MiPO 2005


	Esteban Arellano
Sister, at the edge of day is dusk— what could I have done, but what I did? Your laughter unraveled our Master’s Lent. Your Mongolian eyes shut out the light (slits of black stone). In the trees, in the grass, in the cornfields, I smelled decay. Your words, blades of sorrow, punctured my lungs. (Where was the savior? Is this what older brothers should be?) As you rose— the final arc— day unveiled and showed the balance of God’s hand. Night scurried and hid in the thicket of the wicked world. What was his name— Cabron! Pinche! Chingon! What was his name, oh Great God? What matters is you imbued me with power. I became a Danite, son of Manoah, and faced him with an ass’s bone. I would not let him grind. Sister, not this time, I would not let him cleave. On the day of rest, I brought you home and prayed for you— your resurrection. But you were lost, entombed in clay, and I was left with my laments. Now, a man, full of iniquities, I await your knock. Sister, please don’t weep. Day is done, and twilight is a thousand candles God burns for you.	In the night, snakes gather on San Pio’s one-lane road —it radiates July heat. I stand on the wooden steps of Juan Bendito’s grocery store. A longhorn skull hangs above the entrance, & wagon wheels line the front porch. From the south, where stars burn on the Rocky Mountains, I hear a guitar, an accordion, & castanets. An old man, a rooster lodged in his throat, sifts twilight, Take the ribbon from your hair, shake it loose and let it fall, Lay it soft against my skin. like the shadows on the wall ... Then Spanish, & I know the song belongs to el viejo. But my thoughts are on the one-lane road, covered with snakes, curving into a moon bigger than the earth, sitting red-eyed among cactus bloom.
Poems © Esteban Arellano 2004-2005. All rights reserved.