Poetry

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…

It was Wednesday, I remember. Maybe it was Thursday. I had arrived early, early enough to drink some good wine alone with a man I thought we all should fear and for a second forgot. Then they arrived. Nothing in me had changed, even after the wine, even after I saw a goat and corpse…

And then, one day, though my mother had sent me upstairs to prepare, my thumbs were no longer opposable, they would not hook into the waistband, they swung, limp—under my underpants was the Y of elastic, its metal teeth gripping the pad, I couldn’t be punished unless I was bare, but I couldn’t be bare…

All summer Papá holds a cigarette out the window of his laser-green Buick, points his lips left to blow the smoke into the mirage of exhaust between rush-hour cars. All summer he listens to La Cubanisima on AM radio exploding with accounts of how Castro took everything we had, how we’d get it back someday….