Love in the Asylum
I will escape the asylum
to find you
wearing only a candle on my head
and sing
with a lu lu la lai…
where the world walked through my life
with bloody shoes,
paced thin the ice that’s been my life,
passed through
the eye of my needle,
the black backside of a mirror,
where a nurse with a pin light like the star of Bethlehem
makes rounds for the last suicide check of the night,
the moon on her face like a search light
going over and over a life made of blame
like headlights widening and accusing with silence.
We talked till late about the poetry of Hell,
how poets lie and burn,
and smoke rises
like an animal twisting in its shell
who knows its shape by the walls
like 7th grade geometry of windows and planes—
first letters we hung on the corners of nothing.
I will escape
on the back wings of the hospital,
ascending merely by belief in you,
and we will meet at a quiet café
that is pleasant and gloomy,
and drink according to the wind…
and the wind is always strong.
Softly she comes, the nurse, on tiptoes.
Look away!
Close these eyes, the coffin lids!
Our gowns hang loose…
The night is… resolute—
wet and lovely, our mouths.
And pacing, pacing
circles, spirited away
and the air full of the child’s hosannahs, the child
in circles runs.
Then night will fall, and rain
and into each other we fall—
into the effigies of wind in dreams of the body in abandon
in the blue blue flames beyond.
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.