From Migrations: "in the migrations of red…

from Migrations

in the migrations of red carnations where songs burst from long-beaked birds

and apples rot before the disaster

where women fondle their breasts and touch their sex

in the sweat of rice powder and teatime

vines of passionflowers course through that which stays the same

cities crisscrossed by thought

Ash Wednesday

the old nanny watches us from a shaft of light

pools of shadow breathe

purples rain down nearly red

the heat opens its jaws

the moon sinks into the street and the voice of a black woman

a sad black woman sings and swells

incense of gladioli

and your fingers slip inside me like warm mollusks

we’re in the brittleness of autumn’s hide

in the rectangular park

in the dog days of summer

when the lightest colors are most deeply moving

after Shaharit

raw appeals now forgotten

winds rise lightly rinsed by prayer

forest of pepper trees

and my grandmother always played the same sonata

a girl eats a snow cone in Chapultepec

the ivy vine tangles in the mist

the light splinters

and the clothes hang in the sun

my grandmother’s sonata is impenetrable

you said it was summertime oh music

and the invasion of dawns

and the invasion of greens

down below shouts of children at play

vendors of nuts

breath of yellow roses

and as we left the movies my grandmother told me

dream that the dream of life is beautiful my child

beneath the summer-drenched willow only restlessness lingers

docile clouds descend into silence

the day dissolves in the hot air

green erupts within green

I spread my legs beneath the bathtub faucet

gushing water falls

the water enters me

the words of the Zohar spread open

the same questions as always

and I sink deeper and deeper

in the vertigo of Kol Nidre

before the start of the great fast

in the blue haze of the synagogues

after and before Rosh Hashanah

in the whiteness of the rain

my grandmother prays the rosary

and in the background plummeting

the echo of the shofar opens the year

into the gulf of absences to the northeast

pour words saliva

insomnias

and farther to the east

I masturbate thinking of you

the screech of seagulls the break of day

the froth in the dazzle of the wing

the color and the season of bougainvilleas are for you

the pollen still on my fingers

your scent of violets sour and feverish from the dust

words that are nothing but a drawn-out prayer

a form of madness after the madness

the cages where the perfumes are shut away

the endless delights

the voluptuousness of being born again and again

static ecstasy

move

more even more

don’t be afraid

and the photographs fading in the fermentation of silence

the unscreened porches

fever growing red in other skies

the gleaming verandas darkening with the acacias

and in the kitchen the newly washed dishes

fruit and syrups

in the swell of rivers

in the night of willows

in the washbasins of dreams

in that steam of female viscera

rising unmistakable and expansive

I leave you my death entire complete

my whole death for you

to whom does one speak before dying?

where are you?

where in me can I invent you?

and the milagros piling up in the church of Santa Clara

and the atrium filling with tears

ink flowers in spent Hebrew

dripping from the Torah scrolls

skidding slowly

the days slipping away

squeezed by my migraine

I can’t find myself

I don’t even have candles for my wake

I don’t even know the words of the Kaddish

I’ve lost my bearings

where does the beating break?

how can I cast off this last shred of sleep?

and the house lashed to a tree lashed to the wind

the leaves and their opal shadow

spiral of echoes

reverberation

we are what we think

the thought behind the thought

the cranes return

spread silence with their wings

sudden white flowers in an empty sky

in the cities at noon

farther and farther south

when heat surrounds the mountains’ breath

always to the south

I prefer to cling to my inventions

and not to know what really exists

better to dream that I’m dead

and not to die of all the dreams that invent me

I go back to sleep and dream no more

and the light stumbling on the brink of day

and the cry of the trees a deafening roar

and the afternoon just repeats itself

doesn’t disclose that lull in reality

the only inhabitable place

fleeting geometry

slow shuttered insomnia

dawn draining away

a sun of bees breaking apart

and as my grandmother prays her rosary it rains

and as they say Kaddish for me it rains

and I’m more distant by the day and don’t know what to do

I can’t escape myself

and only know and feel others inside me

an invention that starts up every morning

the tedious learning to wake up and become myself again

and if I woke up once and for all?

the morning melts away

intervals of warm silence

sharpened spaces

sudden structures

rectangles

I can see fragments almost smells

each level has its own blood flow

my nanny accompanies me as I pack my things to go

doves all around the room flapping of wings

I open the window

minute fissures ache atrophy

inflame the afternoon

I can’t feel what I am

I am what I was

and what I wish to be

in the soaring of orchids centers open to penetration

on the perimeter

girlfriends lightly caressing themselves

because it’s always the first time

because we’ve been born again and again

and always return

and the flowers opening

and the high birds oh so high pausing in flight

shredding themselves on the clouds

and the rained-out clouds filling with wings

in the span of the dream

I wake and it’s almost nighttime

I walk into a movie theater

it’s snowing in New York

I walk into another

the present is just a circumstance

I descend

it’s almost eight in the morning

and it’s January

we elapse within ourselves

I’m living overlapping moments flattened on a plane

I spread over afternoons that exist for me alone

outside the windows are today’s hours

I don’t know this day

I cling to my other days

cling to myself

hang on to myself

and even so even so everything comes to an end

even those things for all time come to an end

even old habits come to an end in the end

small saturated moments swell

merge in their dissolution

though I remain shut away in this room

though it keeps on raining

though I still can feel that I can feel

though it still makes me keep on feeling

and fear makes me break out of fear

and I make myself break out of myself

but why believe all this when across the ocean

geraniums bloom all year long

and large trunks laden with warm resinous odors

overflow in unfamiliar bedrooms

and ointments and soaps made of oats and goat milk

face powder made of wheat toothpaste that tastes of chewing gum

and those rinses for untangling hair on drawn-out days

Venetian blinds scorched by the green sun of Cuernavaca

a girl gazes at her sex in the heat of midday

thick with insects and lizards

I’m not sure whether to sleep is to be awake

my hands get in my way I don’t know where to put them

the slow rain almost stops

everything stops grips me but the rain falls

windows open

below them dunes

and farther still ships set sail like an exhalation

bound for the girls in the frescoes at the palace of Knossos

girls of water and lime

and the skin sloughs off

and underneath a dusty sun

and farther in birds

and we never get farther than ourselves

but all year long geraniums bloom in distant memory

and the green blinds are there in that memory as well

beats etching themselves on a daguerreotype

where are they beating?

where are they?

something slides heads toward cessation

I’m far from the mornings

far from men and women

far from habits and customs

I let myself fall

the sky clouds over

the irretrievable yellow

the soft fall

colors lost

shattering

tenacity of white

and the first words of the Torah are inscribed

in the atonement of white

in the anguish of white

in the neutrality of white

I’m hanging on to life

gusts of sun

gusting rain

nearly blue ramifications

hair a mess and that smell

that smell rising from childhood

a lingering streak of yellow

flutters reappears

now sways gently

from a distance it almost looks like a sketch of a sunflower

now it uncouples barely discernible against the white

once more it pierces the substance of nothingness

once more the dreams start clinging to that almost still-yellow streak

I’m not going anywhere everything is here here is there

I identify intensely with the dust

sharp shifting empty vast landscape

I can’t ford the air

I start to live off the breeze

I wish I could pray and don’t know how

I don’t even know what I want to say

everything is inundated

there are no edges

there is quietude

there is all I don’t understand

and I did not invent that girl

she thrust her existence inside me

darkest roses sprouting in memory

the women braiding their hair scenting their armpits

the smell of sex ripening

and in the Jewish quarters high and low hidden in the mornings of Segovia

the love affairs of Jewish girls and Christian noblemen

still stalk the bridges

and the tales of the Haggadah proliferating

as I wait bleary-eyed in airport lobbies

in landscapes of neurons nearly on the threshold of the oracle of Delphi

there is one and only one answer

no explanation is forthcoming

barely the incision

and my mother and some friends play bridge

and chain-smoke cigarettes

and the women’s perfume mingled with the white

grows dark

through the windows the nearly forgotten pepper trees

pale wind

whiff of wicker on the faded porch

the house dissolves

eternity of the gardens of sand

doggedness of the wind

the leaves curl begin their return

I wake up and the girlfriends tremble in the willows

the shady veranda cool in the bustle of linen

I brush your brown hair

we barely move

pollen coats that distant memory of mirrors

it still burns I touch myself I’m alone

dawns from the other floods

beloved distant one

complicity of the voice

its persistence

and I am what is falling

now I’m in a landscape full of mockingbirds

I get closer and closer

when I claim that vastness

I’ll barely have the strength to wake in the brevity of death

the light strikes the air

we’re in the place where the colors open

the days are long and clench like migraines

and everything repeats

the trees casting off

the night dissolving

and then?

nothing is true but the reflection of the dream I’m trying to shatter

and which I don’t even dare to dream

constant plagiarism of myself

and time is the only meeting place

it’s all nothing but time

there where a few sprigs of bougainvillea in a glass of water

suffice to make us a garden

because we die alone

and death is just the awakening

from this first dream of living

and my grandmother said as we left the movies

dream that the dream of life is beautiful my child

the candles’ glow grows rusty

and I where am I?

I’m who I always was

the surprise of being

I come to where everything starts the beginning of the beginning

this is the time

the time for waking up

my grandmother lights the Shabbos candles from her death and looks at me

Shabbat lengthens into never into after into before

my grandmother who died of dreams

endlessly rocks the dream that invents her

which I invent

a wild girl looks at me from inside

I am whole

Notes:

View a bibliographic genealogy of Migraciones (PDF opens in new window)

Source: Migrations (New York Review Books, 2021)

This Body, This Rapture