I Walk Back Nowhere
I walk back—nowhere,
under moonlight. The dogs look as if
they are angels, the ones I never imagined,
with drooling silvery rays and torn behinds, yes,
glowing in a strange and excited phosphor,
dancing
out of rhythm, racing up trees, chasing
snails. This is like a children's book.
O, yes, the children
with rectangle heads and sack stomachs.
With the eyes of Da Vinci, sad and impish,
meticulous as Ibn Khaldun and taciturn as Nietzsche,
phlegmatic and bitter, when they speak they leave
opalescent liquids on the grasses, stuttered
under a half-erased mural of Arafat, or
is it Sharon,
wait,
the children never speak,
they nod their heads, they carry huge
bundles strapped across their foreheads.
They weep under newspapers and roll up
their skirts and wash them in the gutters,
ponds, if they find them, then they run to the sea.
This is where we meet, on occasion, we
make up stories, we remember fruits and produce
as if blessed by the plutonium blasts.
"Remember the pears, they were so green,
and the avocados, like guitars, honey-golden, and
the asparagus, like a lion's rainy mane, and . . ."
Our mouths water. Their mouths water,
I am used to these stories. I am used to the land
barren, bitten and aflame with lies. I am used to
our faces in this new wild dispassionate light.
I learned this from my musician friends, from
years waging futile wars with poetry until
I could not think of anything else.
Copyright Credit: Juan Felipe Herrera, "I Walk Back Nowhere" from Half the World in Light: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 2008 by Juan Felipe Herrera. Reprinted by permission of University of Arizona Press.
Source: Half the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (University of Arizona Press, 2008)