Zayra Yves: Heart of Poetry

NOT WAITING

I am not waiting for the world to love me back.

Yeah, I know I have heard about that idiot compassion
and how not to love too much or be a burning saint.

It is true that skulls hang from roofs, bones dance
in the streets; people shoplift, beg and grow moss.

The news is crazy with itself. It foams at the mouth
wears the best clothes; is unrepentant for all the darkness.

It is rumored that the succulent and juicy are for sale
sort of like a fruit no one seems to get enough of.

And, even though everyone keeps saying this is IT,
the end of everything, the end of the world;

that we should scrape, bite and chain smoke…
somehow I believe that even a star killed by clichés

recovers its light in the blank void of somewhere.
It sort of reminds me of where I am going

even though I only vaguely remember that place,
sort of sovereign but unsolved and unnamed

like lips pressed to lips when we turn silent
to be near the scent of loving one another.

Maybe sometimes we just don’t know how to love
in the absence, in the moment, in return…

Copyright by Zayra Yves 2008
All Rights Reserved

The Blurred Version

Drained of color the night rises to greet me
thirsty for our song.

The line is drawn
and a faded boat has left the shore.

I take apart the last time
we were in each another’s arms –

try to reassemble the softness in my fingers:
silk, flowers and rosaries.

I stare into the fog
looking for your shape to return
if nowhere else except in my soul.

In that world, I held your skin so close to mine
there is a mark, a stain, a scar…

as I continue to hold you
between that dying and this death

in a transfusion of silence
that not even the sound of water can break.

In a song of blind love
a bird cannot camouflage the heart

so, I gather our shadows and prepare myself
for a moment that will never come.

Copyright 2008 by Zayra Yves

Red Clay

I am your first mother.

Before history erased me
faded into stone pigment and wood
circled with shells and dog teeth
mounted by an elongated face
and round body to the center
of your existence
somewhere south of the equator
where my ancestors
still chant my name on the edge
of a hundred winds
while the trees translate my song
your soul tips over
split off from the movement
of rivers in a modern episode
where magic is sudden as the belief
that everything beyond yourself
expands into the miracle of possibility
and pre-history.

Listen to me,
I am your first mother.

Copyright 2008 by Zayra Yves

UNFINISHED & UNTANGLED

I want to be unfinished. I like myself this way.

I like the sound of my voice speaking from a lopsided heart

like a mystic song played softly in the early mornings

off the fisherman’s coast

or maybe like some melancholy drama

carving its name into a wall -

whatever it is, this is the moment I want to be.

I want to be ineffable sweetness

untangled and unraveled and written by a poet

smooth as a wish that floats off the page

and kisses you in public (right here in front of everyone)

and crowns you with love and throws flowers at you.

I just want to be the old habits that fall away

I want to be like the garments of pain

that have been worn for too long -

they are ragged from wandering in the night

they are torn from ghosts

so they fall away.

They can’t cling to who I am anymore.

After all those years of waiting, after all those tears

after all that judgment, all that criticism,

all that finger pointing

and the loneliness (god the loneliness),

I just want to be unfinished, untamed and untangled.

I want to sway dance and move through the world

marvelously naked.

Copyright by Zayra Yves 2008
All Rights Reserved

A Lost Cry

No hopes were born tonight
but I don't think we meant to bury
our hearts.

Perhaps when neither I, you
or the earth exists
new stars will be born.

They will chant slowly
pulling our drowned city from the sea –

uncover secrets, blood impulses,
listen for fragments of love
and our delicate catastrophes
lost in trampled songs.

Those stars will cut our names from stones
release our voices to the wind

uproot our small bodies
bent and rusted to the core
incapable as shells of a single word

after waves of emptiness...

we will stir
from the place where no one understands
or has memory

suddenly our eyes will open
bright as new suns.

copyright 2008 by Zayra Yves

A Lover and the Echo

You know who you are,
I don't need to write your name at the top of this poem.

You rest close to the bone
the same as a wound that will not heal.

I realize I should not speak of these things
anymore:

tumultuous, wild, tragic, sweet and
over too soon.

Or think of how we sold our song
with sandalwood in an open market

It is time I give up the nine stars
that fell from your eyes

onto your collarbone, down to your torso
cutting into my hips

as they tried to catch one another
before they disappeared in the darkness.

I imagine they still lay awake
stare up at the window wondering

if we remember their fire
or if we will ever return

to set them free of this earthy exile
banished and belonging to no one.

I hear the roll of the tongue
as they cry out on a moonless night

holding the skull of our love
that refuses to be a corpse.


copyright 2008 by Zayra Yves