Some of the light, p.1
Some of the Light, page 1
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
NONFICTION
All They Will Call You
FICTION
Mañana Means Heaven
Breathing, In Dust
POETRY
Natural Takeover of Small Things
Culture of Flow
Skin Tax
The Central Chakrah Project (CD)
For RUMI and SALVADOR—
when it was just us.
In your beautiful world, says
In your fresh world, says
In your world of clarity, says
You are a green Father, says
A Father of clarity, says
Your words are medicine, says
Your breath is medicine . . .
—MARIA SABINA, MAZATEC HEALER
CONTENTS
SOME OF THE LIGHT
Endling
Refraction #1
Father of Clarity
A Basic Understanding
Refraction #2
Single Parent Soliloquy (& The Joy of Kites)
This City
Refraction #3
Self Portrait at 46
Time Capsule
Limerence
Unqualified Poem
Refraction #4
Settling
Sandalwood
Salvador
The Poet’s Return
Refraction #5
Hometown Ode
Ish
Tik Tok
Brown Lotus (A Performance)
Her Majesty’s Last Stand
Variations on This Land
Refraction #6
Sleepless Nights (Thich Nhat Hanh Is Dying)
A Grocery Store
The Talk (Talisman for Salvador)
NATURAL TAKEOVER OF SMALL THINGS
Home
Brown Christ
The Day Johnny Tapia Died on My Sidewalk
Undelivered Postcards to Lydia
San Joaquin Sutra
Natural Takeover of Small Things
Instructions for the Altar
Flying Parallel
My Name Is Hernandez
Adios, Fresno
CULTURE OF FLOW
Culture of Flow
How to Get to the San Joaquin River
SKIN TAX
Mama’s Boy
I Rub My Hands
I Arrive Late
I Pissed on Little Ricky
Perched on the Face
If I Could Tell You
Enter Madrugada
I’m Going to Put Virgil Down
When Young Andres
Acknowledgments
Publication Acknowledgments
About the Author
SOME OF THE LIGHT
True contemplation is resistance.
—ERNESTO CARDENAL
4.27.20
Today, I witnessed—
a parade of leaves marching
down Stanton Street, in groups of ten,
maybe more, taunting us with their natural freedom.
Outside, the Palo Verde tree trembles
in the oncoming heat, while the windows
gossip with the blown particles
of a glass I broke. Each refraction,
a glimpse of our despair. The rumor goes—
inside this house lives an aging man,
head of raven and ice, with two children,
and everything to lose.
These days have turned futile.
We can’t live this way much longer.
We are the stars, and we are the darkness
that surrounds the stars. And we are the ether
and the emptiness, and the desirous
distance between the two.
I must remember this.
ENDLING
For Ana Saldaña
I once drove to meet a hummingbird
at the foot of the Canadian border.
And I would do it again.
I’m such a willing flower.
Lean into a sun that shines on me.
I’m bending now, toward you.
I promised myself I’d abstain
from toxic plants. I want to turn to palm readers,
but the moment I catch myself opening
that neon door, I worry
where their hands have been.
In places of worship, I find myself
longing to be rescued. Say, a botanical garden.
Or White Sands, N.M. Or on the top step
of my porch overlooking Ciudad Juárez.
I can’t help it. She took me by the hand
once to Chief Joseph’s grave, and we made
shadow-prayers out of bare wings.
She said, All he wanted was to go home.
I left a note pinned to a tree:
I was here. You were not. Can you
forgive us for this mess we’ve made?
It’s been five years and three months
without a drink. The longest
my liver has ever gone
without turning sentimental.
Nothing gets away from me anymore.
What I’m getting at here is that I’ve spent
this year walking back
the sum of my hangovers.
Starting with you.
Starting with that electricity line
that caught me one wintery night.
Starting with that liquor store curb in Albuquerque,
and onto that snaking Red River in the San Luis Valley.
I found the rest stop outside Denver that held us,
and I unsmoked all the cigarettes,
rolled the planes back over
the Rockies, and returned the watercolors
to Nature Boy’s pond in western Mass.
Never before had so many stones
been upturned in Marfa, Texas, nor
have all the Ferris wheels wound
backwards so fast. Do you know
how many pressed white bed sheets
it takes to undo the shadows?
I’ve been moon-walking across your memory,
restoring sunsets to their rightful coast.
Last night, someone held up a sign on the nightly
news, it said: Welcome to the End.
But it just kept on, until
the sign carrier eventually grew tired,
and walked home.
All he wanted was to go home,
I could hear her saying.
There are more affectionate ways
to measure these days with than masturbation.
Yesterday, a murmuration of birds composed a poem
in the sky. It read: Jack Collom is dead
So the magpies along the Front Range
have taken to yodeling honorific elegies,
and I can almost hear Jack cry out,
They’re crazier than poets!
Everything is black or white with them!
They tell me California is on fire,
and old things are burning up.
History is going to dregs.
And there is still a wolf in the hen house.
Everyone is saying something
to no one listening. Everyone wants
to wade in a gutter and call themselves
a prophet without first learning
how to kneel.
REFRACTION #1
The Children
go with their mother for a visit.
We can only ever return to our mothers for a visit.
But we can never again be the child who once visited.
We share physical space, but the head remains.
Nostalgic of what we can’t have.
Enamored with what we thought we knew.
& the heart’s obsession with time travel.
Geography and guilt, both made of matter.
The girl, the boy, the mother—a nursery rhyme:
Note the wording in this note.rhy
Not the wording in the knot.rhy
Heal the herding of the heart.rhy
Halt the timing of the clock.rhy
Rewrite the beginning we simply cannot.
5.12.20
I refuse to leave my home.
I must write this down. Behind masks
they are protesting, coast to ghost,
another George Floyd extinguished
by a dull shield, and another mother unravels,
her dignity before the cameras.
We are passive voyeurs of our own parade.
We invest in material. In matter. Not lives.
Black or otherwise. Nothing matters.
Of matter we are made. Of matter
we disintegrate. We get madder. Get numb.
Lust words like, justice, nurse rhetorical
hangovers by morning. But we’ve had
our hearts broken before,
and we’ve put them back together ourselves.
We have chosen not to remember things.
For the sake of our own progress.
Everyone is on trial. No longer are we afforded
to look away. The hospitals have closed,
and medicine must be administered at home now.
We must heal ourselves.
Remember this.
FATHER OF CLARITY
Each day the same now,
I wake her up—she’s a woman
in the making, and me,
I’m still a boy, given this responsibility
of another, and my boy,
he’s visiting his mother, one
thousand miles away. We drive
to school each morning, discussing
the state of all things—
how she will need to use my razor
blades, for my legs, she says,
and armpits, except she doesn’t say
armpits, she says, for under my arms.
I mention the color of the sky
at 8:15 a.m. being something like
the color of her eyes seconds after she was born.
She responds by asking me
what “verisimilitude” means, and I tell her
to look it up. These are
the particulars of raising Rumi.
Not like when we would once hold hands
and write our names in the snow.
Not like when she would fall asleep
in the bicycle seat tethered to my back,
as we rode down Colorado pathways.
This is El Paso, the face without
makeup. We cannot hide behind
hiding any longer.
The dry cycle never dries the first
go-round. Living alone is learning
to speak for both sides
of the conversation. And God,
isn’t this true? And God replies,
it is only verisimilitude.
Lately, I don’t have
much to say, except I wish
I could go back to Hejira and
that rainy café in Asheville, North Carolina.
I wish I could go back to the back
of the beginning, try again. Like a video game,
hit the reset button, throw
a love tantrum, force round pegs to fit
my square anatomy. I’ve always wanted
a kitchen with a view of both sides,
and now I’ve got two, El Paso / Juárez.
It’s like looking through a kaleidoscope that refracts
the surreality of our days. See here,
a mountain preaches, with accent:
La Biblia es la verdad, leéla.
See here, the river howls in American twang:
Go back to where you come from.
Between the two, a chaparral bows:
This is not what brotherhood looks like.
This is not the conversation for Rumi though.
She reminds me of this. Held up the bird.
Unnamed still. Trained it to land on her finger.
How it returns to its cage when it flies
too far. I’m the opposite. I return to flying
when I’m too far in the cage.
She’s always been a friend-soul
to me. More than a daughter.
The hierarchy is this: I make her
eggs with arugula and toast. She eats them.
We attempt yoga in the mornings.
There is a peacefulness in our routine.
We don’t speak about the day
when all of this
will be nothing more
than a poem.
A BASIC UNDERSTANDING
If you are human, staring
out two eyes, speaking out
two lips, breathe two lungs,
moves one tongue—
then you will see clearly
that your entire life, all the needs,
the sustenance, condiments, basic
breath you breathe, the joy
you chase, to play a very basic
role in your children’s lives, cello lessons,
baseball games, chore charts
—to say to oneself, I am basically
productive at what I do, and kiss
your beloved at the ripe peak of her
parted lips, and then find yourself
sitting to a plate of toast, butter, coffee
with cream and sugar, a basic meal,
perhaps less indulgent than the night before—
then you will see clearly that your own hopes
are tethered to one kitchen, or another,
and all kitchens lead through a cloud, a basic
harvest of wind and particle, all kitchens
lead through rain, lead through one vast field
or another, no meal exempt from this basic
journey, all meals lead through dirt, lead
through sediment and root, through bark
and stem and vine, lead through basic sun
no machinations necessary, all meals
lead through blossom and burst—
a legume, a nut, a basic green leaf, elephant heart
plum, a tuber, tomato, sprig, grove of citrus,
and in that grove, or end of every vine, basic
to the journey, rising there, amid fragrant clusters,
are two hands, four hands, a thousand
basically dirty, calloused hands, culling
the gems from ones gone to rot—
and the diesels will transport, fuel to roll the wheels,
rubber from the Amazon, all kitchens lead through
rubber, all rubber leads through rain,
rain leads through us, no one denied—
if you are human, staring out
two eyes, speaking out
two lips, breathe two lungs,
moves one tongue—
Then you will see clearly that the cloud,
the air, particles, pollutants, condiments,
the hope, the kids, the kiss, the cello,
chores, the sugar, the field, the kitchen,
the elephant, plums, the fragrance, the gem,
the dirt, two basic hands, the Amazon,
and the rains, and the kitchen
you’ve been lead through,
are all basically your journey too.
6.9.20
Rumi sang Both Sides Now
nonstop tonight. The trains over Ciudad Juárez
sang from both sides now, nonstop tonight.
I reached my virtual limit tonight. I resorted
to moments gone, and begged to be held
once and for goddamn all tonight.
I threatened to scale all the walls tonight.
But I couldn’t convince the unmarked helicopters
to seize me. No one can. Has it always been
this long out of control? Help is not on the way.
We must remember this.
REFRACTION #2
A Man
goes before the judge
to make the case for Fatherhood.
The courtroom is stymied by the apparition.
Rosaries are clutched, prayers whispered.
Even the judge, in her cloak of indecision, leans back.
The mother is there, pushing against silence.
A thousand stories are exchanged.
From the disembodied mouths of the children.
In these halls the word love echoes like a myth.
As if years ago, in some distant land,
existed two birds, who tried forging themselves into one,
but wound up resentful
at the impermanent nature of flight.
Right now, the parents of 14,000 children in cages
still believe in such miracles.
SINGLE PARENT SOLILOQUY (& THE JOY OF KITES)
Who has time for poetry anymore?
I’m writing this as I’m walking.
There is muzak on the loudspeakers
of the dentist’s office, and I must
make poetry of it, if I am to make
anything at all anymore. Somewhere outside,
in San Jacinto Plaza, teachers have gathered
to protest, they want to occupy.
Somewhere here there is always a protest.
And it’s usually happening
when I am occupied. So, I’ve decided
to protest on my own. I declare out loud, to no one,
I will make the appointment for this pain in my gut!
But I will fail at making the appointment.
I am boycotting this house!
My mother used to say this, and now I see why.
Some days I catch myself writing
simply to remind myself, I am a poet.
This means I breathe like you do,
only I have a compulsion to notice
and write it down. In case you forget.
I write it down for both of us.
Single parent, raising two children—
everything happens in singles now.
Poems in single lines.
Line by line.
A slice of cheese.
Toilet paper.
A single free minute to jot this down.
God, I hope this poem never ends,
I feel so alive. Which reminds me,
here is what I wanted to tell you—
I took the kids to the park yesterday.
We flew their kite. The day had wind.
