Robert Fernandez [USA]

Auto-da-fé

                                                                It is

extraordinary how, stripped of affection,

                one is able to walk, legs flat, a snake

with its throat in the dust. A tangling of fruits and vases,

                the shade is verboten. In blinding sunlight,

if over the hills you were to succeed, eyes restive,

                desire a yellow cloud, if, for your sake,

through your night-sweats, if prevailing, tell us

                who fell obliquely in the settlement of fate;—

I would take those limbs and,

                beneath the limes, bless them

with proper burial. The bowl of vinegar,

                a treatment for this shell-flecked

game of spades. You are dissimilar.

                That is also a lie. It is your motives that are as

much an exercise in utility and aggression as the hands

                are diplomats on a mooring ground. We offer

a python’s manifold attention.

                I was a child of The Window. Cored,

we come

                with cameras, a heap

of lens cloths, filming

a documentary on jails. Shadows defoliating the light,

                we film the crowds issuing, gentle

as starlight, down the halls

                like a ring of keys, a meadow.

Quadrangle

A slit in the rib, but nonetheless

so eager to participate it spastically

races itself into the quadrangle

where it is met by packed dirt

like cinnamon flattened from the stalk.

Four doors, each at the center of a wall,

of tempered steel simultaneously roseate—

doors radiant with flowers. The doors

intricately cross-beamed. The beams flowing

serrate to a point like taste buds. Each beam

an answer to a preexisting line of inquiry—

footnotes in a contract. The figure

considers smashing vases set

beside the doors. Each vase

of a distinct coupling of flowers.

At the north, double violets, lilies.

At the south, angel’s trumpets and

gardenias. At the east, iris and rose.

At the west, poppies and dandelions.

The result, a sort of literal augmentation

of what has already been executed ornamentally

in beams: doors split by budding accompaniments—

by flowers made rhythmically alive. The figure,

tallying its reservations with respect

to an act of senseless violence, determines

should the equilibrium of door and flowers be disturbed

some thing would (irrepressibly)

race into the quadrangle framing

an encounter, or, conversely, the doors

would seal shut, encircling the figure like a host

entering the roof of the mouth before it is dissolved.

Precinct

Outside this city of pavilions

we become conscious

of the lengths one will go

to secure oneself a variety of exit-points.

Mathematics is a crutch

in so far as it provides a space

in which a dialectic may operate.

As at a hand of poker,

I am shining the shoes of a deadline

by tallying up the odds.

At the airport, a man

having his feet polished

becomes a random

articulation of the Muse.

Neither profligacy nor restraint,

he instead represents (the true Muse)

ruthless indifference.

Between that which is stilled

and that which is bearing down on us:

infinite steps and breath combinatorials.

We want to join a gym (the odds

have become enticing).  We put our

necks out (a seraph reels with ax in hand).

Witless vultures descend through the terminal.

The numbers of available exits

are moment by moment reduced,

their closing off fed by a pulse.

The dialectic, a flat band of light,

escapes through the soles of the feet.

From the other side of the terminal

one notices a shiny face gathering momentum.

                                                An eclipse,

the face picks up speed

and before one can think to shield

oneself or speak, it has arrived.

Pivot

We scrawl faces in red crayon

on the stones and lay

the stones in the garden, face down.

Later, I generate an interest—

back to the plastered wall,

hand up the skirt of a Medusa,

I create future markets. . .

With whom have we jumped into bed

that on our fists we carve,

                “a taproot

fixing in the soil,

                we will recover. . .”

Each counterfeit nirvana

with slits down its arms,

but neither is that it. . . All

the waking soft-eye’d lamp

bearers, but neither are they it. . .

All those of swollen stomachs,

guiding their thirst into dust

and standing water. This,

then, a soul’s thriving rings

shaded by walls.

I have turned 17 today.

I hear a snapping of collars

and an invitation

to a high-stakes kennel fight.

I wing my chips into black carpet,

gently concealing them.

There, we eat. There,

the lines of my jaw

become refrains. There,

track a menhir of flame

like a wave trough—

hinged vertically.

The light’s cast is

fluted, ear-splitting,

a proximity undercutting

the utility of my repast. 

The Rose

The whole rising

in gradual revelations

of constituents,

each segment a milieu

of distinct organs in truth

unbroken,

a continuous surface

like an eye.

At once wild rings and the aberrance

of becoming younger. It is

uncovered            the eyes

                etched in light,

soaked in mercury.

A child pharaoh,

                mane fixed

in ringing and alarm—

such an immortality of flies

settled at the window

to reveal,

we are delighted.

We have become an

itch spilled into a bowl,

become rivers, first

possessions and

fatuations.

The flower 

a loosening

of colored belts,

a throne saying:

I was fatuous,

inked in possession.

I could not love here.

Hayrick

A sensation of mute nostalgia

that is in fact desire—a desire

to sit with the densely packed

warmth like a shimmering cloud

of blood, like a shield which, moving

towards you, reveals itself as a narrow face.

Not nostalgia, but the vertigo of seeing

a plot of ripe wheat in dead summer,

a membrane of haze through which one

could walk face down, limbs unclenching

along the way. Soft and heavy on the earth,

the rick is neither the anonymity of a pile

of cardboard boxes nor the intricacy

of a tusk. It is like a bell laid on its side

in front of a chapel. It is oscillations

of thirst (the grinding of teeth),

and contours flared in shade.

Measure

One shoulder to a stand 

of palms, one shoulder

to a Medellin villa,

how strange to be sectioned here

quartered into panes and sensing

that over a rim of mountains

a center is lapsing

in insurrection and

alarm, that beneath light-

showers, a warning cuts

through propositions of measure

like a wheel through vein and stone.

Grotto

A sail

composed of equal parts

sand and legibility.

If the light

is strong enough

the task being

to erect such canvas

in partitions. An infinite

distribution of planks.

Infinitely, each plank

perfect into a slot

in which judiciousness

aligns need—

the satisfaction of hunger.

As light aligns

bare wall, a groove

spontaneously become a rill—

the satisfaction of thirst.

Attending

to structure in failure, I open

my arms and receive a ransom of planks.

Attending to structure 

in satisfaction—

vacancies fanning

like the wing bars

of an ivory-colored finch.

As in a derelict hotel,

the eye is seized by

a pulse of water,

by a roll of carpet

like thirst, by light

like an eel seamless

through bone-

white reef.

The clear light of overpasses

and the pale light of the billboards

veils us.

Mines

         I.

The difficulty comes

in pace and resolution,

how to step through this field

of mines that are no mother-of-

pearl or white felt but intricately

and resonantly mines. The gait

was labored, possessed of a lash

branching along its edges into

other lashes that caused the leg

to shake wildly, a tremor rising

into the knee or, we darted and left

no trace, sand sealing over our steps

we were flawless, the ears were two

crushed bells and thus, unbalanced,

you fixed yourself like a trunk and

determined to stand still. You grew

into your rings and, shedding them,

left them illuminated on the floor.

          II.

There are several varieties of mines:

mines that swell (seeds in water);

that fall into themselves, desiccated;

mines that remain perpetually dormant;

that find a set of eyes to meet

at eye-level. If I say the mines

are real I must also internalize

that they are living, not simply

a phantom limb crisp as the awe

of the incredulous amputee

but compacted densely as a fungus,

constituting the subject unlucky enough

to pass into their domain and initiate

the stitch of flame coiling across

the hills, the hills coiled back

across detonation, the slit of an

instant in which it seems the beaks

of foxes flourish and grapple along

fields of intensity.

The Faculties

 Madonna of base erudition,

splintered in bars—perfunctory,

you came with the idea your

organs would (did) follow.

They who appear dutiful,

students who have sequestered us,

arraigned    like sunlight in timothy

one in a cage, one of us

on a barge sailing by,

one swallowed like a tusk,

one bird of paradise, one

in garrets, stockades

gathered along the causeway

in the ribbon-shuttered center

of the vast city,

we who wait

for a cyclone to draw

its eye of granulated dusk 

into completion, for a flag

to branch with multiple rays

of thirst from the center of a well.

We have opened our lives

upon silence and the bridge.

Originally from Miami, Robert Fernandez recently graduated from the University of Iowa Writing Program. He has had poetry in Canary, 580 Split, and, forthcoming, Aufgabe among other journals.

Copyright ©2006 by Robert Fernandez and Green Integer