Poem of the Day

My great aunt’s 80th birthday bash is coming up (shhh… it’s a surprise), so I’ve been looking through old photo albums for pictures to include in the scrapbook. Naturally, this has sent me down memory lane. My grandfather was nothing like the one in this poem (I’m not sure he ever told a lie in his life), but I like the sense of connectedness, even if it doesn’t always make sense.

Mi Abuelo
By Alberto Ríos

Where my grandfather is is in the ground
where you can hear the future
like an Indian with his ear at the tracks.
A pipe leads down to him so that sometimes
he whispers what will happen to a man
in town or how he will meet the best
dressed woman tomorrow and how the best
man at her wedding will chew the ground
next to her. Mi abuelo is the man
who speaks through all the mouths in my house,
An echo of me hitting the pipe sometimes
to stop him from saying my hair is a
sieve is the only other sound. It is a phrase
he says, and my hair is a sieve is sometimes
repeated for hours out of the ground
when I let him, which is not often.
An abuelo should be much more than a man
like you! He stops then, and speaks: I am a man
who has served ants with the attitude
of a waiter, who has made each smile as only
an ant who is fat can, and they liked me best,
but there is nothing left. Yet I know he ground
green coffee beans as a child, and sometimes
he will talk about his wife, and sometimes
about when he was deaf and a man
cured him by mail and he heard groundhogs
talking, or about how he walked with a cane
he chewed on when he got hungry.
At best, mi abuelo is a liar.
I see an old picture of him at nani’s with an
off-white yellow center mustache and sometimes
that’s all I know for sure. He talks best
about these hills, slowest waves, and where this man
is going, and I’m convinced his hair is a sieve,
that his fever is cooled now underground.
Mi abuelo is an ordinary man.
I look down the pipe, sometimes, and see a
ripple-topped stream in its best suit, in the ground.