Desire’s Persistence

Yo ave del agua floreciente duro en fiesta.
—“Deseo de persistencia,” Poesía Náhuatl

In the region of rain and cloud,

I live in shade,

under the moss mat of days bruised

purple with desire.

My dominion is a song in the wide ring of water.

There, I run to and fro,

braiding the logical act

in the birth of an Ear of Corn,

polychromatic story I will now tell

in the weaving, power's form in motion,

a devotion to the unstressed.

Once, I wreathed around a king,

became a fishing net, a maze

“a deadly wealth of robe.”

Mothers who have heard me sing take heart;

I always prick them into power.

Y vengo alzando al viento la roja flor de invierno.

(I lift the red flower of winter into the wind.)

—Poesía Náhuatl

Out of the ninth circle,

a Phoenician boat rocks upward into light

and the warmth of a name—given to heaven—

that arises in the ninth realm.

Earth's realm discloses the Egyptian

on the point of invention,

deprived of life and death,

heart deep in the soul's hawk,

a thymos shadow knapping the tombed body.

Some one or thing is always heaven bound.

Some flowered log doubles my bones.

The spirit of Toltec turtledoves escapes.

A sharp, metaphorical cry sends me

into the adorned sepulchre,

and the thing that decays learns

how to speak its name.

LIFT

Down Hidalgo,

past Alvarado and Basurto,

I walk a straight line

to the snailed Pasco Los Berros.

Here, at noon, the sun,

a silver bead,

veils what the dawn has displayed.

Even so,

I have taken up the morning's bond again

—the lake with its pendulum leg

shining in the distance,

the boy in white

hauling his bottle of chalky milk home.

I know I sit in the deep of a city

with its brocade of hills,

where a thin rain is an evening's fire.

I have heard the women sing

near their gas lamps,

when the rose end of day lights a hunger

for the garlanded soups and meat they prepare.

Often, I have taken the high ground

by the pond, over a frog's voice

dampened by lilies,

and been exalted by the soothsayer

who knows I'm not at home.

I am the arcane body,

raised at the ninth hour,

to be welcomed by the moonlight

of such spirited air.

I am the Dane of degrees

who realizes how the spirit glows

even as it descends.

RED

The heart, catalectic though it be, does glow,

responds to every midnight bell within you.

This is a discourse on reading heat,

the flushed char of burned moments one sees

after the sexton's lamp flows

over the body's dark book.

There is suspicion

here that violet

traces of

sacrifice

stand

bare.

FLOWER

This marble dust recalls that sunset

with the best burgundy, and the way,

after the charm of it, the peacocks

escaped their cages on the green.

I would now embellish the flame

that ornaments you,

even as it once in that moment

did.

I carry you blossomed,

cream and salt of a high crown.

You must flare,

stream forth,

blister and scale me,

even as you structure the enveloping kiss,

sporophore of our highest loss.

WINTER

Under the evergreens,

the grouse have gone under the snow.

Women who follow their fall flight

tell us that, if you listen, you can hear

their dove's voices ridge the air,

a singing that follows us to a bourne

released from its heat sleep.

We have come to an imagined line,

celestial,

that binds us to the burr of a sheltered thing

and rings us with a fire that will not dance,

in a horn that will not sound.

We have learned, like these birds,

to publish our decline,

when over knotted apples and straw-crisp leaves,

the slanted sun welcomes us once again

to the arrested music in the earth's divided embrace.

WIND

Through winter,

harmattan blacks the air.

My body fat with oil,

I become another star at noon,

when the vatic insistence

of the dog star's breath clings to me.

Though I am a woman,

I turn south,

toward the fire,

and hear the spirits in the bush.

But this is my conceit:

water will come from the west,

and I will have my trance,

be reborn,

perhaps in a Mediterranean air,

the Rhone delta's contention

with the eastern side of rain.

In all these disguises,

I follow the aroma of power.

So I am charged in my own field,

to give birth to the solar wind,

particles spiraling around the line

of my body,

moving toward the disruption,

the moment when the oil of my star at noon

is a new dawn.

I shall go away, I shall disappear,

I shall be stretched on a bed of yellow roses

and the old women will cry for me.

So the Toltecas wrote: their books are finished,

but your heart has become perfect.

Copyright Credit: Jay Wright, “Desire’s Persistence” from Transfigurations: Collected Poems (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000). Copyright © 2000 by Jay Wright. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Source: Transfigurations: Collected Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 2000)