Listening to Enrique Rodriguez and absentmindedly watching Pablo y Noelia glide across the floor.




More poems below by L. Kwan.


Another’s

Another’s...another’s, you are in the arms of another
and here, I, powerless to stop you, watch

the one I can’t have with the one I can’t be, holding
each other, even through the goose cackles of cortinas.

Earlier we strode cleaving to Di Sarli, lost in the lush
hedgerows of his violins, and I had a better chance

than he does now, to step into you with a feather and hear
the sound of lightness as it bore our weight on a pause.

But I was afraid to share a tired line, how upon your descent
among our shadows, so many had already uttered,

‘a great weight fell into the well of my chest, and out poured desire.’
Silent, we parted respectfully, the vegetable scent leaving.

You felt what the music dictated, nothing more. So here,
take these lines I’ve roughened on the hot stones of my ribs.

Take them. They may be the only thing better
than the arms you are in, and the one thing that lasts longer.

----

Arriving at the Cortina Again 

I know how a tanda ends with nothing 
I am at the end of love 

Rather I am unsure how to go on
I imagine a train punctua

ted by the caboose

Feels like no longer possessing
I see a woman on the rear platform

She looks to be waving a white handkerchief
Or her dress is billowing as the train keeps leaving

The caboose is getting pulled into a tunnel without exit
The tunnel reappears on the other side of earth

Or the tunnel has not yet been dug out
The crash for one would sound beautiful

Then beauty is a pile up with a woman at the end
Or maybe the tunnel keeps going, meaning down

There’s no picturing a train moving endlessly down
I imagine nothing is too dark to see ahead

She is looking backwards and going forward
It is this way when a woman feels like being swallowed

I let out a long loud O
A pleasure to do so in a tunnel

Even if the tunnel steadily descends to Hades
Who would decide on such a trip

Maybe she was never real
Her dress looks more like a flag on its pole

The flag is flown atop the tallest building
It flaps and flaps and keeps getting smaller

I remember that surrender of once loved
I break like a dish or I keep falling