Light, for example, or
the clapboard crack
slap of recognition, a shadowed body
entering the realm of
possibility in ruin.
You enter with your arms outstretched,
your heart pumped with
trembling–
a night-starched moth in your mouth.
Who will speak your
name in this rubble?
The fires will continue next door, consume
this moment. Down the
path, by the ravine
parentless children have learned to pull
worms out of their
festering wounds.
Recognition. The names for things.
Happenstance. Remorse
is the first crumb
of forgiveness. What is taken then?
Must, if it could, the
cloudless sky ask?
Everything, including this short circuitry
of how memory’s ash
tinges your hands.
BIG ROCK
from which I cast my
line, hard
against the backs of my thighs,
my father leaning
against me,
brazen for how a fish will tug
hard enough to pull me
under,
the way all those ancient poets
saw the moon remove its
masks,
pale drunkenness of longing
for what could never be
spoken.
A boy, his father, a thin lip
of sandy river, how
lives ebb
from one shadow toward light.
This place, this rock,
a marker
as big as that invisible fish
taking the bait into
its mouth,
going down toward blissful dusk.
|
My mother asks
what I want her to bring
me from Cuba this time she goes back,
the last time she will see her father alive,
the last time she will ever see the red of earth
beneath her feet, walking around the house
of her birth and childhood. A cement
foundation is all that’s left of her history
with place, an empty well into which
she flung people to make/keep her promises.
“Bring me back the rain,” I say over the phone.
I am in New York city, looking at the snow-
covered sidewalks, a man in a red parka
shoveling it like confetti out of the way.
“La lluvia,” she says. It’s raining
in Miami now, she tells me. There’s rain
everywhere. I tell her I do not want Miami
rain, I want Cuba’s rain. Only in Cuban
rain do I hear the sound of my life—crisp,
my grandmother chasing after guinea fowl
with a sharp knife hidden behind her back.
My father riding with my grandfather
on horseback, their shirts dampened with sweat,
or the rain from the hills from which they
harvest coffee. My Cuban rain, the kind
that fell on the tin roof of the chicken coop
and lulled me to sleep. The incessant rain,
horses spooked on the pastures, lighting
heavy, flashes of light and shadow against
the pale walls of my forgetting. That rain.
|
