[To return to the suspended project of posting items from my extensive back catalogue of creative writing, here is a piece from 1998. Around this time, the tone of my poems took a much more somber turn. This short piece inspired by the semi-arid region of Northeast Brazil was written shortly after my mother died, at a time when I was feeling increasingly homesick in Brazil. Often minimal, doleful, my poems from this period dwell on drought, the inversion of seasons, nostalgia, a perverse longing for winter. Some foreshadow my later work on urban landscapes.]

Summer Winter

                                       Here
                                       there are no seasons
                                       life is precious and cheap

                                       the shrub has no sap
                                       most of the dry year
                                       the twigs of a million crucifixes
                                       against the blue and brown and sun

                                       a drop revivifies

                                       death waiting
                                       patient
                                       for occasional life

                                       life a sliver of a thing

                                       the juazeiro's
                                       green fleece
                                       prevailing
                                       like a local god
                                       over this dearth of life.

                                       Everything is not water.