“I just can’t fit.  Yes, I believe it’s time for us to quit
But when we meet again introduced as friends
Please don’t let on that you knew me when
I was hungry and it was your world.”
—Bob Dylan, Just Like A Woman

and after Estrella Morente’s La Noche, and Pablo Neruda’s Ode to the Sea

1992

I have no answers, no reasons but your wicked game.
In this world, there is no one who will love you like me—
Underneath it, I have died, to hide, so you will not see.
For you are sun and dawn, swans bathing in your rays.
I am night, here to meet you every morning, but only—

Those green eyes, reconsidering.  My eyes, arrested.
Estrella, what did you have to hide?
I bought you this ring.  Yes, I bought you this ring. 
“Perhaps.  Quizás.”
I bought you this ring, my wife?
We never saw the altar, organ, or freshly dripping
Wax—and being tired, waning
I stopped buying you things.

I stopped buying your love—again

The evening fell, and a cloak winding the trees—
Drunk to you I ran.  Street naked, on my knees, and 
Repairing to my rooms, I decked myself a feathered white—
Like a swan without a partner, like a man without a wife.

Candles.  
Candles from heaven.  
Candles from heaven falling 
On you, my immense sea.  
Wax floating, votives washed over.
No more safety at the lee—on shore
The night fires snuffed out by your tidal tongue.  
Saying yes.  Back a no.  Saying yes, of course!  a yes!
Yes to us!  And perhaps, perhaps, but then, a no.  

I am only alive because for years I did not know what to feel. 
I am grateful that I did not know what to feel.