Francisco Aragón

Broadway past Lincoln Center and the wind is up so seems to speak saw you through the glass standing in line I swear a quiver played on your lips you were leafing through his book… —years it’s been years since Corona Heights, backing into him: dribble, hook, swish… …that beige comfy couch, sipping a stem of wine, his cat in my lap * * * The Townhouse Saturday night—shoulder to shoulder pushing toward the piano he stops to squeeze by; his eyes  mine clench  unclench… …What was it we found in common over drink   smoke   talk? A college campus —his son, his daughter * * * Earlier that night I rose to the city’s surface steam through the grate, crossed crossed again down 7th past Carnegie Hall, the greek joint as imagined, chic —unlike the shirt D wore (the fur of his arms) at Castro and Market waiting for the light: words were struck like steel and flint that distant August day…Then his visit to Spain, mine to New Canaan—walking through the Morgan with him. And what our mouths unfurled across a table of olives years later—last night… Dropping me off at 58th he reaches for the door I’m fumbling to open, leans close and plants what I’ve missed all these years

Just let the San Andreas stay put, keeping this tunnel intact, enough to amble out of it, past Louie’s Dim Sum a Saturday afternoon, a breeze detectable off the bay—visible in the distance, carrying with it the smells of open air markets: crab freshly caught and seahorses piled in bins along Stockton . . . or Jack, strolling out of the tube connecting Polk Gulch and North Beach, on his way to Aquatic Park to spread the Sporting Green on his favorite patch of grass . . . He is ferrying the portable radio to his ear, listening for the count in the bottom of the ninth at Candlestick, begins to smooth the pages with the palms before he sits to keep it dry: the split seat of his pants for Jack Spicer (1925-1965)

not straight, but in waves It seems every advance in the process deepens the subject’s relations to inner objects, happiness in regaining them after feeling adrift and lost, an increased trust because they appear good and helpful after all, as in the child step by step, building his relations to external objects, gaining not only from things pleasant, but from ways in which the child overcomes frustrations . . . Mrs. A, for instance: finally walking down familiar streets with a friend: an attempt at old bonds. Yet moments into the stroll the number of bustling people is too much, the buildings strange, the sunlight artificial, bleak . . . so that she has to retreat indoors into a restaurant for a chair, but even there the walls are buckling, the diners and waiters blurred— indifferent to what she carries inside, her home suddenly the only tolerable place— pictures of her boy, his drawings, in each and every room.

November 9, 2016 University of Notre Dame minutes felt like hours "deplorables knocking at your door" he shouted the day after—“build the wall— we're building a wall around your room!" minutes felt like hours "cowards!" you managed, catching a glimpse by cracking your door: there were three of them scurrying down the hall, their faces obscured… your back against the wall, you slid to the floor— "Hail Mary..." you began whispering to yourself and back they came their laughter louder minutes felt like hours and the thumping in your chest— his fist pounding the door for Gregory Jenn ('18)

What was it he felt humming beneath his skin? Gaze of a twelve-year-old feasting. The hair on those arms.

The tint of the sky between sunset and night. And wandering with you and your nephew in that maze, half-lost—Madrid of the Austrias—looking for Plaza of the Green Cross where, days before you arrived, an Opel with false plates was parked, its wheels straddling the curb, and so the van heading for the barracks that morning had to slow to squeeze past . . . Back at the hotel your mom is holding up her gift—Amethyst, she says admiring how light when passing through a prism bends. At his window that morning before we began my student said, ¡Qué bonito!, watching it drift and descend, settling on roofs and cars. And I think of you and your wife and daughter: getting to see Madrid in white, your visit winding down, and how I had wanted that lesson to end to get to the park—Retiro, they say, is the city’s one lung, and the way the feel and sound of steps cease when grass is completely covered as if walking on a cloud. The year before on a visit from the coast, a friend sitting at a window watched the flakes flutter and fall, dissolving before reaching the ground—aguanieve, he said while from a town near Seville B-52s were lifting off . . . I was in a trance that week though like most things the war in the Gulf was soon another backdrop, like the string of car bombs the following year. And yet that morning as soon as I heard, something led me not to the park but down to City Hall, workers in the street evacuated, sipping coffee, though I never reached the site—of course it was cordoned off, the spray of glass, the heap of twisted metal, and so later learned their names their lives. Of the five there was one: a postal clerk who as a boy, would plunge his hands into the white, the cold a sweet jolt whenever he got to touch the stuff, scooping it tightly into a ball like the ones he would dodge and throw years later at his wife-to-be: those weekends, those places—away from city air— a release . . . Miraflores, Siete Picos, Rascafría . . .It’s in his blood, she would come to say chatting with a neighbor about his thing for snow—the way it falls softly, blanketing roofs and groves, villages nestled in the Sierra’s hills: it is February and she is picturing him and the boy, up there now playing, horsing around

Perfect disc of moon, huge and simmering low on the capital’s filthy horizon— ¡Ay, qué luna más hermosa! she says pushing the stroller slowly down Atocha. And gorgeous too the firm-thighed boys from Lisbon a block away, who work Kilometer Zero’s sidewalk, the neon shoestore they lean against cupping the flames of passing strangers. The sky above Puerta del Sol turns a darker shade of blue. Who says it doesn’t become night’s one eye as it scales the heavens, paling and shrinking before it moves across a late June sky? And below, men persist and circle the plaza, twin fountains brimming over their brilliant waters. Hours from now with the heat waning, the same moon will spot the figure of him making past Neptune, the Ritz the orange jumpsuits hopping off trucks to sweep and spray, hosing down those electric streets.

the noun A disease of the peach tree —a fungus distorts leaves. The first time I was taken to see him I was five or six. A vesicle on the skin containing serum, caused by friction, a burn, or other injury. He lived on Alabama Street next to Saint Peter’s and wore a white t-shirt, starched and snug. A similar swelling with fluid or air on the surface of a plant, or metal after cooling or the sunless area between one’s toes after a very long walk. Don’t ask me how it is I ended up holding it. An outer covering fitted to a vessel to protect against torpedoes, mines, or to improve stability. My guess is that he brought it out to show me thinking, perhaps, I had never seen one up close, let alone felt the blunt weight of one in my hands. A rounded compartment protruding from the body of a plane. What came next: no image but sensation of its hammer (my inexpert manipulation) digging into but not breaking skin—the spot at the base of my thumb balloons, slowly filling with fluid… In Spanish: ampolla —an Ampul of chrystal in the Middle Ages could be a relic containing the blood of someone holy. I’m fairly certain it wasn’t loaded.

(Francisco X. Alarcón) asleep you become a continent— undiscovered, mysterious, long, your legs mountain ranges encircling valleys, ravines night slips past your eyelids, your breath the swaying of the sea, sprawled across the bed like a dolphin washed ashore, your mouth is the mouth of a sated volcano, O fragrant timber, how do you burn? you are so near, and yet so far as you doze like a lily at my side, I undo myself and invoke the moon— I’m a dog watching over your sleep