Zayra Yves: Poetry

Untitled: Not Received

The letter outlined the 52 things I knew
I would do differently.

It started in the boat on the Zambezi
then moved to wishing we had put those twin beds
together in dark, rather than sleeping
so far apart.

I added lines for the dispute over color,
whether or not Buddha is better off dead.

Plus, I put a few double XX’s
so you can fill in the corrections to my errors
(the ones I am certain exist, I just don’t remember)
almost as if it just occurred to me to consider your opinion.

I realize seven years is a long time to wait

for this sudden awareness
for my heart as it falls from the vine;

how generous I am –
two thousand five hundred and twenty five days
too late.

I want you

I want you sweet as cinnamon, warm as butter on toast.

I want you in me soft, flickering as a candle flame.

I want you deep blue, abstract and painted in flowers.

I want you as a prayer written a thousand times, tucked in a pillow.

I want you aging, ripening on the vine, as pure as Burgundy, as Merlot.

I want you as a song five times a day in a hundred countries.

I want you as a risk, as a skydiver dives off a cliff.

I want you as a wish, as lyrical, as loyal as dolphins swim.

I want you loose as spilled milk, dripping down the sides.

I want you in me zipped as a twin, tight as a reason.

I want you midnight fragrant as African air, as distant.

I want you to play me as a harp, harmonica, flute or guitar.

I want you intoxicated dancing bare on a cloud in the rain.

I want you bright orange, hot as mouth blown glass.

I want you as a vixen, slut, love machine.

I want you as a saint, Mother Mary, Jesus, and Allah too.

I want you wrapped around my skin as a blanket on Christmas.

I want you sleeping curled under the covers faithful as a dog.

I want you aloof as a cat lounging on the windowsill.

I want you wise as an owl, royal as an eagle, free as a falcon.

I want you laughing, bubbling over, sparkling as champagne.

I want you as a mystery, a story, as someone I may have imagined.

I want you dressed, undressed, clothes over the chair, on the floor.

I want your name revealed in my world as someone eternal.

I want you naked, raw, exposed as an oyster on the half shell.

I want you to crawl out of my dreams to join me.

I want you here, now.

First Day of Summer

At Capistrano and Highway 1
I am about sixty seconds away
from fourth gear

his hand touches my knee
slides my dress
up past the red light

I drive it over fifty-five
as he fingers the underwear line
pulls the lace aside
I open the juice of summer heat
like some kind of pear
some sort of whorish peach
spilling in his open hand.

The Night Bird’s Last Tear

All year she gathered things that bind,
collected thorn and toad memories

field to field in every angle of light
only to find some questions do not answer.

She went as far as the horizon -
beyond departures, the plague and sunspots

not in hopes of carnations and prisms
not in search of prayers and the sacred

just for thin last words and a few flights
in the dark toward a crystal heart.

In the morning, silence gave her something
too small for a name. She accepted

a tender exile and let the habit of looking
for herself drop on the shore broken

into a million pieces of nameless grace
by turns of twilight the mouth of a small earth

and she opened to taste the stars,
that exhausted heaven gone drowsy on her lips

now a smooth brightness transparent
between her limbs and ribs as night dissolves

in the color of her eyes like ten thousand
moons of naked silence.

Love’s Sanctuary….

You arrived in a dream
and left the same way.

Part of me thought it was overblown
how you might just touch me
in one minute to change life as I knew it
and walk like a flower
among the thorns of my discolored heart.

The other part of me knew
it was you

would always be you

to rise like a sweet fragrance
in the strangely lonesome field
I call “myself”
and populate it with love.

Just when I start to think it is dead
all dried up and gone
with the memories uprooted
and nothing to show for it
except a few seeds…

suddenly the selfless joy of our embrace
opens like a rose in sunlight.

Once again

I am surrounded by our flowers
in full bloom.

Why I am Not Afraid of the Dark

I.

I offer thanks to the darkness
dressed in a spectacle
of cruel mysticism.

For without the black hearts,
there are no flowers of light.

II.

Praise for Mapplethorpe's lillies
and celebrations of impotence
choked around scrotums
and confirmations
of barbed wire.

He would not turn away from
pierced tongues
of borrowed debauchery
and circumstance.

III.

Let them talk of cypress
and steal diamonds—

The black hole of a face
pretends to suck infinity,
propagate the myth
of madness.

Let them have a thin smile
of satisfaction—

It is hip to be a victim
and practiced in the art
of disturbing.

IV.

When this cacophony
of the overly anxious
dies down...

it is the carnival of the sun
with sweet perfume
and solar flares,

not the trivia of slide shows,
that burns heaviness
from the mind.

V.

Angels appear—
turn shadows inside out.

And, who knows what
is reflected by the rays
bounced off darkness

in smooth radiance,
like some beauty
that cannot be captured?

VI.

In a vortex where hearts join
and eclipse one another
through portents of mystery,

darkness is a canvas
for brilliance and prisms
that favour stars.

I offer thanks to the light—
listen as the heavens open,
and the stones cry out.

Life Titles

Those other titles for my life are not right.
This is how I know they are not.

I arrived late to San Luis Obispo where my family sleeps
surrounded in the cove of Seven Sisters.

The coyotes were on the hill
digging up our dead dog buried next to the cats.
I did not stop them. I did not cry.
I got out of my car to look up at the Milky Way,
the great belt of light, because here
like Maui, one can actually see these things.

I thought about what is true; what is real.

In the morning scraps of fur were stuck to the bushes
bits of cloth were rolling around in the wind.
And, I asked myself what of my life would be translated
by the wind after the coyotes came for me?

Now I am ready to write the truth

"She Who Remembers" is someone else's story.

I have told it well because I could.

It is time to write about my life. The title will change
as I unravel it from words that belong to anyone
they just happen to be mine in this moment.

When I am finished the wind will tell you what I lived.

Stay with me for the journey.