MiPOesias Magazine

Richard Blanco

Richard Blanco’s acclaimed City of a Hundred Fires, received the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press (1998). This poem is from his new book, Directions to The Beach of the Dead (University of Arizona Press, 2005), further explores the universal themes of cultural identity, homecoming, and place.

Last Lines

I pull out the copy of Neruda’s poems that you left
on my shelf. I read “Tus Manos” inspiring me to write
another poem about your hands holding a cigarette,
gesturing with our old conversations about Botticelli
or the cosmos over goblets of red wine on the beach
with seashells and stones we’d collect and place along
the window sills as if they’d grow soft with moonlight.
I read “Tu Risa” wanting to trace your laughter back
to days when I hadn’t written about the way we’d walk
together on the boardwalk as if the sea didn’t matter,
paying no attention to the senate of stars governing us.
Then I turn to a poem you book-marked with a petal,
flat as the page it kept, turning brown at the edges,
but its heart still scarlet and velvet with want, pressed
between titles: “El Olvido/Oblivion” and “Siempre/Always.”