Circularity Up ahead the gleam of the abyss is waiting boundless certain horizon final gleam of all things rays of light in the dark corolla highest leaves, fruit about to fall with its delicate buds the future white shadow of the child of the child of the child... his aura so clear on the screen and I, so old, gripping the stalk in the lovely hologram imagined in his burst of fire his tenderness. And a possible, almost safe site of wreckage the eye of hurricane in the body’s center and its echoing gale in the dark interior country that, prophetic, might predict what earthquake what solar storm what lightning bolt traversing lymph and heart will shine in the dark. And one more tributary of this untamed river with unquiet waters where the death bed was once a ship and the garden grew only orange blossoms their brief bloom that taking flight under the moon that raises its blade like a scythe stalking the fortitude of the pines. in the absence of the child on the high branch with his face revealed by the January moon. it’s necessary to reorder the tree and the night.   The House of Orange Trees “how will we look in the amber sun, backlit, facing the old wall” “. . . besieged by a wall of high waves, stone over the whiteness, whiteness over the wall ” Amanda Berenguer (From The River) There was a time when I looked for snails between the yellow sidewalk and the stone wall where my sister had fallen and died. I followed them in order to kill them. I wore those clothes handed down on my mother’s orders, clothes not given away, that knit bikini, so tiny it showed off my puberty, which was why I liked it. I’d collapsed into her, her small breasts, pink, white and pale, into her batik shirts, tangled among the threads we’d strung with snails for necklaces we had to yank off when the gross slugs came slithering over the neckline. In a box I locked like Eleusian mysteries the poems we’d shared the previous year under the January moon, along with the colored ribbons and glass beads that we’d fought over, now mine alone. (Trapped in them my neck got burnt, stinging). Later, along the beach the whitest dust was flying. In the green quarries’ solitude I invoked her name and boneless face. And I missed her. And I said It’s me, I’ve come with roses to hang an epitaph of petals sealed by a hopeful flower. You’re not there. For so long no one has been there stamped, staked in the nothingness estate. Therefore I come, every so often, to change the water and clean the letters chiseled in marble.   I’m Writing an Elegy and so I’m arranging a dark bouquet of useless words with their eloquence of broken petals and burning in the rhetoric of embroidered leaves the poem grows in black water of the fragile overflowing vase: Ay, mother, she was so little, I see her lost there between the flowers’ white vapor and the wood’s lustrous rigidity, all by herself, looking within toward who knows what high point of heaven.   And He Teaches the Lesson “Given the provisions for living ... the grandmother takes life’s journey full of nothings ... " Tatiana Oroño (De Estuario) I have read the poem to Marco and he knew how to point out his name’s letters one by one in the water of the mirror of my eye and he repeated the rhyme trilling in amazement at the correspondences leaving a little bird inside my head. May it live in my eye and trill in my tree and receive in verse the provisions for living. Then, may it read, see the shining water of the poem, its meaning in the lovely bower of letters. Be the tall flower that holds up my tree.