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* * * they show me words they say the scent of roses can be found in a word but all I find is paper paper and more paper neither fragrance nor color and I know that a spray of sparks when workers are welding streetcar rails while we stand around two ten-year-old boys and I that spray of sparks means light much more than the word light and when my friend paralyzed in a wheelchair bites off a piece of bread I hand to him the way he bends his head the movement of his jaws have more life in them than the word life

* * * women are valued for their beauty men for the shadow cast by long eyelashes and poets because in the word they conceal the swarm of willow-green sensations at night - oblong from the moon's slim knees they come up the very white hill run riot with light kneel over the dead bird of silence whispering prayers swollen with tropical pain above them across from the rigid moon mosquitoes of fear keep buzzing with their translucent wings and afterwards it rains - and homeward go poets hiding the fledgling words - under rainsoaked coats

* * * and I sit by the stove and try to catch time red-handed the delicate ripple of curtains the phosphorescence of walls books dancing on the wooden shelf the abstract leaf on the rug the Mexican flower I enclose in a single breath