When, young and foolish in my quest,
I dared to light up a candle
inside the wise man’s literary cave
remember, don’t you?, how was I stared at,
and then told, like a puppy hard to handle
(and that was least what I would call a rave)
that miracles are never getting old or stale
it was as if I was committing an incest,
inside a blooming miracle, an invasion
of voracious orchids ganging up on me,
drumming their appetite with heated bites,
heavy madness but flowery still, what better
cold discontents can you fathom for an
irritated spine trying to go straight?...
and then I knew that I stepped inside the garden of duels
under a fidgeting eye of a restless master:
“How?!”, I shouted, as if the wise man was deaf and
unwilling to fight my paper sword, my vapor words…
“How do I make my own miracle into a fiber of truth?”…
“Hide it!”, ordered the old man,
and my tenderness was suddenly torn,
the sound of my feet pounding the ground
as if toys and years of play were ripped away,
thrown into a paralyzed wilderness…
“You, fool!”, he said, “There is your humility at stake!”,
but I was young and failed to see or hear his scorn
for love was my new miracle, I thought, and he feared it…
I nailed the puppy in a frame, and full of tiger fury,
forgetting shame, respect or pride, I told the geezer:
“You just don’t know what of my love to make!”…
my confidence so high, I felt as if I suddenly tamed
an army of wild and very angry bees…
He took my candle, a silent face, a wall of calmness
In a sea of youth, and handed me a note:
“love, when wrapped in words, is fruitless
and thoughts are helpless worms
when love’s fruit has no form…”
and later, by the water, with light from many candles
ravishing the waves, he whispered in my ear:
“Save your words, young man, a time for giving names
and writing songs will come
hold your horn and wait
your miracle is not yet born…”
