poetry

From "KaluluwA"
by J. Neil C. Garcia

XXXIV

Of course I do not want to die—
only poets sometimes do
and even then, they would not want,
I think, my kind of death,

one from which no beauty
may be summoned forth:
a death that being final and all too real,
resists all description.

Between us it is you who are the poet,
who are always sighing after what escapes
your grasp, your sight:

sunsets, the softly chirping dawn,
water and horizon by turns folding into blue
and deep vermilion, buds coaxed by rain
to dappled bloom, stars wheeling past
the evening sky’s abandoned roads,

the scent of seeds inside a baby’s mouth,
a lover’s smooth and savage voice pouring
thick and hot across your chest,
a scoop of coconut meat velvety
and moist upon the tongue.

I often wonder why you are never here and now,
how come you indulge in thought so much:

For instance, why does wine
never taste as sweet to you
as when you have remembered it?

I guess it is the poet’s one vocation
to nurse, within himself, grief’s dark-eyed child—
to crave beyond this life.

While I and the rest of the ordinary world,
we merely breathe to live.

Even that is difficult enough.

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