An amputated leg, they say, tingles, an ear long deaf still jangles the brain:the body asserts the integrity of its parts,and this body, at odd hours, yearnsas if his hand had passed my shoulder,as if snores rose above the downturned book.Now the mockingbird at the mulberryand its mate on the fence pretend they’re crowsand their caws contend with the noise in my bonesas I stand at the window…

LoveI have not forgotten you—the nights long and difficult,everything untouched. Today,I wish my sun could reach you.All I touch, from any distance,is you. You breathe through the mirror.You are the universe I shape into the single space of my room.HistoryI was born in 1910 in a room on the corner of Londres and Allende. In 1914, my mother opened the balcony doors so Zapata’s peasants could…

When I went with lamp and dagger to see if you were, as my sisters said, a monster, and light stuttered across your sleeping body--cheek, neck, chest,cock, their warm topography-- I couldn’t stop staring and staring, until the lamp tipped slightly, and burning oil flecked your arm. Then, night closed over me again.

2.  

Once I made my way by will; now I make my way by feel, by love in its curious faith-- not that the darkness will ever lift, or the fear, but that I’ll extend my hand and somehow find you there.

3.  

Before me, tiny seeds piled endlessly-- a roomful to be sorted before dawn, but I wanted to find you so I began: sesame here and wheat, millet there and poppy, each dot its own small promise. I didn’t see the first ant, like a black drop against the grain. I didn’t see the second or the third, but soon I saw armies, each with a seed raised high, moving millet to millet seed, poppy to poppy, doing my work for me.

4.  

I looked for you from house to house, but you had vanished. I looked for you in field and waterfall, but you were gone, and everywhere were small gifts, small debts of gratitude to pass on until love was no object, but verb and verb alone, and I gathered bit by bit like wisps of wool curled on briars in the thicket where the sheep graze.

5.

So what I wanted most found me when I sought it less, moving from effort to rest--the kind of careful neglect that lets a lost word descend or rise to mind--and beside me you took shape.

6.

How to talk about the time without you? I barely remember it now. The way in spring winter’s slap and pinch, the misery of damp feet and numbed fingers fade as the senses open and open to what is: tickling of breeze or sun against the eyelids; the way a rescued child knows thirst as water, water, not as water’s absence.