Traveling light
there was no room
to pack snowstorms...
IN THE COLD SUN
RISES LIKE STEAM
FROM THE SEAMS
OF BLACK SOIL
el
rocio....(the
dew)
In the carry-on
fit only two seasons of four:
summer and winter, dry and rainy.
MANGOS THE SIZE OF CANTALOUPE
(sliced in wedges & eaten like melon)
Toil is a mystery here
like the inconsistent sea.
GLIDING INTO THE NEWBORN SEASON
UNDER FULL SAIL IN ROLLING GALLEONS
STEEL-WHEELED
Razón y
caparazón
Lives ANY snail apart from its shell?
Where is the asylum if not in self?
CREATURES OF THE NIGHT
NEVER INVADE THE DAY.
IT IS YOU WHO TRESPASS.
LOOK TO WHALE OIL & ELECTRIC LUCUBRATIONS.
She
is no maid
in luminous brocade
to be nursed or cursed.
She stirs ever so softly
with small-cupped tea
and songs of youth....
IN THE MERCADO THE SILHOUETTE OF AN AZTEC
in the desert dryness of winter
whoever is sane waits for rain.
THE
SANDPAINTER:
“it
is landscape imaged in landscape, it is the map that is the
territory....”
[spits & pisses]
The transience of beauty, the transitoriness,
what is its inverse? The permanence of the ugly,
its
Calvinist eternalized universe?
Or does that too pass, giving way again to....
IN THE FAR EAST
SELF IS NOT ATOMIC
Semana santa es
la semana
cuando el
Cristo resucita y los precios
suben con él.
Where is the suspense in this passion play?
What if Spring never returns? What if bread
never rises (even symbolically)?
Even Christ doubts.
[nothing is resolved by western science: eclipses
have beginnings and endings with repetition only
in their middle]
Listening to
Hollanders talk for a week:
they never
repeat, just expand like balloons.
They are
grandiose in their small-mindedness,
building
elaborate dikes and filling all the little crevasses
with their
fingers.
BELOW
THE LINE OF THE HORIZON
SANDSTONE WALL BECOMES DAWN
& SUNDOWN
LIFE IS A NARROW LEDGE DISPUTED
BY TOURISTS ON MULES
WALKING IS A GLIDE DOWN A LONG GRADE...
What to do with a poem
that roams from place to place
in sub-atomic space?
What to do with a rhyme
that is a hundred years
in aftertime?
OVER THE DRY PEAKS
THE BLUE OF THE WIND
IS NO FIGURE
TAUGHT BY ROTE
TO BLINDED CHILDREN.
IT IS A SPECIFIC SKY,
ENDLESS
UNCHANGING....
Just between our six tongues
(two searching, two denying, two affirming)
a word that rhymes with lizard
that names a county in Kentucky
which Ferrer is Dreyfus
where in the USSR U-2 was downed....
THIS CREATES SPACE
WHERE A CLOCK TICKS
IN HETEROGENEOUS SECONDS:
arma virumque
cáno....
HERE ALL
QUESTIONS
ARE ANSWERED
TRUTHFULLY
or not answered
at all....
There the fruit
of associations
begin between
you & you.
In this water
the platypus
hunts crustacaeans
electromagnetically.
Do you smell the lights flashing?
1,2,3....
Once upon a time
no one ever invented
a word.
Twice upon a time
everyone misunderstood it.
Thrice upon a time
begat birdsong
and crickets rubbing
their legs together
sensuously.
Have you heard the babbling books?
Have you seen clothesless nymphs
singing by the still pools of satellite dishes,
echoing?
This is Narcissus & the Missus
kicking off their shoes
after a hard day's worthless work of 7x8
watching 24.
Darkness is their fortress wall.
Flickering is their intellect.
Commoditized dreaming
is all the rest
they ever get.
E. A. Costa May 9, 2014 Granada, Nicaragua
