CONE OF LIGHT

Sing Guadalupe, until you twist the flight path of ducks that
returned us south

Sing right and left the breeze and the grass to the reeds and
riggings and ocean storms.

Sing Sing Guadalupe the light twisting and your red-haired a ball
of twine and sing scale after scale so the staff can
ascend to its Nimbus the Corolla held over the sprawled
figure of an archangel.

You've stopped singing in the kitchen the salt and its place
the hives of saltpeter and the dunes native to the native
old desert with nubile beaches torrents with not contours.

Sit besides me and sing and turn a little this way I like to see
you when you light up in a shadow confined for a moment
by the glow of a candle burning and the painting we know
so well by Georges de La Tour.

Make me Guadalupe a modernist poet in a striped silk kimono in some
tropical city the crackling of an impressionist painters dark
candle are making me write poems by José Asunción Silva they're
staggering syllables make me murmur them bring your profile
closer to my head the intermittent mind of poems and come now
with your voice its scales so I might be the spiraled
archangel of your assumption head crowned by a halo of ants
one by one divided in two by an indivisible sickle which
dividing them brings me to an endless ravine of ants on route
to their ant hills there is no harvest more true right
Guadalupe.

Sing sing over my head and your three song notes would be three blows to
my chest at the hour of prayer pins and needles and my
wrinkled trousers let's laugh one more time in this room you
and I making fun of poor Amado Nervo full of grace as we know
so well in all his disgrace just a pretext right a pretext just
like any other for you and me facing or in profile and our right
or left sides and still in our backs let's scintillate a little
longer between the diaphanous semi-fuzzy notes the unmodeled
crescendo or the unbroken trouble of your voice.

Lightness Guadalupe lightness and a certain concision so the song caps
off the lyric smudges and as it pulls itself together by the
glow of twilight our own the sprawl archangel that dozed off
under the influence of your song sits straight up a bit furious
and glares at me suddenly from his rusty throne forcing me to
pour forth one more mark of punctuation so thoughtfully Guadalupe
after a turn it will become a burned drag.