Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
-After Larry Levis
[1]
In all its simplicity to pray
is to stare at something other than yourself for once.
The sun digging a hole in the dirt
with its brown thumbs lighter than a wingbeat.
Syphilitic with vision, the saint’s eyes are two white sheets
hanging from the branches.
[2]
In its infancy, to love
was to be a man carrying another man,
while walking toward a woman.
The night limping toward them
like another drunk man, flesh colored across the sky.
The pretty ones inhabiting their own plot,
the splashing before the body touches the water.
Fantasy on one side, the mouth on the other.
[3]
Perhaps God too had to look away from Himself
before stringing out neat lines of accidents
across the bottomless sky.
[4]
Our invention of day through the runic haze
grazing above the water.
Nothing left untouched.
We said our names until they turned to oil.
En la cuchara se derrama las preguntas de los niños.
[5]
Even the deer looking up and down
from the pond are men carrying other men,
bowing their heads, not knowing to what;
a vacant box of winter
with all its beating wings inside.
The bird inside the boy speaking for him.
[6]
There are places where even
a severed hoof is holy.
What is required is not that the words
themselves be believable,
only that they be uttered.
God rolled into blueberries on my tongue,
swallowed like some one else’s blessing.
Anything can be holy
if you stare at it long enough.
Second son.
Second God to tremble.
[7]
Hermosa. Impossibility of union.
We pretend to be deer
pretending to play dead.