from Someone Must Be Called Twilight (for Carlos Ramírez)
by Jaime Saenz

Many times searching without being able to find you, the twilight would
surprise me in the hour of your eyes
Many times I forgot you, wanted to forget myself and remember, and
remembered I had to forget you,
thinking of you for the very reason I didn’t want to remember you
—the twilight would surround me at such times, I remember it perfectly.
I confused you with the twilight confusing myself with you;
you confused me with the twilight confusing yourself with me,
and you and I confused ourselves with the twilight which confused you in me and
me in you,
confusing with you what was confused in me to confuse with me what was
confused in you.
And many times in the same person there was a confusion of twilight, you and
me,
and many more each confused with three other distinct persons,
adding up to nine altogether, which is to say, zero.

And there was no such person called twilight,
or, to tell the truth, no person not called twilight,
except those called you and I, who nevertheless could not keep from calling each
other twilight.

Kabir thing:

There is nothing but water in the holy pools.
I know, I have been swimming in them.
All the gods sculpted of wood or ivory can’t say a word.
I know, I have been crying out to them.
The Sacred Books of the East are nothing but words.
I looked through their covers one day sideways.
What Kabir talks of is only what he has lived
through.
If you have not lived through something, it is not
true.

The Garden of Love
by William Blake

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door;
So I turn’d to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore. 

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

Silence Near An Ancient Stone
by Rosario Castellanos

I’m a woman sitting here with all my words intact
like a basket of green fruit.

The fragments
of a thousand ancient and defeated gods
seek and bind each other in my blood, straining
to rebuild their statue.
From their shattered mouths
a song struggles to rise to mine,
an aroma of burnt resin, some gesture
of a mysterious carved stone.
But I am oblivion, betrayal,
the shell that did not hold an echo
from even the smallest wave in the sea.
I do not watch the submerged temples;
I watch only the trees moving their vast shadows
over the ruins, biting the passing wind
with acid teeth.
And the signs close beneath my eyes like
a flower under the awkward fingers of the blind.
Yet I know: behind
my body another body crouches,
and around me many breaths
cross furtively
like nocturnal animals in the jungle.
I know that in some place,
like cactus in the desert,
a clustered heart of thorns, awaits a name
as the cactus does the rain.
But I know only a few words
in the language or the stone
beneath which they buried my ancestor alive.

The Poem I Just Wrote
by Joy Harjo

The poem I just wrote is not real.
And neither is the black horse
who is grazing on my belly.
And neither are the ghosts
of old lovers who smile at me
from the jukebox.