rustling in tile softest breeze.
And look at those three. A strange disease
consumes them. In the early stages, thought
walks straight as a street. Later, a fine curvature,
like earth's, shows. Now at the last, ideas
curl, like fingers, like a drying autumn leaf.
Abreeze wings your skull. Look, so that they don't notice.
Just watch them walk past, out of averted eyes, as their
wishful tl10ughts get caught in the whirring blades.
Nadya Aisenberg
THE SELF TALKS TO THE SELF
After you kissed the orange, pulpy £louit of the sun
you expected to meet Neruda strolling down the avenue of palms-
that he'd transfix you with a white stare from the guano islands?
Poor child, how could you know that was my dream, too?
Now it's apparent why you sulked for so many years,
the equal of tl1under and lightning.
Stay. Wait for the throbbing crickets at dusk,
a commotion as loud as your heart.
You didn't feel tile eartll's deep tremor,
the horizonless ocean, pouring.
How could you know decades later
the chilly interpretive schemes begin,
cramped glass flowers that used to mn wild.
