How sweet, to have no purposes in sight:
Those wandering can never lose their way,
Captured by the unmaking of the day,
Swirling towards the center of the night.

Mad men parade in endless roundabout
Across the clover tables and red glows,
And the ghost thread of time just barely flows
Till the last broken gambler cashes out

But sticks around, still looking for a chance
To tango to another kind of dance
And they smell so good, the midnight flowers.

Come look for them, beyond the neon haze,
Sink into their unquestioning embrace,
They will love you forever for an hour.

When ivy strangles the bust of
generals
And the watches of secretaries are stricking ten,
I'll crawl back to you, my moonlight meadow,
Silent like a subterraneous Nile.
I want back the unrest,
The musics that you robbed me of,
And the fata morgana
We would chase through the alleys of that endless midnight
Just for the pleasure of watching it recede before us.
My life is a sequence of conditionals:
Ever since you left
I'm guarded no more
By the magic of your everyday chores.
There are days I'll forget to look up the sky,
And many, many times
My lefthand side is crushed
by the almost unbearable certitude
Of knowing you'll be waking up somewhere,
Warmer than a dove,
And I can't be there to witness the miracle.


When ivy strangles the bust of  secretaries,
And the watches of generals have struck ten,
I'll be gone already.
Look for me by the other side of the window:
I'll be a raft in the open night,
Drifting across frosty constellations.
Someone that's me has been writing this; still,
there is so much I will never understand.
Let us love each other:
I see your trail in the flight of birds,
Your face in the lines of I Ching.

The second light of sunrise filters
through the blinds of a broken transom window, gliding the kitchen.
There’s an instant
in which bottomless jars, worn out dishes
and a headless Mickey magnet that has fallen off the fridge
Seem to levitate in a sea of dusty honey.

I haven’t witnessed the scene.

I think about all the other ordinary prodigies
That must be happening somewhere.
A trembling chrysanthemum blossoms in the frosty gardens of Nagoya.
Six grey wolves fail to hunt down a white deerling.
A middle aged man whispers into a hollowed stonebrick, then covers his secret with mud.
Two  giraffes disappear in the middle of a starlit Colosseum, to the astonishment of a roman dilettante.
Twenty years of boredom; then an ex con feels the tact of dewy grass under his feet again.
In a balcony over the Seine, two lovers prepare a padlock.
Some skinny kid from La Matanza scores a last minute free kick to win the neighborhood derby.
A pretentious teenager watches The purple rose of Cairo for the first time, and  discovers his true calling.
Days before dying, an old man stops by a bakery and inhales the same caramel fragrance he would inhale in the afternoons of his childhood summers.
An older brother decides to throw a game of Mario Kart to his sibling.
On a deserted reed bed, a blackbird sings the most beautiful tune in the world. There is no one there to listen.
A single mother finishes cooking breakfast for his son, and decides to let him sleep for another five minutes.
A physics grad student solves the meaningless quantum noise model that’s been torturing him for weeks, and stops wondering why he didn't choose to be a lawyer
Two old friends share the same espresso in a hidden Manhattan coffeehouse, perhaps for the last time.  

None of this everyday miracles are
happening to me.

Every droplet the distant drizzle brings,
Every perfect chrysalis, every glow,
Like seasons, they will blossom, wither, go,
And linger in the living heart of things.

A single moment holds eternity.
And yours is  lurking somewhere, out of sight,
Drowned by the silver waters of the night,
Buried beneath a hollow lilac tree.

I see  the reed bed where we said goodbye.
We watched how slowly darkness filled the sky.
Deigos floated astray across the pool.

The chirping of the crickets left the glade.
Besides the rim, perhaps a willow swayed.
Perhaps the harvest moon was beautiful.

-"Old nail, why linger yet so straight for,
All rust, but spirit still unshaken,
When everything around has been forsaken,
And all your brothers wither on the floor?

You last, and there's no point in lasting:
No petty beam, no structure to support,
For once a great design has fallen short.
Yours is just a sad and aimless waiting."

-"It's true, I have long outlived my purpose,
It's true I've been forsaken, I suppose.
Green woodbine is now crawling through this wall,

I know I'll soon be garbage to the tinker.
And yet there's a reason why I linger:
I linger 'cause I'm choosing not to fall."

The sky, the sun, her footsteps in the snow,
cradle of old, forsaken beatitudes,
are coming back to fill your interludes
with all the broken brights you'd wish to know.

And then what's left of life is rushing through:
the waiting, the quiet sense of duty,
the lost strength, the feeble bolts of beauty,
the ageless sand that's piercing through the blue.

You will not get out: the woodbine's cracking
Bastiani's walls; all the tartars smacking
the gates, there's nowhere else to go.

You'll soon know what's the price of solitude,
but now, to fill the final interlude:
the sky, the sun, her footsteps in the snow.

Through the silky lattice of what, why, when;
Through the ever-forking tunnels of time;
Through the maze of causes, iron and wine;
By the burning bridges, we met again.

“Though the stream flows, nothing really changes”
I thought, as she walked again by my side.
The night's musk pervaded and conjured the sight
of a blossom that flourished for ages.

Yet all moons must set, and that is a crime:
By the neon gardens of splendor untouched
I kissed her goodbye. Right then, as I watched
how she walked away, she turned one last time.

She said: “Closure can be the beginning.”
I wished it had not; the world kept spinning.

You craved for the Big Answer long ago,
among the cooling ember of your creed,
as hesitance, the ever growing seed
took root inside and never let you go.

You searched for Higher Knowledge far and wide;
Above the angled soaring of the dove,
Beyond the misty harbors down the cove,
And through the fickle swaying of the tide.

You’ll long for that Enlightenment till the end:
One morning, as you look upon the past
in fear that your next breath is the last,
you'll wonder if that time was yours to spend;

Or fate was just a roadblock to avoid
as every veil you lifted turned out void.

Cesar awakens with the crow of the roosters,
and he leans over a basin,
and he drenches his temples,
and he curses the Roman summer.
He sees his mocking reflection in the troubled water.
He barely recognizes himself.
He doesn't realize how tired he is.
From another room
comes the muffled whimper of a woman.
Cesar approaches.
Spread eagled over the bronze bed,
Calpurnia is sleeping.
Just as the previous night,
as every other night
she is having a bad dream.
Cesar remembers
the stillness of her gaze in the afternoon,
after they laid together,
when she begged him not to leave the house this morning
(I've had a bad omen, his wife said)
and smiles.
He loves her,
and he pities her.
He places his hand over that warm, milky skin.
Calpurnia has stopped moving.
Cesar walks away quietly,
without looking back.
He wears a spotless purple robe,
and some worn out sandals
that used to know Spain.
He gets down to his study
and takes breakfast standing.
His secretary, a sparse bearded Greek,
is waiting for him with a quill in his hand.
Cesar would like to handle
the excruciating minutiae
that come along with ruling an empire,
but a crucible of memories
has run aground in his mind
since he last saw that stranger
looking at him from the basin,
and won't let go:
The mosaics of Jupiter's temple,
The face of a crucified pirate,
The weeping of the daughters of the Gauls,
The roar of the Rubicon he left behind,
The hollow eye sockets in Pompey's head,
The Nile under the light of the stars.
Suddenly,
his loneliness overwhelms him
he doubts of everything,
and wonders if so much blood,
so much iron,
so much fire,
were really worth his while,
if it wouldn't have been better
to end his days as a feast for the crows
within the dust of Pharsalia.
That weakness lasts but a moment.
He then remembers Calpurnia's fears
and smiles for a second time.
He goes out to the street.
The morning is catching fire.
He starts walking towards the Roman forum.

Take me back to the pond of stagnant time,
back to the musky corners of the night,
back to the moon and its shimmering light,
back to the scourges of your grace sublime.

Back to the moment when the gap was bridged,
back when your silence consented my hand,
back when we laid on the ivory sand,
back when you pondered the depth of the ridge.

I did not know then (I could not have known),
your beacons were lit, the wind had not blown,
that Beauty had struck-- How dear the cost.

I look at myself, the scorched earth of Troy
And I cannot find a measure of joy
that once it was mine, and ever is lost.