Michel Galiana Poems

From our two closed mouths a new island would surge.
No vessel, no time would ever know of its ports,
The ocean of our flesh would dash against its shores -
An island that would be in innocence immerged,
...

Three forts adorned with arms linked by a rosary
Where fervour was captured in stone and in pageant,
Were a jail roofed with slate and with epic legend
That in twisted soaring flared up - a cemetery
...

The flight which you suspend haunts your quivering fur,
Echo of wings by some caprice strayed from the sky.
As you feel you could not follow the flight you spy,
Your buried bound is dream, expectation, anger.
...

Are you the light dancing ahead of the bowsprit?
The reef you're heading for, which will be your respite?
Yet I am the helmsman and I steer and I weight
My holds with your ballast of darkness and of silt.
...

And since a double night is consuming your brow,
Since Heaven against your years has set ageless flow,
Foams of desires floating above our blood like dews,
Our bodies shall mimic the recumbent statues
...

Let the dance make the hull be subject to decay,
A crucible for words, I shall free the live one.
Who can deny the wind when the oak crashes down?
In flawless crystal are breath and strength caged away.
...

Never in life otherwise fed
Than on transient pity's bread;
Frost gnawing at your swaying bones;
Rags that your nudity won't hide;
...

The arrogant blazon in scornful height towers
Above the simpering gables across the square -
A stone spinet marking out half-tones of an air
Prompting those on the mail to embrace each other.
...

Marble and onyx are entwined, like in a tress.
In high-perched cupola and triple pediments
Where saints wield their crosses and their tools of torment
Surface and volume are of harmony possessed.
...

I was a blind woman and groped my way along,
Fancying for my own purpose wind, lightning, ghost,
My window heavy with logics I would have closed
More firmly still than with iron shutters so strong,
...