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.

In honor of Cinco de Mayo (a holiday widely celebrated in Texas, at least), here’s a poem from a southwestern poet with Mexican heritage. I am reminded of Death Comes for the Archbishop, and I think the imagery in this poem is outstanding.

The Death of Anselmo Luna
By Alberto Ríos

Since he was the priest,
No one could say for certain about Anselmo Luna.
What began as a lark
One slow afternoon of interminable chores
Regarding candles and residue on the walls,
Became his drawings:
First of the saints,
Then the twelve Stations of the Cross,
The sketches of simpler remembrances.
All of these chiaroscuros he made
In and from the soot on the walls of this church,
A work that moved into years
And which finally filled his life.
What began as a lark became the seed
Of his miracle, a simple
Moving of a finger along a pillar
Just to see, was three enough
To require cleansing,
This test also used on parked cars,
A line spelling wash me in the soil of a window.
He died while perched on a ladder
High behind the altar, underneath
The fine woodwork: that moment
As he fall, and as he made a mark
Not unlike a moustache
Where none should have been,
He died already partway
Toward heaven. It was said
His soul took the advantage,
Leaping out from his body
Right there, stepping from his ribs
As he had stepped
On the rungs of the ladder.
It was a strong soul, muscular,
On account of his years of devoted effort,
And it knew like an animal what to do
When the moment came.

Current Tea: captivating caramel (black tea with caramel flavoring)