I.
My mother rubs a peach on her leg. It leaves a trace of color. Not because her flesh is white, but because the fruit is rotten.
My sister writes about how Roman women used rotten fruit as makeup. She says it’s incredible. What she means is that she finds it disgusting.
II.
My mother drags a peach across her thigh. She’s seated, there is no directionality. The gesture is devoid of function. Thus it is a poetic gesture. It only stains, gives off its smell, highlights the nakedness of everything else.
I watch, leaning on the doorjamb.
III.
One skin brushes against another. It breaks, it stains. It slips away before the pit can appear. It comes apart.
And there is no flight, no wound.
If I watch, the gesture belongs to the everyday. The poem too. The peach is the size of my mother’s fist.
Darkness
I want to contemplate their pains, all of them all at once.
Like different reflections of light on a tile wall.
Like firelights. Brilliant and alone.
All My Father’s Orphanhoods
I. Doubt
On the slope the trees roil in mist. There is no falling, only suspension. Silence in the car.
Between the three of us we have to decide whether or not the children will get to see how a body is laid to rest.
Today your word will prevail above all wishes, all knowledge. Today your eyes are the only innocents.
In November there is no falling, only suspension.
The three of us are wearing new shoes, not all of us feel how they pinch.
*
When we stop, the rain sounds like soft television static. Mom gets out.
Silent hand movements.
Windshield wipers.
II. The Bird
We shouldn’t laugh, but I do. No one seems to mind.
There’s a bird knocking against the funeral home window, Uncle Emilio tells me.
It’s been there all morning.
He’s been watching documentaries recently. We also talk about elephant migrations. I tell him that I try not to make decisions and that even so, I move forward. I say that you remind me of a salmon, Dad.
Neither uncle Emilio nor I believe in God.
The bird keeps at it.
III. The Rosary
All versions of the same woman.
Wrinkles, short hair, thick jacket, neck covered. The wet soles of her shoes don’t reach the floor, they levitate.
The song is undone. A language of water and of dust.
They are going to bring consolation to our blood, Dad. They want us to fall asleep.
Someone coughs, embarrassed. The women in the back lift their chests.
This is an exercise in flexibility and in memory. A language of water and dust. Bread is impossible.
Open your eyes, Dad. Impossible to say white.
And then, facing the end, like a fluttering of birds.
IV. An homage
I approach the glass and search my swollen face for my great-grandmother’s wounds, the place inside her that years ago called on despair and hid a feathergrass rope, though she knew she it would not hold her. One foot after the other.
I observe his hands crossed over his chest. That awkward position.
*
The woman closes herself up in the house with death; her arms orchestrate the action. Tragedy gives the woman her name.
Death comes to inhabit us by way of the throat. Like a sound that should be silence or an organ that is born far from the body.
Sculpture. A room. A place forgotten by the wind.
I can’t think about the hospital room anymore. The sight of fatigue. My breath on the glass. I say: Let me choose another death for you. Another orphanhood for my father. Something that seems like an homage at least.
