Poetry

Avila, 1982 When the civil guards approached me and asked me for my papers, I recalled the face of a sunny saint being disemboweled on the rack. Widows in perennial black, addicts of prayer, find comfort here the way monks in hair shirts must take to penance, or me, addled in my blissed-out days in…

I didn’t know then how couples flow into the space around each other— how Max’s sweet exuberance was only made possible by Rose’s bitter chill. Who knew what that whole generation of refugees had gone through? I knew nothing about them— only that Max had been to Alaska, had prospected for gold. Said words like…

Just because you think a man is dead doesn’t mean you should leave him. Really, the dead have a lot of advantages over the living. Think about your dad. How much better you get along with him now that he’s passed. It’s time’s way. And why in the end everything turns out okay. A lot…

In 1936, when a tramp knocked on the farmhouse door and asked, please, for bread and butter, Kate hacked him a slice from the loaf she baked last Wednesday, and spread on it the Holstein butter she churned Saturday morning. He thanked her, Ma’am, and walked down the road looking for Help Wanted, for a…

translated from the Spanish by Ilan Stavans   Powerful— but a grain of sand, a fly’s foot, half a milligram of dust entered your right eye and the world became dark and foggy. Streets became staircases, buildings were covered with smoke, your love, your son, your dinner plate changed color, turning into palm trees or…

One morning they dig up the sidewalk and leave No sign of the truck only the large dark shadow digging and digging piling up sludge with a hand shovel beside the only tree Two o’clock I come by and he’s slumbering in the grass beside rat holes Three and he’s stretched across a jagged stone…

You are recently dead, old man,     with your thunderous brows and voice like a vast sea     hinting at a dangerous undertow— you are gone, your generation     of testimony, of witness, gone, gone among the ancient rites     of passage, gone, taking with you the innumerable     names of the lost. And yet…

1 Tell me how the prison broke you. The first night, they played with a man in the next cell. Nine rollers scrunched in the tiny stall, hardly room to swing a fist—sometimes one elbowed another and apologized— the inmate wailed absentmindedly, just a voice, and I listened. I thought: I’d see you again. I’d…

This is the way I describe it; what time does to hands and face.                      That old-timer shoots a glance that makes like God in Genesis, you— a very image and withered likeness.               Or a finger points, mocking the way hands dislocate dates, memories, who’s died, what voices issue from one-way traffic—souls like a…