Poetry

Moritz, A. F.

In Puerto Rico In 1949 Juan Ramon made this list of synonyms : god, essence, noble consciousness . you. beauty utter and complete . The thing so named. he said, lives not in its young manhood...

...older now, disappointed, and fie fell silent . next was injured in his body, no longer could rise or move about . and so died : there had remained more loss...
...noble consciousness, summed up in him, dros% ned in the dust of his blood . 24: 6 November 1992 POEMS A.F...
...A door %k a, opening in the far wall . Who was about to enter" And the whole scene in memory is so still that the drive begins again in pursuit even faster, the images growing invisible as they flash by . Streetcar Somnolence of the running streetcar shaken, as though by breathing, on its rails . It stops for some students and the drowsing calm of the few passengers is crushed . An uproar of boys and girls escaped from schools floods in : bright lips, blue-painted eyes...
...While the young jokes howl on, ancient, repetitive . stupid and dearly loved : another way of hovering, like a hand, over the skin of things...
...A stone bench, and on a white stone wall the shadow of a woman's profile, deep blue and graceful as the shore of a lake' Didn't the branch of a lemon tree reach to~card her hands, as Il the l.emon , anted to he irullls...
...soft hair...
...Moritz The Car Sometimes they stop the car . get out, walk, and try to remember something glimpsed in a courtyard as they flashed by . Was there a green parrot in a tall gold cage...
...loud laughing at shouted jokes . And the silences of those who are older and alone . and were here first, meditative before, are deathly now . So each one turns more fixedly to the window and strains with sight toward radiance of the sun on chipped blue storefronts and young mothers dragging children against the weather...
...more failure to come . than yet had announced itself in 1949 . Too soon, those thoughts of congress with direst things . the words beautiful, utter and complete . You...
...undaunted . Many sights and dreams, even in 1949, foretold the human events that would compose a face for that vague loved one he addressed . Already he had been blown far from where he grew . from mornings of Moguer, cafes of Madrid . a world's ri-ht]lewshastt should be eternal, grown a memory . And then to light in Puerto Rico . aged but stronger...
...he said, lives not in its young manhood alone, but most powerfully in its dying . He prayed to it : I am swallowed up and swim in you, wholly submerged . but in you I will never drown, as a child never suffocates in his mother's womb : because you are the blood inside me and I am in you as I am in my blood . Worker of bronze filigree, delicate hard words...
...seeing farther through more tangled leaves, new powers in the quaint garden, the little house, the lecture room, the green museum . There Zenobia died lingeringly . Alone, he was weaker...

Vol. 119 • November 1992 • No. 19


 
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