I.
A life of adjustment,
a life spent looking
for a vein.
Oh, that one,
not the first one
nor the last one,
but one along the way.
What if that one
were the right one,
the one that mattered.
Second thoughts,
as if you hadn’t
paid attention
during the shell game.
A metaphor
is a digging,
is retracing steps,
is the betrayal
of the original music
of the tenor,
for the escape,
the detail and promise,
of an ephemeral vehicle.
Smoke and mirrors
over blunt noise.
Why not look at things
directly the first time.
II.
Once again, to slip into
an unknown place,
to try and steal
a bit more time.
A voice as it fades.
An arm protruding
from an elevator.
III.
CULTER
I.
I gave a knife away today.
I can’t help wondering
where it’s wandered.
This weather sharpens every blade.
I wanted to be rid of shame,
but find I’ve only bartered.
The whistling of life through doorways
makes mouthing-on a spill of words,
a gush of reach, a stray touch, always.
II.
These airtight times,
keen on pollarding
any unseemly growth,
allow no explorations,
no fertile touch to cover
the orchard hill with lightning.
Supporting sticks kicked out,
there will be no more signing,
now that hands break open
from their own fruit’s weight.
Who will gather
what refuses to be sealed?
And who will heal
the split trunk
that today bows its head.
III.
Enjambment cannot be mere
division, cutting syllables from fear
as they come flooding in, riding rhythm.
Expression breathes and extends.
Even Lincoln knew that legs
cannot be incomplete.
There is a falling of the sound,
each tap internal steps to ground
and so proportioned, germinates.
IV.
I have accepted that you are here,
she thought. Yes, she thought,
I am looking at you, and?
This is why I send you messages.
I see you there, limited, small,
finished. Hadn’t we expected more?
Why do you think this is my problem?
Can’t a girl deflate after a while,
like an old party balloon? After so
much huff and puff? Never thought
of myself as a tug boat! My skin
looks older today than it ever has.
How many miles are we from the sea?
Well, here it is, my hand.
Come on, get up.
V.
Though love will last forever,
lovers will not.
They will creak and break,
dilapidate and unhinge.
We can’t expect the roof
to always levitate.
When the singed beams give in,
besmirched memories will call out,
caresses will get caught mid-reach.
But what a ruin majestic is proportioned thus.
This high-flung arc survives to frame the whole.
Such a threshold sweeps within yet further,
bejeweled with sparkled dreams.
What buttresswork of laughter
sketches out the distant detail,
to give a notion of
the very breadth and gust of this,
what must have been
the hearth of the place.
VI.
How the silence changed
once she had turned on the light.
Encroached upon and limited
by the looming solids.
It took her so long to regain
its hidden rooms and hallways.
She had to listen hard,
literally for years,
before she heard the voice say,
“Remember to open this door
when you wake up.”
VII.
There was a white bird
on the balustrade.
Clinging to it now
though formerly up in the wires.
Down again then, nearer the light.
Braced here against a storm,
large in the offing,
lashing and lisping closer,
a burst stain on the horizon.
Taut upon her line of sight,
the white bird, ruffled but still,
inclined her head up
at the approaching stir.
Simply what is coming, clear.
Quickly each change,
unannounced, for a lifetime.
A seemingly endless, unmerited,
necklace of nacre clouds.
Soon enough, we were enounced
though, in gaping gusts
that, like a grasping hand,
scooped out the balcony
of leaves and chimes and light.
Tossed about and spread,
she continued to flap on there,
like a tethered ribbon
in the rifling wind.
What could such tenaciousness
have meant?
When letting go brought
certain levitation and transport?
Like the great chalice
of a magnolia blossom,
whose second morning
is all awry, the wilting force
that could lift her off
rose from within and not without.
The slightest fracture of direction,
the twitch toward any drift
incrusts, sinks and engulfs.
Only attention can burn away
the dark enveloping that rises like sleep,
the wash opaque that tips the plunge,
lost flailing down a hollow sock.
I had no stomach for it.
I looked away
and afterward found nothing
there of comfort in the cold.
VIII.
Here, now, and that is all.
Enough for intimate reflection.
Neither arrowhead nor knife’s edge,
I cannot seek nor bless perfection.
Outside, the air is fledged with bluffing,
And life will press and burst the husk.
But until the sunflowers bow their heads
and fall, there is
Here, now, and that is all.
IX.
Currency
Everything seems
to stop moving,
but actually
the transactions
never stop.
Which is another
way of saying
the current continues.
Words are
more metallic now.
Living has
become saltier,
as if it were
only a matter
of paying up.
I am old now.
In my wallet,
all that is left is
cheap sentimentality,
dog-eared notes,
even more devalued
now than when
they were issued
in passion, during
the living of it.
Here, where I
find myself
at this moment,
immersed in air
blurry with chatter,
I can feel
my thoughts,
lizards scavenging,
descending darkly
through the bin rubbish,
instants before it is
taken away
someplace.
Nothing happens
anymore.
Situations
just sit there,
like fat children
staring fixedly
into space.
Slowly, they
come into detail,
the texture
of their surfaces,
the moist folds,
the patterns that
leave them
even more still,
like bedsheets
put away
or lay upon.
I tried to make
a bed from silence,
bargaining
each syllable
evaded
for rest,
haggling my way
toward sleep,
and yet beyond
its savage dreams,
getting there
by blinking,
by seeing
blindness
as a way
of navigating
between rocks.
But it is not
that they avoid
each other.
What a wishful
universe that
would be.
Rather it is
that need
is invisible
to death.
In the case
of my current
ongoing respiration,
my current prayer
for others’ kindness,
death only
appears
to show
good manners,
having given me
the time to finish
writing this.
The very force
of the current
that carries everything,
that carries me,
tucked into the
curling gush
at some spot,
creates
the musical sensation
of mutual suspension,
of a momentary reflection
in the stillness.
Old images
show nearness
and remoteness.
Both the intimacy
of wear and stain,
and the pale distance
of blurry outlines
and discoloration.
Is it a triumph
to have gained
in usage?
In the glare
and difficult waking
that is
what it is
to become aged,
visions, almost
transparent,
are what remains.
These views
out from
a ruined facade,
through
smudged and cloudy
windows, are
the last wandering
left.
Only what
appears to me,
only whatever
appears to be,
is and becomes,
why
notwithstanding.
The other mumblings,
though also ruminatory,
are pushed out of tune
by so much collapse
and honk,
frivolously noisy.
They will not
be attended,
though they bustle
about underfoot.
Unavoidably,
they are driven out,
like irate geese.
But even beneath
the immediacy
of the pealing carillon
of commerce
something has changed.
That conversion
from matter
to musing,
formerly monikered
as concentration,
now rings out,
expanding, over
a world distracted,
irrevocably fluctuating,
irremediably estuary.
X.
Reverie
Stop it! You will only make it worse!
Why must you always be picking at yourself?
Is there something to be discovered in distraction,
in mining your own wounds?
Leave it alone!
Must you compulsively explore yourself?
Is losing yourself in delicious prying
at scabs worth the blood?
Or is the blood what you are after,
dislodging coagulation to separate
that brittle piece of yourself and flow out?
First, you caress your surfaces
in search of opportunities of easy sweet damage.
Next you focus, you dwell, you return,
digging until you manage it, the blessing,
the suspiration, now that everything is smoothed out again,
and the red juice of you stains your fingers.
You have found it again, that red that tastes like metal,
like sounding brass or tinkling cymbal.
XI.
Routinely
Old people routinely
see dead folks.
There is nothing
extraordinary about this.
Lingering is more powerful
than mere presence.
Memory continually
barters with sensation.
Hallucinations flash over
familiar surfaces like kisses.
Each night, before the vast flat place
and before the sigh that clears
a path through the day’s burdens
after collapsing prone upon the pillows,
the murmur of she who lies beside
gives enough confidence
to continue living.
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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 a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Under the name George Angel, he has published poetry, fiction, and essays in English. Since 1995, he has lived in Medellin, Colombia, authoring seven books of poetry, and three books of theater plays all in Spanish under the name Mario Angel Quintero. He continues to write and publish in both English and Spanish. He is also a musician, a visual artist, and a theater director.
