The cruelty of ages past affects us now
Whoever it was who lived here lived a mean life
Each door has locks designed for keys unknown
Our living room was once somebody’ s home
Our bedroom, someone’ s only room
Our kitchen had a hasp upon its door.
Door to a kitchen?
And our lives are hasped and boundaried
Because of ancient locks and madnesses
Of slumlord greed and desperate privacies
Flowering sietecueros trees:
How easily we married ourselves
to the idea of that bruised light
outside the window,
capillary
fibers of the linen,
stained wood of the door frame.
Deepening hallway.
Beyond
the stucco portal,
crushed purple.
At night, tinnitus
we thought,
the ringing after an explosion,
a frenzied inner ear axle squeal,
until I placed my stethoscope's bell
on the purpled ceiling:
Mouths full of laughter,
the turistas come to the tall hotel
with suitcases full of dollars.
Every morning my brother makes
the cool beach new for them.
With a wooden board he smooths
away all footprints.
After it lifts the army-green, stuffed
dumpster over its head and the trash
falls to the receptacle, it hulks
backward with a cadenced beep as if
to say, get out the fucking way, please.
En Cuba tuve —
I’ m tired of hearing your complaints.
All that whining about el exilio, the tragedy of loss,
In Cuba I had —
the catalogue of things, the status, the riches,
the opulence of it all.
I had a mate. We were a pair. Our mistress was young. We
were young. We would dangle on her ear
Concentrate on what you have.
Forget the past.
and go out on the town. Mojitos at La Floridita,
dancing at the Tropicana and later
No, don’ t tell me about later.
Everything was the apple and the glass of tea.
The mountain, the mold, the apron on the grandmother —
the neck of a brown baby holding its tiny head
to get rid of the black bees.
This is the end of a bad century,
the opening of a door that was never built into the chest.
I called the white donkey that hurt my left shoulder
the last time it appeared, ramming me
with its ivory head, cracking my back
to relieve me of worry and hope.
I called the white donkey,
surprised at the sound of my voice.
Scared, I wondered if the white head
would give me its donkey brain,
snowy matter dripping into my ears
like the horse of the first man who fell off,
the donkey teaching me about desire
and the moan, that white hair on the back
of my head that warns me.
I sit with my railroad face and ask God to forgive me
for being a straight line toward the dead
who were buried with their poor clothes
in the Arizona desert of iron borders.
This way of waving to the embers of the past,
not apologzing for carrying torn rosaries inside
my pockets where beads of worry became fossilized
insects whose dry husks I kept since a child.
At once this dragnet of cousins
Whips its way into your presence saying
None of them among us. They are
Oracles on the court of midnight,
The tight filigree of a mind or your
Splashing around in, your pandemonium
Of copper graffiti inexpertly put up.
They make weapons of furled hands.
“We will walk, but our bones will carry
Ribbons of lead, or we will, like
Acrobats mill-headed in 3s (3 blades,
3 hips, 3 tongues), answer to what comes
Before, what comes before?” Eleousa,
Master of Dark Eyelids, eye opening
