Blas Falconer

It isn’t madness but shame for wanting and shame for not having what I want, which is a kind of madness—drunk, 3 a.m., the stairwell too steep to climb. The bed can wait. I go to the pool instead, strip and step in, the smell of smoke and sweat washing from hair and skin. The wet kiss: his mouth pressed here, my neck, and there, my chest—in the end—went nowhere. Cars pass with coupled strangers. I wade. The brick wall stretches into the sky, the sky empty, save the constellations, whose lives I love—yours most of all, father of poets, whose lyre filled trees and stones with awe, the lover torn to shreds and thrown in to the river. Tonight, you’re the swan, lost among pinholes of light, your throat bitten by a black hole that takes and takes and never fills. I kick, stroke my tired arms to buoy this body. It makes ring after perfect ring, but each one breaks along the edge. You who never were, did you look down on the world at last and see that more won’t be enough? Not now. Not ever. Want picks the human heart. You’re the lie I won’t believe forever.

The driver has no knife. He has no knife, no, you think, and lower your head into his car. A ride in the rain? The dark clouds bellow. You saw him drinking at the local bar, you think, and lower your head into his car. Rain taps on the roof, falls on this familiar man: You saw him drinking at the local bar. He shrugs and offers up his empty hands. Rain taps on the roof, falls on this familiar man, and sugarcane stalks bend in the breeze. He shrugs and offers up his empty hands. As sewer pipes burst, flooding the street, and sugarcane stalks bend in the breeze, machetes swing into the green stems, low. As sewer pipes burst, flooding the street, bile is a blade at the back of your throat. Machetes swing into the green stems, low. A ride in the rain? The dark clouds bellow. Bile is blade at the back of your throat. The driver has no knife. He has no knife, no.

Platanal, 1974, by Myrna Báez Considering Myrna Báez’s painting Platanal, E. Carmen Ramos explains, “When Puerto Rico was a Spanish colony, artists like Francisco Oller depicted the plantain as both a key accoutrement to the jibaro (rural peasant) and a metaphor for the island’s independent cultural identity.” Plantain trees gather at the edge of the orchard, clamor for light in the foreground. They seem to grow as one, as if they’d fill the field and the mountains behind them, leaves large and frayed. We stood there, once, or someplace like it, so here we are again, it seems, years later, branches leaning over the road, you in your long skirt, looking out as if to recall something you meant to do.My country, I hear you say still. But if that’s dusk in the hills, you know what’s coming to the field. You’ll stand among them till there’s nothing left to see. I’ll wait beside you, though I don’t know what we’re waiting for.

Nocturnal (Horizon Line), 2010, by Teresita Fernández I’d come to help settle your mother’s affairs. On the last night, we ate where she worked all her life.Now that she’s gone, you said,I’ll never come back. Looking out over the dark, you saw a light in the distance, a boat crossing the bay, and told the story of the fisherman cursed to float adrift forever. You hadn’t thought of it since you were a child, and held your hand across the table to show me how it trembled. I didn’t understand until, alone, years later, wandering the city where I was born, I stood before a black wall, polished to shimmer, and it looked to me like the sea at night, hard and endless.

X. Your bags were packed and left at the door, the vase you filled with shells, wrapped in tissue, your books boxed. I have the whelk you found on shore, the small conch, intact—the point, the fine grooves— and keep it in a box with a picture of you at the beach: your hair slicked back, head cocked at an angle. Behind you, the green jacket you told me to throw away. Strewn over a chair, its arms dangle above the floor—a hole in the pocket, the elbows thin from years of use. Y. I become each day more reckless, too impatient for summer, the unbearable heat, the calm that comes with it. There are no hills here, not one, and I’m bored with the stillness of the yellow field outside my window. And you, who cannot keep still, who can never look back, where will you go next? How will I find you? Can you feel the world pull apart, the seams loosen? What, tell me, will keep it whole, if not you? if not me? Send a postcard, picture, tell me how you’ve been. Z. Running down the stairwell in the garden, I divide the steps by three, until my foot catches the edge, wet with rain, and my frame, flung forward by its own momentum, leans into the night as if reaching for something I didn’t know I wanted. Not the moon. No. Not the sky, suspended and limitless. Not even the tulips standing on their stems (their petals cup the air). But in the streetlamp’s circle of light, I land among them, broken. My body can’t contain itself, as blood burgeons in my hands.