EL PARDO

Summer of my heart, do you remember the river
And the flicker of light reflected on the undersides of leaves
And the dragonflies jewel-winged and fiery? Do you remember
How limpidly the water, colored like your eyes,
Chirruped over the stones? And how our souls crept
From their chrysalis of caution, scarcely daring
To lift their moist wings skywards.? Oh how my heart grieves
For the blind innocence of those ghosts who bore our names!

Under a dam's blank concrete bluff those waters, sluggish
And brown now, carry beer-cans, condoms, plastic jellyfish
Past vagrants in their jungles. Where our twin souls
Entwined, sharing each secret, listless strollers
Trail down the littered banks, piss where our bodies lay,
And scream away the tedium of a stifling afternoon.
They are all gone, those dragonflies, those moments,
Never in all eternity to come again.

And yet, scenes that now, to me, are a mere fading flicker
Of energy, decaying from cell to dying cell,
Are traveling still, borne out on the light reflected
From those leaves, from that river, too faint to be detected
By any human eye, into the vastness of space,
So that some alien gaze with infinite resolution
At the farthest edge of time might still recover
That which is somehow, somewhere, present for ever