Robert Mezey

To The One Reading Me, and: The Night They Held a Wake On The Southside, and: The Other Tiger, and: To A Coin, and: Brunanburh, 937 A.D., and: Buenos Aires

You are invulnerable. The very numbers That rule your fate, have they not given you The certitude of dust? Is not perhaps Your irreversible time that rivers time In whose glass Heraditus saw the symbol Of his fleeting day? The headstone waits for you Which you wiU never read. On it already The date, the birthplace, and the epitaph. And others? They are also dreams of time, Not monuments of bronze or poUshed gold; The universe, Uke you, is Proteus. Shade, you will pass into the waiting shade Implacable at the end of your days journey. Think,—in a way, you are already dead.

Unsent Letter to Luis Salinas

Its hot in the mountains now even at night and soon you will be in Texas fighting the sun & looking for the virgin in Mexican bars. Obsidian eyes that see the human and the inhuman with the same anguish, hands of broken wheat, bones resonating to the grito, all the weariness of the poor burns clearly through raw alcohol. I think of you pushing a heavy brown breast to your mouth as if you could get away for just one night or even twenty minutes. A fiery planet flies around your heart and a moon around the planet and stars are shooting everywhere. Your blood is amazed at all this activity, and the woman is amazed, and the bed creaks under the weight of the world. May you have many children and the gringos none.