When I did sail across the boundless sea
Through waves and wondrous shores, and wayward winds,
I traveled into earth's philosophy,

And saw the ocean’s daunting thrills,
Its majesty become a living thought—
At nature’s host I did but hardly glimpse.

I only wish to see what beauty wrought,
From shoreless seas to forests, meadows, leas,
And many sights that held me overawed.

That endless dream I now no longer see,
For I’m in glory’s blindness now confined,
And now I pray to once again be free.

When I do close my eyes one final time,
I only wish to dwell in nature’s shrine.

Put on a clean shirt
before you die, some Russian said.
Nothing with drool, please,
no egg spots, no blood,
no sweat, no *****.
You want me clean, God,
so I'll try to comply.

The hat I was married in,
will it do?
White, broad, fake flowers in a tiny array.
It's old-fashioned, as stylish as a bedbug,
but is suits to die in something nostalgic.

And I'll take
my painting shirt
washed over and over of course
spotted with every yellow kitchen I've painted.
God, you don't mind if I bring all my kitchens?
They hold the family laughter and the soup.

For a bra
(need we mention it?),
the padded black one that my lover demeaned
when I took it off.
He said, "Where'd it all go?"

And I'll take
the maternity skirt of my ninth month,
a window for the love-belly
that let each baby pop out like and apple,
the water breaking in the restaurant,
making a noisy house I'd like to die in.

For underpants I'll pick white cotton,
the briefs of my childhood,
for it was my mother's dictum
that nice girls wore only white cotton.
If my mother had lived to see it
she would have put a WANTED sign up in the post office
for the black, the red, the blue I've worn.
Still, it would be perfectly fine with me
to die like a nice girl
smelling of Clorox and Duz.
Being sixteen-in-the-pants
I would die full of questions.

The young maricones and the ***** muchachas,
The big fat widows delirious from insomnia,
The young wives thirty hours' pregnant,
And the hoarse tomcats that cross my garden at night,
Like a collar of palpitating ****** oysters
Surround my solitary home,
Enemies of my soul,
Conspirators in pajamas
Who exchange deep kisses for passwords.
Radiant summer brings out the lovers
In melancholy regiments,
Fat and thin and happy and sad couples;
Under the elegant coconut palms, near the ocean and moon,
There is a continual life of pants and *******,
A hum from the fondling of silk stockings,
And women's ******* that glisten like eyes.
The salary man, after a while,
After the week's tedium, and the novels read in bed at night,
Has decisively ****** his neighbor,
And now takes her to the miserable movies,
Where the heroes are horses or passionate princes,
And he caresses her legs covered with sweet down
With his ardent and sweaty palms that smell like cigarettes.
The night of the hunter and the night of the husband
Come together like bed sheets and bury me,
And the hours after lunch, when the students and priests are *******,
And the animals mount each other openly,
And the bees smell of blood, and the flies buzz cholerically,
And cousins play strange games with cousins,
And doctors glower at the husband of the young patient,
And the early morning in which the professor, without a thought,
Pays his conjugal debt and eats breakfast,
And to top it all off, the adulterers, who love each other truly
On beds big and tall as ships:
So, eternally,
This twisted and breathing forest crushes me
With gigantic flowers like mouth and teeth
And black roots like fingernails and shoes.

I sit in the rows at church and hear stories of the Man that fixes the broken.

I hear of all He's done.
l hear of all He will do and all He can do.

I think of all I've done.
I think of all I will do and what I can do.

I think of what you did to me.
I think of what you will do again and what you can do to someone else.

I feel the layers of my skin peeling apart as I find the center of everything.
I find the reason why I'm like this.

I see the parts of you that I've kept away in my chest.

I sit in the rows at church and hear the word "forgiveness."
I hear the words "no one can know" over and over again in the back of my head.

The Man who heals the broken says to forgive.
If apart of you lives inside of me, do I forgive myself too?

Some days, it hits me harder than others. I can wake up in the morning and build myself up to a mountain's peak. I can feed myself love and forgiveness, and swear to the sky that I am complete. I can speak to the lives around me of the love that I found in my own darkness.

But my words aren't big enough to hide the cracks that form in my underlying foundation. Other days, everything is still. I'm bottled up with words that I can't bring myself to speak. I lay as time passes endlessly by. I hide myself in the depths of solitude, knowing well enough that no one would make the voyage to save me. So, I just stop. I stop hoping, and expecting and feeling. Time passes, but I don't move along with it.

Myriad of stars
are brighter. But still I find
this beauty in you