A Selection from Diario by Iván Argüelles

                                        xxii

                                          

                               the last photo of us together

not have the final rapprochement though we walk

streets crowded with vowels and a lack of syllables

the marmoreal entrance to thought and its dictionary

a lapse of afternoons in a summer of conjunctions

the left hand and its lesson of versifying heights

a nosebleed a shadowy walk with nuns into the nave

candles spent and incense wafting in clouds the shape

of demons or imps from the Rg Veda and if there

is a right hand still functioning as a guide to the per-

plexed to the ignominious of memory walking avenues

shaded by months of porphyry did we not have

a final epistle a trajectory beyond the daily baptism

and crucifixion something on the other side of words

a chaos of invention in sound and ink with books

of uncut pages and leaves alphabetized for their color

and formation and the eye we shared like the ear

between the two of us which heard symphonies of  utter

stone a pre-history of sand and the enormous fictions

of space with its eerie evenings without water and

what if we did say goodbye too soon and the buildings

curving around a Jerusalem of despond taking photos

with windows and reflections of a black Toltec sun

spinning its x-rays around our cinemascope brains

childhoods and childhoods we spent together like a

pair of unwanted Buddhas lying in an early spring

ditch more totem than idol more idiom than dialect

spans between thumb and index finger we aimed

our maps at the futility of language knowing full well

the birthright of platitudes and the silence of glass

crystalline dawns made static by our secret radio

oracular division of the number without quantity

what a mistake the bride was what an error the phone

and making up for a miscalculation in years we met

or so it seemed in a darkness of light outside the chance

that for the last time we would pose for the camera

of entelechy bright with the expectation of a future

grounded in the birth of our past a death beyond

reconciliation a loss of the eye and ear we shared

from the inception in snows and bitter melancholy

the famous dot dot dot of a code flashed from out

there hermeneutics and mandala of twin-speech

if we did say goodbye too soon

04/14/19

Innovative poet  Iván Argüelles is the author of numerous works, notably “That” Goddess, Hapax Legomenon, Madonna Septet, and Comedy , Divine , The (a poem structurally based on Dante’s work). Among recently published works are Fragments from a Gone World, and Cien Sonetos. Usually linked with the surrealists, his work has deep roots in the classics as well as modernists such as Pound and Joyce.