Elias SIQUEIROS

---

Evening Scroll


Private as a clam,
as a world undertow,
as a Christmas card turned to smoke,
private as gaslights
of old times in the sewage
when small birds made chains of the ear's
history.
Private, the sun inside.
The whole horde of invasions that
begin at the mouth,
begin, the mouth,
the surrender of the children,
of what they had to say.
I say something,
I mumble,
the streets tonight were Florentine.
Useless in beauty, Florentine and wet.
A garden
with the immediacy of a gun.
I wept, the absolute burned my smile.
It was a savage thought,
to become a flood
the way the world is flat.




A Train Perhaps


One more time.
Learn of the conceivement of echo,
return with
wedding rings
of the undiscovered.
Someone's chasing your name, catches it,
shelves it near the spurt
of an embarrassed nation.
Surround the pulpit
with the wind of having arrived
somewhere without the maps,
destiny has died there.
A train perhaps, leading nowhere,
borrowed from this world now twice as
clear as the cigarette
by the curtains of your thoughts.
Gave the leaf of the soul the flat surface of
denial,
watched it burn higher than the tree of disparity,
lower than the star of our root,
the star of our happiness.
Mothers to sons gave the imprint
of rivers mawed by flesh,
sons to mothers
gave a silence met with headiest sadness.
Both liquidated all assets.
Both met rain with the troubadour's growl.
And me, all, and if all, then you and I,
still, by the sewage of the heart,
found the gentlest paths of stone quite cumbersome.
We recorded them with listening,
drew the light before the truckstops.
The faces of the stones were enamored of their
night and of the moving questions of their forfeits.
A germination of what we saw
transfixed the streets with a clean shawl.
Apples fell from orchards
not planted
beyond our thoughts.




back