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Sons 
My mother listens to the cries of one
and then the other (the ones she wants to spoil
with her body, with her skin), and my
own cries. Entering this labyrinth, she
puts back into the tree the spineless colors
of bankrupt Christmases. Our cries ricochet
from the veranda to the street, and
we all feel sorry for ourselves, except
for father, who's gone shopping and
is out buying slates. My mother
doesn't realize just how much she's succeeded in keeping
us from dying young. Yet ungrateful
and precipitous, we continue to demand that
she mend our socks.
Family Scene
They are like a fence
at the end of the afternoon—
a fat woman and
a tall man—
holding each other up,
while the children
eye a dog mounting his bitch.
At the Sacred Lagoon there are
family scenes
in the solitary depths of those
waters contaminated by time
that would pass almost unnoticed—were it
not for that howling.
Flutes
My stomach is stuffed from eating up
the view. Peruvian women
show me cornfields and hairy
pigs. The horses are dots of color
as I dive dizzily
into the meadows. Infinity
eats rats. In the Pisac Church
the natives and their buttocks under
the rain—their clothes: sadness and cold.
A sad people
in the solicitude of flutes
their bodies renouncing the coca leaves'
tea of wisdom before the calm siesta—
Laugh at yourself,
breathless tourist.
The Condor Passes
Magda dances with me.
Solange dances with me.
The condor laments. The pan-pipes
go mute. No breath.
My face and hair hit the sun
in the alchemy of lies & truth.
Dance with me, History—melancholy/
ecstatic intercourse between memory
and a weathervane.
Brazilian Winter
Nadja wants to die.
She'll never find
her father (who's already dead) in
the body of a nonexistent lover.
She sobs and pushes me away,
then sobs and begs "Don't go—
don't go." Hair-on-Fire, Golden-Fur,
she blindly follows each morning—
the same lost morning she's detached
from Day and Night—
drifting numbly across the panorama
of unfinished power plants.
Nadja wants to—yet
she won't. She has yet to plunge
into the Brazilian winter, the one
without snow, so hot
it both melts and cools
her burning need to submit.
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