The story is always the same story,
With every step retraced;
They tell the story in Buenos Aires

to Antonio M. Cubero

The flags sang their colors
            and the wind is a bamboo shoot between the hands
The world grows like a bright tree
                                                Tipsy as a propeller

I might have been a martyr. Instead I was
A scourge of martyrs, trying souls in fire.
To save my own soul, I tried tears and prayer,

There is so much lonliness in that gold.
The moon of every night is not the moon
That the first Adam saw.

I have forgotten my name. I am not Borges
(Borges died at La Verde, under fire)
Nor am I Acevedo, dreaming of battle,

was dead, face down
in the river, until I raised her
to air on the dock by her tangled

to say yes. I believed as a child.
Meaning I feared. Or I loved.
Or stood in the sun braced for those
stupid photos—Easter, Christmas, Fourth of July.

Redact, redact, erase, cross out, tear it up,
let the wind take it. And wind
showers down embers.

That’s sleep, isn’t it? So many

Honest-to-god color, god said, for artists. 
But first, graveyards, to grind the human femur 
in secret, for bone black. And cuttlefish 

September, with a paintbrush, on Monadnock.
October, in the backyard, with a silencer.
November, on a windowpane, with a skate blade.

Look out! my nightmare shouted,
as she crashed across the porch, flailing the shadows with a crutch.
Dark wind blew a storm of dust, or feathers, and lightning