4 TANGOES

1.    Tango Orgel

You can be young enough

to be missed.

You can walk upon the steps of diapason.

You can be only caparison.

You can be young enough to be missed.

As normally as the sun

entering a room

through the venetian blind,

you can be sliced.

You can be young enough

to be missed.

The sound she made was the sound she made.

It is never enough.

I am starved for air.

This suffocation. This home

wraps my love. The sound she made

was the sound she made.

When a lover is eavesdropping,

He may be a thief.

Each casual look may sponge

the residue of radiance.

This can be a token

stolen when you are not watching.

You can be

young enough to be missed.

She whispered:

Who touched my cloak?

2.    Tango a Carlos Gardel

My love twisted tighter than your pigtails

splits your head

like a pomegranate

and its red pellets fall

into your hand.

Eat them.

They’re sweet

and bitter at the same time.

We could call them the children of

of our childless marriage.

They will have arms

softer than your leg

and cheeks round as your knees.

You can talk to the moon.

It visits every night,

with occasional dark holidays.

Then you can sleep

as if the world had stopped

all of its clocks and rivers.

When I am in love, I am in love

With you,

no matter who you are,

no matter what you are turning into. No matter

how long you pretend

to be living.

It is the moon.

3.    Tango/Brecht: Keep your eyes

Keep your eyes. I can’t use them

anymore. Everything in this world

is finally visible to me. No secrets.

No drums at a distance.

No having seen.

mein got ich liebe dich zo

Her ring and some lips.

The nesting of oranges in morning sunlight:

So are they strangers, strange

as frozen pebbles of rain.

They hit my window.

They hope to become invisible

in the warm room. Her lips

and eyes and some rings.

mein got ich liebe dich zo

You are the always other one oif my dreams,

the woman who walks past me on the street.

A pickpocket and a perfect explainer.

I am sick of your explanations and smirkings.

I want you

to not be walking past me when I am walking.

mein got ich liebe dich zo

Have you seen the streets flooded

with mystics, with exaltation, with grief?

They are holding hands with so many

dead. They take air like a narcotic.

They are waiting to see if the experiment failed

Or whether—

I am squawking about it because it is your problem!

mein got ich liebe dich zo

4.    Tango: “Volver”

The echo is not the music.

The star remembers the star.

Scent creases the air

in the shape of your body.

            What room is ever empty?

Edges of the shell

delicate violence of voices

the integration of diatesseron

widenings ooze: diapedesis.

            What life ever ends?

The interval and the leaping through.

Mediacy seems to plunge

but it accompanies. When

will you flow through me tonight?

Nothing is simply over?

This set of poems, written in the early nineties, reflects the course of the romantic imagination from the child hiding and listening to the organ playing Bach thrillingly, to Gardel's tango Volver, which I always played when I recited this poem in public and I danced to it,  to the Brechtian love and cruelty of Surabaya Johnny, and to the finale which is completely lost touch with the physical and the loss, a song of despair as Neruda might have it.  Once when I danced this for a group of people, the Volver, a friend who was from Argentina came to me immediately afterward and told me I had no idea what Tango was. I accept that criticism. I am not sure dancing lessons would help at all. But I know what it felt like to me when I listened to Volver, at least a thousand times and danced in my living room. .