3 poems from the Yjanla Castello Experiment

The following are 3 works from what I have labeled as the Yjanla Castello Experiment. As to what the experiment was all about, I am sure the works would spell it out. Enjoy.


Traces

It is possible you are not of this land
Though I have seen you weep
The poison from spirits long left in your empty cellar,
Though I have seen red gasped and flowed
Like the flower you held for me
Whose torn pricked you.

Who is the mother who taught you
To caress like a silent stream newly born?
Who is the father from whose seeds with embers
You sprouted,
Flesh and form garbed in fire?

I ask these questions and others
Because though I have deciphered your outlines with my own,
Because though I know your secret name,
I cannot remember a page from yesterday
Whose words, colors and sketches are kin
To those with whom you leave your traces,
Nor can I find among books or among the trees
Or there where heavenly bodies call their home
The name for this elemental force in the season
Arriving with you every time.

From what far away constellations
Did you steal these stars, these suns
Who are now submerged in your skin
That in your room filled with the dark
I saw you with my unopened eyes,

Your caress is a feather,
Or a like a fallen leaf floating
In air or sleepy waters.

And in the silence I seek for the sound
Murmurs, pieces of you
That I could decipher.


Listening

i have been listening
to the songs you burned
in silver discs whose face
reflect only my own

the final song is playing
our song, you proclaimed
and as my fingers trace the edges
of the next one,
as if following a path
that would lead to you
i cannot help but remember
the tenses you used

burned in
read only cds

burned
burned out
like ashes

if only the compacts of our lives,
round, spinning and spinning
like the earth
were rewritables
then i would be burning them
as you did
not with your songs
nor ours
but mine

burned in, burned out
the flames invisible and long gone
even before the final wail.


Of Seasons & Stars & You


The seasons have lost their minds
Astray, confused.
It rains on summer these past years,
Falling and falling
And they press the sweet blossoms
Deep into the earth
Unsmelled.

And so I am sensitive
To that certain silence,
A liquid silence
To nights where stars flower
After the fall of rain

Before I knew constellations
My eyes jumped
From one star to the next,
In the night sky I pegged
The strange and unexpected orbits of my life
Until I discovered
In textbooks
The truth
About seasons and stars.

Exploding blossoms of light
Whose flower, whose center
I could not touch.

Yet these mournful eyes
Filled with clouds filled
With the evaporation of happy memories
Still look at the stars,
A shared affinity
Deep and misted as these nights
Where stars bloom after summer's rain.

It has been another season
Since you last came
Yet the embers still burn from the nights
That blazed with our bodies,
Bright white lights,
But your memory belongs
To another season.

In nights like this one
You are like the stars
Carrying your light in the distance,
And the truth about stars
Are also yours,
Bright, burning light
And dead.