from Lovely

His Feet Always Hurt
 
My father’s feet always hurt.
Limping he’d wander through shoe stores
looking for a pair of shoes comfortable enough to help
with the pain of lashes
abrasions and cuts
inflicted by the sea.
He never found them. He had to leave
barefoot with the wristwatch and with the knife
to slice bread to slice tears inside his coat jacket and
with a face white like the foam of the waves
he rode so many times.
 
He’d always tell me:
I didn’t have a childhood.
 
He couldn’t get it out of his head: 
I learned to write my name on the battlefield.
 
Bullets whistled stars of blood shot through the sky
when I learned to write my name.
I didn’t want to be just any laborer.



*
 
And my mother would say:          
He’s a handsome man. It’s a shame
he can’t write. You
must go to school Antònia. Daughter you must not
be ignorant like your father.
 
And the bright blue of her eyes poured down her cheeks when
diluvial
                                                   she’d weep his absence.
 


Roots
 
From memory roots have sprouted. Recollections
are tiny like a penny. It’s necessary to
have plenty of them in your pockets to go to the bakery
to buy bread.
 
My father would always tell me:
With empty pockets you lose your balance.
Bread fills a man.
Pride fills a shirt.
 
Pleased he’d walk down the supermarket aisles under the fluorescent lights.
 
He’d spit out his algae green lung by the apples and oranges.
 
He’d spit out yolk yellow phlegm in front of the fish counter.
 
People would run away from his skeletal figure
but he’d return home with a bag full of grapes
and in high spirits.
 
He’d always tell me:
At ten
I met the great sea.
 
At twelve
I met the storms.
The dolphins. The horizons’ lure. 
 
He couldn’t get it out of his head:
I lost my clothes and my watch once.
I was writing Joan
                              in the air
when the boat sank. I didn’t
want to be a drowned man without a name.
 


*

And my mother would say:
He walks erect. As if he ruled the wind.
It’s a shame he keeps losing his clothes. You
must stay alert Antònia
never let go of what’s yours.
 
And the red of her lips trickled down her chin
just as blood
                     trickles
down the legs of a woman. 
 
 
 
A Snapshot
 
In the photograph the breasts under the sweater
compete with the plaza.
 
I was very young when a photographer took a picture
of me going down the church steps. (Behind me the bell tower against the sky.)
 
The men came out of the bar with a cassalla in their hands.
They smiled
ethylic and concupiscent.
It was Sunday.
 
Among them only my father’s gaze was sails and seawater.
 
He had no fortune but wove nets:
To catch time.
To regain the exact minute of purity.
 
He’d always tell me:
By thirteen the sea already hurt my back.
By fifteen I didn’t know about cassalla or aspirin.
 
                                  
 
*
 
And my mother would say:
He still dreams of beaches. Daughter you must not
be like your father. He has always
been seduced easily.
 
And a string of laments got stuck in her gums
just as the hooks of longlines get stuck   
in Posidonia meadows.



The Boat
 
After losing the boat
my father fought the waves
that carried drowned men like moons
across the sea
and lovers’ idleness. 
 
His obsession was to reach eternity: 
A dark-haired lover at the coast of Tangier and a blonde one
on the beach at La Cala.
 
He would always say to me:
If at twenty I treaded waves
it was to turn sorrow into wine.  


 
*
 
And my mother says:
He’s filled with tubes and needles.
Tied to the bed. Anchored
to the smells of the sea.
His lips fade away and he believes he’s
God walking on a boat’s water.