What can you give that can never be taken?
Last night I found her amidst muffled cries
I will hold her thin bones against my ample flesh till the quivering
subsides
How will you hold the rare and perilous given you?
Dawn begins in the bones.
from Querencia
by Risa Kaparo
Because her lover has flown
into the stilled blue,
she enters the secreted place.
She climbs upon a star,
hurling arguments of desire.
She cannot come to him like this.
Her lover sleeps but does not rest.
His spine writhing through dream
lulls the lower sky.
Behind him, the forbidden.
He stares, time swallows itself,
the lesser days, eons,
his life a reflection, a leaf.
But no, I am mistaken, there are no trees,
only a stone
separating the son
from the boy
lifted as a kiss.
I mount the wounded lamplight,
sail the desert on a windless night,
soaked in the sweat of invisible horses
drinking the last blood of dawn.
The road is red and ends.
