LatinosUSA

Once, and Then: A Sestina

The dawning plays across the windburned hands
Which, clenching tight, revitalize the sun;
The lovers watch it rise through sprays of salt
That gust with every wave upon the sand.
As always, this has been too short a night,
Now ended, dead as leaves blown on the wind.

The old man squints into the gusting wind
And, clenching tight his aching, blistered hands,
Anticipates with bitterness the night,
When glutton Earth will eat the shining sun
To spit it out as gritty, windblown sand
That burrows deep and stings his eyes with salt.

The island scent, so redolent with salt,
Delights their senses as they gulp the wind,
Reclining as they do in silken sand,
The breezes flowing through their tangled hands.
In time, the molten coin that is the sun
Will die away, to leave them with the night.

The old man’s oldest foe is still the night.
He lives here, blood turned light by age and salt;
He’s damned near worshipping the welcome sun,
The sea, the brisk and unforgiving wind.
He sits there now, down on the beach, his hands
Dug much like claws into the grainy sand.

The dark their sheets, their sumptuous bed the sand,
They feast on one another in the night
Like vampires, almost, gentle searching hands
Appraising each the other, slick with salt
From perspiration dried by twilight wind,
To sleep much later, well before the sun.

But now the self-same, angry slept-through sun
Is savior to the codger on the sand.
For much like dream and dust and teasing wind,
She left him here alone one moonless night,
Her hair and eyes agleam with bitter salt
As, carefully, she disengaged their hands.

Now, in his tired, old hands, against the night
A bottle made of sand and made of salt
Will hold him till the wind can raise the sun.

~~

bartab

the bar is cool-smoke happiness
where chicness comes at five dollar an ounce,
where fashionable jollity cuts
so like a Texican norther
to the barebone sham that we are,
to reveal (oh shame) the grisly skeleton
of normality, of pretense,
and baby, would i lie to you?

wouldn’t i? words are symbols
but so many symbols
are vessels empty or filled
with something devastatingly mundane.

have care: a touch can shatter
this thin ice of our masques
and the real people revealed too often
are too real to be real,
and aren’t allowed to
exist.

So let’s drown us before we escape.