Neblina

The car was moving too fast
for that road to be the one you imagine.

Your feet have treaded a forty-five-minute square,
countless tessellations of concrete octagons
neighbors interlocking like two hands
outlined with black paint on a silver canvas.

Lost.

A trapezoid ousted your mind's square
and the gloomy clouds blush a deeper gray
as the sun abandons them for the day.
Too stubborn to turn back, you forge ahead
and the highway fills your chest with fumes.

Scarf over mouth
you squeeze past two police cars,
a man guiding his calf on a rope,
and your steps fall in tandem
with the black pairs of flats ahead,
giggling as the buses bathe you in their smog.

At home, the hands joke
that silhouettes, perhaps, were never meant to be.
The outlines may never be filled in,
pulled apart by the whims of life.
Your lips twitch
and the emotion dissipates like smoke on the road:
fleeting to the eye, but lingers for nose
and the fingers apologize.

The fields of Patastillal

When the weight of your body is more than you can bear
you remember every rock that made every bump on the road
and the faux-massage of a rickety ride over the wheels
manifests as new cricks and aches
and reminds you ungracefully of the aging
that awaits you.

Dehydrated, broken, you thumb through old photos
at the end of a long dusty day
that filled your lungs with carcinogens from concrete jungles
and wood smoke and pine needles and shade-grown coffee.

"The air is rich here en el campo," the driver said.
Your courteous inquiries unleashed the memories brimming
beneath his swollen paunch, that he doubtless had not
when they first got married.
Antonio tames the pain in his voice with a stoic delivery
of how she left
the other man
and the years that have passed since he held his children.
"You get tired in the city," he chews and spits his tobacco
into the green fields.

But he goes back every time.

The gleam in his eye
he claims is love for the country
you recognize better as a wilting melancholy.

Each photo of your past self clouds your convictions
that the fountain of youth is ever kind to women.
His nostalgia buries you like the avalanche
of stones that made the road uphill
what it is:
a back-breaking harbinger of the sweat on Antonio's brow
that will one day drip from your own.

The prophesy comes true

The dust tickles your nose and travels down your throat.
It coats your pant legs, diffuses through your shoes,
and only your toes are protected
by pink-rimmed socks you nearly neglected to pack.

The biggest challenge in life is to walk
through these piles of ash and cinders and
breathe deeply the pulverized horse dung
swallow the lump forming at the back of your tongue
and let those tiny particles settle wherever they may in your body,
much as your dreams and capacity to love
settle as grime and grit
covering the ground around your footprints
in a fine layer
of what could have been but never was achieved.

Home

Exposed
those frayed ends you hide
the red and black fibers woven together and folded under
unruly fibers prickle your skin all day
so accustomed to the chafing that you never stop smiling.

I found a strand and I pulled,
unraveled my way to a chatty father and the smog
you breathe in day in and day out,
the booming stereo vibrating in the concrete walls,
the curly lock of hair the devil can't straighten
snapping back into place from the puppy's paw,
the whirring of sewing pedals
stitching up hems that are tidier than yours.

How much you've knit, how much you've purled,
and how discretely your needles click and clack
from row to row.
No one ever sees you spin the wool
but these curious fingers
have stretched taut the yarn
that made you.

Las Cumbres and Armita

Shoulders hunched forward, stomach in your chest,
another day on the road.
Counting minutes, counting kilometers,
and counting on backseat laughter
to raise your drooping eyelids.
When their eyes succumb behind you
yours follow the curves of the road
the skyline, drifting from rectangular patches
of green slanted cabbages to bright blue expanses,
and precarious gray fences that tease you about the vales below.

The sun sets and you count once again:
cars lined up like ants, buses spewing black fumes,
the low-droning hum of traffic the bass
to the backseat's revived running commentary.

You come home to his face:
lips curl downwards from rustic pleasure to an anonymous frown
(you don't always say the right thing),
his eyes change from country to city.

Habiliments of the grave

Hollow hollow hollow heart,
Years ago I dared to read the cards.
They prophesied your hermitage,
the shining light on the dark path,
beams illuminating the crevices and places unseen
where humans step and stumble.

Hermit hermit hermit heart,
Know that they will never heed your words.
They wish to fall for themselves,
they cry to you as they slip and tumble,
and your predictions incite their anger
when they inevitably come true.

Hollow hermit, your lips are sealed.
Your first breath gave way to a strangled sob of solitude,
and the illusion that stays alive for most
died as your childhood faded into premature senility.

Hold the lantern, hold it high,
you are merely a lamppost to passersby.
And those days that you see their smiles,
their jolly cheeks and pink abandon,
the fire you thought long gone glows,
those embers of doubt
how they haunt your hollow heart
until all the footprints are covered in snow.
Not a voice, not a breath.
Alone with the ice and cold,
Your hearth back to its status quo.

Hollow hollow hermit,
How long will your heart beat?