Four poems by María DeGuzmán

If a Tree Falls in the Woods …

Narrow an eye
to a blade of scrutiny.
See in a flash
how a thing can cut.
Imagine the heartwood
without splitting the tree;
the fallout splicing
the atoms in everybody.

Sitting at table with you,
I watch your eyes track the objects there —
the knife, the glass, the peaches on the plate —
and feel the movements of your eyes
in the sockets of my own
as I imagine each object
return the pressure of your gaze
by taking sudden flight.

Call it appetite, if you wish,
a restructuring of desire
that turns the molecules of my mind
into microscopic spiders spinning
gossamer, rhizomorphic threads,
tiny fiber-optic tentacles tumbling
out of my eyes, my ears, my pores
and binding my vision with blade-like
silk-spun blindness
to your life
beyond any given horizon.

Late

Time perches,
steel talons,
on the nation’s wrists.

In each wrist
lies a field mouse,
trapped, twitching.

Decadence

While the earth is dying,
emotions of the deepest dye.
The color of those eyes,
Retinas irreplaceable.
A vision
supplanting the demand for proof,
the need for certainty,
the Virgin become the dynamo,
illusionistic survival in transduction,
in the transcription of light across
Septillions of miles.
Urania, you would know
the beauty of this dubious
fall of light
traveling the universe’s synapses
as a flâneur would know
the beauty of decadence,
its truth, as the world
comes to naught,
and our condition made of
laws and seeming randomness
disintegrates like ozone,
and the scene in the abyss
is glimpsed in the aperture —
a memory, the erotics of memory,
supersensual presence conjured
in the trompe l’oeil of contemplation
before the unsheltering light burns
liquid eyes, their depths, into
whitened carapaces.

Hunter Moon

Taximeter to the perimeter,
metering the immeasurable,
fire and filamentous light
in the extinct mane of your hair
haloed in shimmering blue static.
This brief October habitat,
quivering on the hypnotic edge
of time, turns on
imaginary dimes mined
from October’s Hunter Moon,
the insatiable prospectors
burning up our prospects
and seeding the atmosphere
with tornadoes and freak hail storms
in which the resolute scarecrow’s
straw tumbles through raging air.

I stop in my own tracks
under raucous crows in shattered trees
and picture the mane of your hair,
lean in to something no longer here,
warm harvest smell inhaled
against the clicking:
the latch, the lock,
the clocked and loaded