Alberto Ríos

People would come to my great-grandmother’s house. She was in a room. They would stay in the kitchen. The words their words rolled like cars by on a train Here from somewhere else and going somewhere else Moving on faster almost than we could read them, Sound them out my brother and me with our small mouths, Chessie, a cat, see? the Erie, Santa Fe, Ferrocarril, Ore cars from the Southern Pacific, brown And all the numbers of all the engines. The words they rolled easier, fat and longer With each beer held in a fist and hit Against brown lips and thin tongues, And things slid out of those mouths then with the drinking, Took shape in sounds larger than we were, those uncles’ laughs, Loud things which could be called back no longer. The words they rolled into plates of food Up with the smoke curling, there around the elbows, the words And the smoke, a tablecloth, a rope wound like a hypnotist’s wheel) All of it catching the heads of our mother in weak headlocks That fooled us—we had thought we were stronger With our thousand gatling short words, Half tears, half whispered. We were not. The words they rolled their wheels they rolled Until the mayonnaise turned light and then dark brown Until we slept in the corners, my brother and my cousins, Me with Midnight and Puerquito, our own hands Held around ourselves, our voices intimate Only with the animals, who understood something of us, Who let us hold their heads to our chests, Who looked at the things we whispered. The words, they rolled, they, they would not stop. I closed my eyes then, and their phrases became birds, Long birds, fat, snake birds that would not fly. A single laugh, some thin tongue pulled to its shrill Kicking roots, this one laugh, an uncle’s, It was the thinnest and strongest string Pulling their faces up together like puppets And they hit each other, those wooden heads Laughing, hit each other rolling, blunt-edged Side hitting sides like rocks and pieces of hill Heading along toward some bottom, heading Somewhere, the place of the broken parts. Nothing would take me by the hand, only the handle On the drawer in the corner, my hand holding it, my eyes Seeing how it became a licorice stick, then thousands of them Holding me, by the eyes, so I could see nothing, Hear only the sounds of a second world In league with the thunder and this night of summer. The words, they rolled, they would not stop, They would not take me home.

Yes, but beyond happiness what is there? The question has not yet been answered. No great quotations have issued forth From there, we have no still photographs Full of men in fine leather hiking boots, Women with new-cut walking sticks. So yes, it is the realm of thin tigers Prowling, out to earn even more stripes; It is the smell of seven or eight perfumes Not currently available in America. Maybe this is wrong, of course. The place may after all be populated, Or over-populated, with dented trash cans In the streets and news of genital herpes In every smart article in every slick magazine Everywhere in the place. But everybody there smiles— Laughs, even, every time a breath can be caught. This is all true. Beyond happiness, it’s all the same, Things come back to where we are now. Of course maybe this is wrong, But don’t believe it: a happiness exists, All right, I have seen it for myself, Touched it, touched the woman Who with her daughter together keep Ammonia in Mason jars by the side window. They will throw it all in his face God Damn him if he ever comes close again.

The old Russian spits up a plum fruit of the rasping sound he has stored in his throat all these lonely years made in fact lonely by his wife who left him, God knows without knowing how to cook for himself. He examines the plum notes its purplish consistency almost the color and shape of her buttocks whose circulation was bad which is why he himself wears a beret: black, good wool, certainly warm enough the times he remembers. He shoots the plum to the ground like a child whose confidence is a game of marbles whose flick of a thumb is a smile inside his mouth knowing what he knows will happen. But his wife, Marthe does not spill out when the plum breaks open. Instead, it is a younger self alive and waving just the size he remembers himself to have been. The old Russian puts him onto his finger like a parakeet and sits him on the shelf with the pictures. For the rest of his days he nags himself constantly into a half-sleep surprised by this turn of events.

1 As she grows to twelve, her body begins Its Spring, its hike along the trail In the mountains that open Suddenly to show a whole valley So surprising one forgets For the moment to breathe. Her hips, and so her walk, Her breasts, and so The way she begins to see How other people look at her, How they are caught mid-breath, and shy. But the day a train first came here, They look at her like that: No one staring at her face, no one Noting a moustache curling up Like the arms of the bald He-man posing in the traveling circus There on the face of the engineer. She gets angry, steam in her head The way the engine had Barely held in, almost bursting. Angry in the manner that a person might Take an egg and hold it too hard. Her breasts begin to grow, And she gets angry. Or, she gets angry, So her breasts begin to grow. She cannot remember exactly which. Her mother had told her This would come, But told her so quickly, so much In a hurry and in a small room, And with the other things, She neglected to say that also They would stop growing, So they might not. She would have to wear— She learns this in a dream— High heels backward on her feet To keep a symmetry of balance. The angrier she gets through the months, The more worried she feels At the silliness of how She has begun to grow two new shoulders, Of how she will have to wear her shoes, As bigger, one centimeter at a time, She sprouts out like buds, at first, Like fast plants, Then, like the trees, And finally unstoppable In their season: fruit. The future, she reasons, cannot be good. 2 At 28, she has forgotten what is past. She sits and watches now her thighs Flowing out like the broad Varicosed backs of alligators She has seen in moving pictures, Pushed out around the metal Edges of the lawn chair. Long and flat animals, Sated and full of wrinkling Ridges, held as if by small bones The way camping tents are suspended, All from having eaten Too many pigs, too many birds and cows In the summers of her middle Years of crying When she was all mouth and chewing To feel better, all without boys, No Pedro of her own And now the boys cannot Come close, dare not Dare the alligators Which might come after them. 3 But no. This is an exaggeration, This sadness At het self. Sadness is like that, Adding weight to a thing, to legs The way legs look as one sits In a chair relaxed, Or on the edge of a wall. As if one were a circus performer With a partner, Ramón, Ramón standing Feet planted this moment precisely On the thighs. But no. This is a further exaggeration. Sadness again is like that, It learns you, she thinks, Makes you heavy in those places exactly You have dared think to be strong. On Thursday the 8th of this month Miguel her husband left her, But in that odd physics of how distance Increased every step she took Away from him. As she left the house, he got farther. As she, his María, walked out the door He left her, and the more she walked The farther he got, and smaller. She had learned him as one learns A pair of good leather shoes. She loved him so much She stopped thinking about him. He was like breathing. So that when sadness called, she went To see what it wanted And did not worry. Sadness, again, is like that, Not telling a person the whole story. 4 The orchard was his passion now More than women, More than hard words and fast guns In the hands of other men. And he tended his trees with fingers He might have used touching The hair of his young cousin, lovely Marta, his wife, light skinned, Eyes the color in the moss And barks of his trees, Who walked to the river and stayed. Fingers that might have Pointed out to her with care The beaten line a trail made Leading to his house, their house. But he was busy growing the limes So that her hair was like a bramble Having to be torn away Hard from her, leaving the blood.

or The Unfortunate Story of the Unmarried Flora Carrillo And the Man Who Loved Her Before He Died his Famous Death, From Whose Single Liaison a Daughter Was Born And the Advice, Rather the Explanation, Both of Them Left for Her, And the Story Also Of What She Became, and That She Was Happy 1. Three did not count. A fourth was forgiven by the Father Torres In exchange for reasonable payment, Two full days of the Hail Mary. Bigger than priests, the fifth Indiscretion was born on a Thursday, early Evening in a November not too cold. No rain had fallen And the birds had not yet gone. She chose a black dress, this Flora, Florita + here evoke the names of saints + Underneath which she carried tonight An old blade, but of fine Toledo forging Long as the member of this man In love with this woman standing at his door. Her head was filled with the vines of the jungle The noises of a lion, the feel of ten birds Trying with their beaks to get out. All anger: that she had hoped he would Come to her bedroom. And that he had. Faster than !that she took from him his rolled tongue Hanging there between his thin legs, his two-fingers, This girl’s wrist and fist of his Its central tendon and skin that moved on itself, This small and second body of his Which had found its way to her second mouth, This part of himself which he had given her Then taken back on this same day, earlier His ugly afternoon of loving her too much. He would scream as she had When she had taken him in first as a leg-bone And held him there too long, too much Until he had become a pinky-finger + here evoke the holy names + Which she !took now and put in the dowry She would make for her new daughter. With it she would write a note, Nothing else was left to do: Daughter, you will be an only child. The story of your birth will smell on you. Do this: take baths filled with rosemary With leaves, with pinched orange peels. Keep secret the fact of yourself. Be happy enough, happy with this much life. Ask for nothing. Do not live for a long time.

But the truth is, I am Thursday on a Monday. I Am the walking calendar alive of mixed-up days and dim hours. I have A week inside of me, a week or a year, time out of order. I have contracted With the world to behave, to try, hard, to be Monday on a Monday. I Look like I am happiness, don’t you think? On Monday, to you I have The right laugh, and seem always to be even-keeled and at-eased.