Will and Annihilation

 

It is because at my back I have
fifty summers of throats calling for water,
mirrors covered with garlands and purple cloth,
the annihilation of rooms brimming
with the bad habits of dead tenants,
the vision of a girl, hot in her summer dress,
who pulls off her hat and tosses her hair back,
and the indiscriminate generosity
of August days giving way to cool nights;
it is because I am sometimes tempted
by the inhospitable craters
of a full moon that seems so pure and so white,
because I have felt something like fear
in the terrible stillness of the stone angel
that is really only a girl with downcast eyes;
it is because, like all men, I am lured
into photographs that are never taken;
and, like all men, have inadvertently become
part of histories that are never told;
it is because annihilation is everywhere I turn
that I use my will to hold back
the prospect of rusted swords, mute telescopes,
the heartache of sickness and age,
and the fear that a star has already burnt
itself out by the time its light reaches me.

I have looked for a will I can take
possession of in the most diverse places:
under thoughts as heavy as rocks,
and beneath emotions as evasive
as a trout startled by the fisherman’s lure;
should you ask me, I have to say that I have looked
for a will in the clover’s perpetual return,
and inside the bobbing boat of selves
that left me stranded on a green sea
with nothing but the sun at my back and saltwater
washing over my bruised and burnt body;
should you ask me, I must admit I have looked
for the will to love under the lemon tree,
on the slanted, peaked roofs of houses
inhabited by good men and women,
and in the river turned muddy and brown
by the pity of the swimmers who never
strayed from the sandy-bottomed shoal
who knew better than to temp the swift
and violent currents by the further bank.
With the color of blue strapped to my back,
I have combed the green wheat and crouched
near my enemies to learn their secrets;
and when the evening darkened the footpaths,
and men wore only the coats of the dead
and the Sunday shoes of their fathers,
and suffered moonless nights without wine,
I stood among them, drank water made bitter
by rusted iron, and was overcome with the joy
that this moment must, like all others, pass away.

It is because I have tasted happiness
that I smile at the naiveté of funeralgoers,
and because I have searched my diverse selves
for a will that could unite them that I tolerate
the summer that wraps its fever around me
with the gentleness of palm leaves.

Perhaps I should say it plainly: I have searched
for a will, thinking that it would make me tough
like the lizard’s skin or the clay at the bottom
of the waterless pond baked by drought and sun,
but now when the night falls down around me
and the galaxies flow across the dark
like riverbeds of shimmering pebbles,
I allow the self I would have strengthened
to escape from my blistered hands, watch it merge
with the shadows the moon cast among the trees,
and feel how the black distances wash over me.

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