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Poem
by Michael Ruby

Lorca Was Right

     Y las hormigas furiosas
     Atacaran los cielos amarillos que se refugian
      In los ojos de las vacas


The boys ate monkeys at the ashen fair
and it was hard, so hard,
to return to our whereabouts.

None of us would sip the dawn today-
on the table for the first quarter of life.

I didn't know the girl who became my mother.

You live in that ant, you live with the ants.
There's so much ants don't know.

Lone passerby, I need you so much.
Tell me why you hurried toward the oily canal.
Did the wind matter to you?
I need you to testify for me,
to establish I was not there.

We borrowed some of her chlorophyll
this morning, we're too brown.

She was a fish now, I saw it very clearly.

The kitchen is buried to its neck
in the rust snowing from our bridges.

On land, all water is tepid.

The burn kept me from sleeping.

We're not exactly ignorant of neurotic rituals,
but what could possibly require a rusty pin?

Do you have something against oxygen?

Parts of my body dissolved.
Someday, they will need to be replaced.

Lorca was right: they dumped doves in sewers.

Yank the knife from the egg.

Snails age and die
in the tiny circular rooms in my body.

Each of us reconstituted the seawater drop by drop.

You lived inside the knife that slept
except the few times when it was sought.

Little dead things lined the bank one time,
many times, perhaps every time.

On its own, the powder is neither good nor bad.
And yet, the simple fact of its existence,
doesn't that make it bad?

This is where the pigeons go,
the crowds of pigeons on the cobblestones.