Your Next Lover

No matter what other wonderful
qualities he has, your next lover
should live in an air-conditioned
place so that on sweltering
summer nights you can
tune out the wails of Manhattan,
and lie oblivious
in each other’s embrace.

Whatever your next lover’s
beliefs, you should be
tolerant of his views.
If you are not convinced
he is the love
of your life, (or even one
of the top fifty-eight)
do not be cynical
about the guy.

Please make sure your next lover
is generous not just toward you,
but toward the people
who beg for coins in the streets.
Your next lover
should not be interested
in tax cuts or welfare reform
and he should definitely
not be a Republican.

Your next lover should appreciate
your sense of humor, the way
your friends do. If you can’t
laugh with your next lover
the way you laugh with, say, Melanie
or Silvio, forget about it, you might
as well have fallen in love
with a fire hydrant or a sea urchin
because where there’s no laughter
there’s no freedom
where there is a need for locks and frontiers
there is no room for love’s bloom.

I do not mean that your next lover
should be a stand-up comedian,
a glib jerk who has to be funny
all the time. There is plenty
to be sad about, and sadness
can be a useful feeling
to artists on rainy days
and in dark November afternoons.
Some of the greatest joys
are deliciously sad —
think of the moonlit bayou of the soul
in Roy Orbison’s songs
or the way Greta Garbo stared
into the void at the end of Queen Christina.

Your next lover should
not have bad breath
his breath should
transport you like
a magic carpet gliding over
fields of verbena by the sea
in early May.

Your next lover
should be enamored
of the radiance of the night
sky, the intimacy of dawn.
He should give
you bouquets, just to remind
you how much you are loved.
When you go to sleep in
his arms, you should feel
wrapped in the blanket of the sky
on a late august night.

Now, pay attention,
this is crucial information,
your next lover should be
HAPPILY EMPLOYED and know
how to give a great
foot massage. He should be
a sex machine, full
of surprises, going down on you
in an airplane
in a cave, under a waterfall
in positions you never thought
you’d find yourself in.
When you go to the country
for a weekend with him spend
days and nights making love,
until you emerge
from your cocooon of passion
exhausted but renewed, a survivor
of the flood that swept away
your foundations. Outside
it will be a new season.
Because love is the finest
season of all, though it seldom
lasts that long.

Your next lover will wear
a bracelet of tiny rubies
that looks exactly
right on him, not just an adornment
but an expression of his
enraptured soul.

Your next lover should write you poems
on your birthdays, on your anniversaries—
no occasion is too small. He should go on
writing you poems after you’ve dumped him
for a guy with a sports car
the way I find myself writing this poem
to you—who shall remain unnamed—
impossible love of mine
you who hacks me
open from my skull to my toes
consuming flame that flares up
as I invoke your lips
sweetened with the poison of love.

If he’s any good, your next lover should
prepare you FOR THE ONE WHO’LL COME
AFTER him; because your next lover
should not be the end
of love, but just a resting place,
a subway station playing Stan Getz,
a queen-sized bed, a silken pillow,
a window that opens to a pellucid sea
a harbor from which you’ll keep
departing to other destinations
as of yet undreamt by you.

Published in Lungfull

1962

I made the kites
myself using
onion paper
the color
of dream
jungles.

With the arrival
of the trade winds
in December
I flew kites at dusk
in Recostadero Park
where Barranquilla’s
sweethearts met.

The days
flew by
like kites
in the wind.
At night,
exhausted from kite-flying,
I lay in my bed
neither boy nor man
and night-dreamed
with a kite that flew
all the way to the bloody
moon of the tropics
while below,
on planet earth where
I lived,
all the glaciers melted
all the seas overflowed
and the African continent
went up in flames.

Published in Gival Press, 2005

Don Quixote

I woke up; it was the hour
of nocturnal terrors. My head
still on my pillow—in the unsettling
darkness of my room—I thought:
“I’m old.”

I couldn’t
go back to sleep.
I slipped my bony toes
in my slippers
ragged and thread-bare
like the life I’d lived.
Like so many nights
of late, I wrapped a blanket
around my shivering frame
opened the door of my room
and slipped out of the hushed house.

Outside, the ground
was damp, the night
abloom with stars
screaming silently
as they fell toward
God knows where—but certainly
far from my barren fields.
From the barn
an owl’s gold stare
questioned me. Not my presence
in the lateness of the night--
but my entire existence.

Spring was near, I could feel
the ground turning under my feet.
Then a second thought occurred to me:
“Soon I’ll be dead; soon my flabby
flesh, my brittle bones, my dried up brain
will be enriching the soil-- the earth
will be my roof, daisies my constellations.”

“No, this cannot be the end,” I heard
myself say. “There has to be more
to life than all the stories I’ve read
everything I haven’t seen or felt
the hardness of my cold bed.”

It was then the idea came
to me: I must take
to the open road
to redress the grievances,
rectify the wrongs, amend
the errors, and reform
the abuses in the world.
“Before it gets too late,” I added,
“I have to find love.”

It took a few days to prepare
before I rode away
on my Rocinante, my neighbor Sancho
for my squire, and the lady Dulcinea
del Toboso as the compass
of my loveless heart.

The rest of the story is well-known.
But what has never been
written about before
was that instant when I woke up
in my frigid bed, stepped out in
the chilly dawn, and felt
worms stirring the ground under me
reminding me I
had one more spring to live
and it was my duty to live it.

Published in Cimarron Review, 2007

Return to the Country of My Birth

As I arrive in my old country
the smell of ripe mangoes
welcomes me.
In the fruit trees
sated birds sing:
“It’s a good season,
food is abundant,
in many flavors.”

At home awaits an e-mail
from my friend Tatiana:
“I am sad--my brother
was killed in the war.
I’ve returned from the country
of our birth to the cold north.”

Later, lured by the smell
of honeysuckle,
I walk in the garden
of the ancestral home.
The air teems with black moths.
Moistened by moon glow
the cannon balls glisten,
hibiscus offer
their lustrous red tongues.

When the moon transits
out to sea, in the high branches
vampire bats feed on
broken-necked nightingales,
and the stars’ light reveals
corpses lounging on the grass,
ruby hearts cupped
like split-pomegranates
in their hands.

Back in the house
I answer my friend’s e-mail.
“All these dead people
among the plants,
are too much for my first
night back home.
Sorry, but I
did not recognize
your brother among them.
Twenty years away,
I have forgotten
the customs of this place.”

Published in Gival Press, 2005

Cometas

En diciembre
arribaban
los vientos alisios.
Al atardecer
izaba cometas
en el Parque recostadero.
Armaba las cometas
con goma, varitas
de paleta y papel cebolla
de colores selváticos.
Los días
transcurrían raudos
como cometas
al viento.
Entrada la noche,
exhausto de correr
con las cometas
en las lomas de El Recostadero,
donde se reunían
los amantes de Barranquilla,
yacía en mi lecho
con mis ojos abiertos
y soñaba con una cometa
que me transportara
hasta la luna sangrienta
del trópico
mientras abajo, en la tierra
donde yo vivía,
los glaciares
se derretían
todos los mares
se sublevaban
y el continente de Africa
se consumía en llamas.

The Blue Hour

Sometimes it happens here
in Manhattan late in the afternoon
as a helicopter or a seagull
crosses the sky and I remember
my grandparents’ town when
the late hour was an invitation
to the bats to enter our house
like a dark invasion of tiny spaceships.

I saw that light caressing
the bricks of the building
on the other side of my window,
and I got up from the bed
where you and I lay
and I touched
January’s frost on the glass.
You asked
me for the time as if I—
like my grandfather—
had the talent to read the heavens.

It was the blue hour
in Manhattan, we were in love
and I wanted it to prolong it
so I could live in it always.

Weeks later,
on a snowy morning
I walked with you to the avenue
helping to carry your luggage.
As we waited for a taxi
—you were returning
to your city of bridges and warm stars—
I felt how irrevocable the moment was,
your eyes avoided mine. You
climbed into the cab and while
I looked in the direction in which
you were disappearing, perhaps forever,
you did not turn around
as a final punctuation mark.
At the corner nearest my house
I tripped and almost crashed
against the sidewalk.
I felt an enormous weight
on my shoulders, as if I they were
propping a brownstone;
I felt the full weight
of my fifty years.

Published in Bloom Magazine, 2007

A friend sent me this quote by Martin Luther King

The arc of history bends toward justice.
- Martin Luther King

And some lovely verses by Wallace Stevens:

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.