to neruda when i should be sleeping

In a Neruda sky, you
are like a cloud. I remember
one afternoon marveling
at the colors aground
of the green against the sky,
the layers of paper-doll mountains,
stacked one over the other as
to their westward slopes
I drive home.

Even if you never existed,
for my sake
I would've imagined you,
and been fulfilled. Like
the drunk-love poet I am
always never quite finished with,
oh thank you for the plunder,
the voice, the water, the wide-wide
sky, the hunger, the every time
you call me by that sweetness,
I cannot rebuild Jericho forever.

You say they are all
from older ancient sorrows
& I wait for mine
to be lifted,
all the saddest poems,
the lemons entombed
in stringent purpose, to
cleanse, to sting. I sing
the sonata & the sonnets,
I wait for that fluttering
that strumming up
of all your age,
your generation spent
apart from my company.
These are by far
the longest days. a
voice still hidden.

I honestly keep waiting
for it to fade, this feeling
of delay, I keep
anticipating that I will
dissolve my sudden attachments,
that things will go back to
the way they were
before you. But they don't.
Even after bitterness & anger,
the absence of those stanzas
clinging somehow,
I'm not sure I think, I think
I don't expect it to leave
and don't want it to.

From the center
grows the mandala
& the garden. some
beast to whom I can say:
the light wraps around you.
and because I was courageous
because I spoke, you saw
me. All of it, & I was
forgiven & no longer
afraid. I feel
the howl in you,
of your tired & worn
transfiguration, like the cusp
the scorpion I'm not &
two fishes, I only mean
pieces of beauty & vanities
intermingled. I grow
outward in hope that
if I reach far enough
you will grab my hand.

I keep writing for someone
else, myself, my visitations
the holy paved to good
intentions, dirt roads
if I lived in other countries. But
you keep returning. Pablo
warned me against the
loneliness of the hour,
a life filled with fire, but I
surrender: you understand
the wick is always green
after burning.