I write to my friend
who wears his indignation
like a paper hat
he thinks makes him
look ridiculous.
He says,
“Who am I to ask
others to listen to me?”
But flesh is flesh
and fire is fire,
and things don’t
have to matter
to be real.
The properties
of ginger wine
are just short
of miraculous.
As I write,
I hope
he remembers
its taste.
I write
into the wind.
He won’t
write back.
He loves me
too much.
A woodpecker is silent in its flight. The forest has darkened all its wealth. He continues to sing, continues to humiliate himself. The king of flowers runs through his wildernight. His arms like pawls resting on the darkness. How many words it will take has yet to be decided in the vaticans of grief. The fire in the trees. The night of spiders will not condemn nor bless. He runs there nonetheless. My brother’s brother in his jodhpurs. Herbissimo Jupiter. Not daring to touch or spark, he runs with all his voice. He turns, and burning everything he has blessed, the king of flowers humiliates himself in the dark.
The Hinge
A proffered hand disparaged
snatches tulips from the flower boxes
on nights when even kisses snub.
The balcony has asked whether it might
withdraw into the parlor
to avoid the shame at its consent
Apparent, as a small village
of turtledoves is startled from the street
up onto the wires before me.
With much less force than this
someone is assassinated or begins believing
something that will lead someplace
different and refracted.
The trees brood.
Slowly tilting, the afternoon
creates specters to greet twilight.
A hand flits
between them, like a small fish,
between the mandibles of circumstance.
But the stripes of shadow
extend and thicken, extinguishing
the salmon light, however bold.
And hands, like flowers,
wilt, even faster than their intentions,
in the very act of pollination.
To reach out is to protrude.
To make contact is to dangle.
This is a world of cold distances.
Will I be singing of flying
when I fall off the ledge?
Birds sometimes fall,
and this hardly sounds.
A tired woman
adjusts her collar
on the platform
of a train station.
An example’s
manifestation
is always more
than its meager use.
A blue feather
dances in night’s depths.
Again. Voice the silver helix of mother grace. Bow ceilingly rolling toward you the small hell of rats and children. Something, some white paste between the fingers of the child and she says cloud. A rodent moving about in the wall hind above head dropping to the ground. Riding upon a wagon well rolling she makes an argument out of her face and cursing is as good a hat as any feather if it is red. Ask the men hanged from ropes if the bridge is underway yet. A bowl is crippled, and as it falls the memory of its mother rolls around within it like death along the rim of a stadium. Tearing down the paper from the walls, the painted flower left bouquets of strips, a nest which it had puckered. All great trumpets have hit the ground and every worm has flown within the belly of a bird. Muscle tin pin it, rather still bud, under some pillow without its indentation. The child found a rat’s carcass by the wall and decorated it with the doll’s crown since the small porcelain head had shattered into string.
BETWEEN PLANTING AND HARVEST
An Epithalamion for Tim and Laurie
We will continue
To stumble upon the garden,
As we continue
To stumble upon the garden.
We are doomed
To go further each time we go farther.
Our voices have bloomed
In the muggy blush of our ardor.
We will continue
To stumble upon the garden.
Why do these people
Insist on eating so much fruit?
They will change its name.
They will hide it in the mountains.
But we will continue
To stumble upon the garden
So we continue
To stumble upon the garden.
And though at times we grow too tired
For the arrival, for the curtsy after a fashion,
Laughter is passion’s mercy
And we have thrived on our survival.
So we will stumble
Again upon the garden.
Yes, we will stumble
Down the footpath to the garden.
Though it be flooded
With muddle and grime,
The measure of our greeny pleasures
Will still mark its coupled time.
Hard and senseless world,
May our joyousness be pardoned,
As we continue
To stumble upon
The discovery of our garden.
About the author:
The son of Colombian parents, George Mario Angel Quintero was born in 1964 in San Francisco, California, where he spent his first thirty years. He studied literature at the University of California and was later awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Fiction from Stanford University. He has published fiction, poetry, and essays in English as George Angel in literary magazines and the chapbook Globo (1996), and received the Nilon Award from Fiction Collective 2 for his book The Fifth Season (1996). He has since published a book of new and selected poems written in English, On the Voice (2016). Since 1995, he has lived in Medellin, Colombia, where, under the name Mario Angel Quintero, he has published six Spanish poetry collections, as well as three books of plays in Spanish. His visual art has been exhibited and published and he has also illustrated books. Since 2003, he has worked as director and playwright of the theatre company Párpado Teatro, and is a founding member of the musical groups Underflavour and Sell the Elephant.