ERASURE
"Hangman, hangman, hold it a little while,
I think I see my friends coming, riding many a mile."
-Led Zeppelin
The mirrors in the restaurant of exile shattered today.
My father's remains recompose, his heart pumps & flutters
as he joins the dead digging themselves out of countless graves.
No more dancing. No more singing. The streets change
Names. The airplane that brought us propels itself
in reverse, a sky monster choking on its own sooty smoke.
Hazy blood point of perspective diminishing in the distance.
Who fights oblivion to win? Who wants history to absolve them?
We did not belong here, nor will we exist here much longer.
The Magic City crumbles to rubble first, then sand, then dust.
In the straights waves regurgitate the many who drown.
Nobody remembers their names or stories, but they float back
beyond the detritus and flotsam. The asphyxiated walk backward
in camara lenta, long enough for the tropical light to bring back color
to their gaunt faces, and reed-hollowed bodies. The sun counterfits
its purpose. The island frees itself long enough to enjoy a last cafecito.
In 1962 a man holds his son for the first time, a moist seedling
who will lose itself into a dark and sterile earth. This couple marry
and move to a ravaged city to coil back through impossible
beginnings in 1959--the year a murder of crows ravaged the harvest.
Before that came the hurricanes, the Spanish raping the Tainos.
And even before that the first coconut and the first palm. Lava. Earth.
The sand retreating below the ocean, cooling and burning itself out.
Who were we? What became of us? Those marks we left in the wake
of all this vanishing taking place in another place where the mirrors
are black or covered with stained bed sheets and old rags. Cracked, we
do not recognize ourselves in the cobwebs of that rubble we called home.
THE BEAUTIFUL LIGHT
Most of the world is disappearing.
One car at a time, one person.
My daughter's endocrinologist
Says it's a fresh canvas every hundred
Years, a new slate that continues
To repeat itself, yellowing all along.
A slow demise and sinuous flaccidity
To the flesh. Metal rusts. Organic
Material decays. We make time cringe
At will, but time doesn't seem to even
Want to linger in this pocket of marsh
Where a terrapin's snout disturbs a froth
Of duckweed and algae. Insects freeze
Inside the pages of an ancient book.
It's daylight savings again, here comes
That light that casts a shadow on the porch.
A bloody cardinal files its complaint
To the sun that the squirrels hoard
all the seed in the broken bird feeder.
On a desolate highway, a roof caves
In at the abandoned motel. A tile crushes
The rat. A nest of wasps is torn asunder.
That buzzing you hear is the light
Fighting back its inability to remember
We'd been here in this same room
Watching Hopper paint the billowed
Curtain. Outside the clouds drag themselves
Across the landscape again. They speak
a ruckus in eternal and yet momentary
sameness. They will be back tomorrow, right?
