[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.
Poetry, Politics & Language 
beautiful