Floor 13 (Short Verses With Sharp Teeth)

(13)

In the endless room of twilight

out of nowhere showers a faucet

of electric water

threatening flood.

He rises and goes to the terrace.

Moon shines on the glass river.

She smiles and we dance the night away

on ice.

Why didn't Noah call a plumber?

(12)

Through the clouds in your ears

fly poems with sharp teeth

leaving contrails

in one eye out the other.

(11)

Like a pipe

like Arius in the outhouse

like a world collapsing

he bursts out laughing

to himself.

(10)

In this city of familiar innards and sweetbreads

where streets are canals channeling strangers

in and out

the moon is captive of high walls

with minds barred like tall wooden doors.

(9)

Picture this:

Space

of whatever far horizon

you desire.

Place

of whatever zero gravity

you may cipher.

Room

like Mister Moebius' strip

twisting.

(8)

The roof is damaged.

The sky scarred with cloud

bleeds water.

(7)

What solutions can fictions offer?

They have no nothingness in which to move.

The mirage of prose is to prevent a line that knows.

What does a plant know of Sunday?

What does a toadstool ken of midnight?

They expand without calendars or tongues

and suddenly explode in seed.

(6)

Some place in the where of millennia

are submerged your necessary clowns,

drowned in the inanities of your right

and dutiful hands

and in this land surrounded by ocean

in every false harbor mark buoys

where mothers end and the maelstrom begins.

This is the good and the vicious of Penelope's

widow's walk:

seen dry-eyed from height

these are marriages of the desert.

(5)

Here are no first class seats, only steerage.

Here are no peers—only Harpo and Chico

mooning and diving into spaghetti with bare hands.

Do you know that old wooden table in the mountains

where were engineered hydroelectric dams of corn meal

filled with squirrel?

(4)

After Carvajal

it is not necessary

to drown in a little bit

of water.

After Carvajal

it is not necessary

not to smile at whoever

may.

(3)

Speak easy, machine,

in plain polyunsaturated prose

like a rose of one-way streets

radiating in the rain.

Speak easy, tracemaker,

beginning at both ends

and like a lead charioteer

in the circus take heartbeats

through their paces.

(2)

Don Quijote is the last ever seen

of Agamemnon,

with hollow barrel chest

and homilies.

(1)

The day ends,

play finishes.

Money is counted out,

strongboxes locked

and street flowers

with emptiness.

E. A. Costa 13 February 2014 Granada, Nicaragua