Se Me Olvidó Otra Vez

I sit in bed, from the linen your scent still rises.
You’re asleep inside your old guitar.

A mariachi suit draped on a chair, its copper buttons,
the eyes of jaguars stalking the night.

I sit in bed, from the linen your scent still rises.

Through a window a full moon brings to mind Borges,
there is such loneliness in that gold.

You’re asleep inside your old guitar.

Are your calloused heels scraping its curved wood or
are there mice scurrying in the walls?

I sit in bed, from the linen your scent still rises.

I flick on a lamp, yellow light strikes your guitar
like dirt thrown on a coffin.

You’re asleep inside your old guitar.
I sit in bed, from the linen your scent still rises.

after Donald Justice

originally published in Poetry Northwest

Misael: Oil, Acrylic, Mixed Media on Canvas: Julio Galán: 2001

again and again he shuffled a deck of cards/ a small accordion

in his hands/ to be a man/ to be a tree/ or even something less/ like a plank

the wounds along his shoulder/ salmon leaping out of black water

line two borrows language from Humberto Ak’abal

Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome

I approach a harp
abandoned
in a harvested field.
A deer leaps
out of the brush
and follows me

in the rain, a scarlet
snake wound
in its dark antlers.
My fingers
curled around a shard
of glass—

it’s like holding the hand
of a child.
I’ll cut the harp strings
for my mandolin,
use the frame as a window
in a chapel
yet to be built. I’ll scrape

off its blue
lacquer, melt the flakes
down with
a candle and ladle
and paint
the inner curve
of my soup bowl.

The deer passes me.
I lower my head,
stick out my tongue
to taste
the honey smeared
on its hind leg.

In the field’s center
I crouch near
a boulder engraved
with a number
and stare at a gazelle’s
blue ghost,
the rain falling through it.

originally published in Indiana Review