Soon fades the dew
but in a dry old age, encumbered by our wooden limbs that ache, we still desire
as any moth who burns inside the flames,
the tiniest of screams so faint and faraway.
A furtive face carved out by wind and sand is nervous and remains
a window in the rock, formations of a word or two
of invitation to repose and join the land…
Oh, she is in rut, writhing in rut, the mouse gray mane disheveled
like the dreams of you, your image flickering, when youth was all
and, days dearly departed rose again, hardened with resolve,
declining ever to be old.
Wild roses she kept in her heart and clever wiles, reclining with a smile
after dinner and a glass of wine.
But boughs do drape and veil the sacred corridor
and music pines Oh love oh feckless love…
and lags behind, pinned down inside a breast where
talcum dusts the creases clinging to the smells of age awash in dime store lavender—
the first of many seals
which will be broken like the bread of body.
And what with moths now flirting with their holes, and rust,
who would trust the sun to rout the darkness and to rise as stout as ever we beheld
in savage light?
And aren’t we all?
Aren’t all of us prodigal in the ways of love? like a tide going out with its meaning,
leaving the drift and derelictions in the sand, the stranded lover beached and locked
in lockets of
time, like photographs and flotsam—or
we malinger, feigning with a sign some love, some rose of the heart,
something we’d want to remember were the snow not yet
mixed with the ashes of last year.
The white blade cuts deep into the blue, stretches deep into her life
till she’s become the shadow marking time.
Marlon L. Fick divide su tiempo entre Ciudad de México y Odessa, Texas, donde es profesor de literatura inglesa en la Universidad de Texas—Permian Basin. Además de traductor, es poeta con varios títulos publicados. Ha recibido el premio National Endowment for the Arts de escritura creativa. Editó y tradujo la antología The River is Wide/El río es ancho. Twenty Mexican Poets. Antología bilingüe, traducción de 20 poetas mexicanos.