with his dollars and change
on the long walnut bar,
only the wind of the barkeep's hand
waking him for the long walk home
in a draft he felt sneak
beneath the turned-up collar
and down into his wide-open heart
that turned brilliant red and veined
until it, too, had to stop
hanging on and let fall, let fall.
BRIAN SWANN
N eruda
in
Purgatory
USi me preguntais de dal1de vengo, tengo qlle
conversar con cosas rolas.
... "
Blue patches of weather; shivered blue stone
I try to scratch a fire from. A single swallow
balks where red water screeches
&
an invisible hand
forces it into progressively narrower spaces.
Somewhere in the search for the useful,
nuptual matter, there still may be flowers
to pluck from sleepy faces. But not here,
the proletariat no more than a chronic itch;
not here where a man facing eternal loneliness
can only shoot out words like pistons,
abandoning gears, staring at the Janus hood-ornament.
I have been left to starve in a garden,
a jackdaw tacked to the gate, scarf fluttering
in tacky rcd clods. I start a fire. Each spark
gropes upward, as if up was the only nourishment.
They allow me my figurehead in the window
now the world is all shore. A sea-music less
than half-roar takes up what it can.
I was wrong, I was right. I was left
here where I devolve into spray, sal t, bi tter,
unlearned, not yet repentant. No one
sees the blood in the sand I lay the driftwood over,
and light a match.
Hay
tantos muertos.
..
