Untitled
BY GUSTAVO HERNANDEZ
My father’s friend is dead. The one who owned the produce warehouse.
I don’t really know if that warehouse is how he wants to be remembered,
but that’s how I remember him. The rolling door. The lettuce bins.
How do I know what the dead appreciate? My father is gone too,
and even there I mostly deal in educated guesses. He loved every city
at five in the morning. He missed driving in the dark when his eyes
started to fail. And the living, what do they think of what I choose
to focus on? My brother and my sisters. My father’s friend’s stable of sons.
How do I know if what I say will be enough or sound the way I mean it to?
Even here. This should be Atotonilco and the early workweek sun. Sound
of brooms on a wet sidewalk. A handshake over a cold cast iron scale.
Husband
BY GUSTAVO HERNANDEZ
After that night the night no longer cut
like a black, sharpened pendulum.
You were gone
and it was easy as a story
where the outline of one man
replaces the outline of another.
If you want to know what I remember:
The eaves / The windshield / Dripping
In some dark lot in me, relief.
The cold moon and what I considered
my own unnatural strength returning.
You were gone. It was so clean.
It was too quick. It’s brutal. I know.
And the next morning, when I came home
and got her up for breakfast, my mother
said that in her sleep she’d been again
to that white place where all souls go.
Where my father went.
She said it was no dream.
She said it was no dream, and I had to believe her.
How could I doubt her?
In that world warped by absence,
in that after condition.
Son
BY GUSTAVO HERNANDEZ
It is raining. Here and in my mother’s dream.
The house there is quiet.
The rain flows into the verdolaga.
I am not forty-five. I am a few weeks old
and the house is in disrepair. She worries
and says worry has never known
how to live only inside of a dream.
The water will come through the rafters.
Will fall right where my baby is sleeping.
Theory
BY GUSTAVO HERNANDEZ
All afternoon, and up to their curfew, planes
flew out of the airport next door.
Our room was paid for. It was spring
and I couldn’t stop thinking
about that sunny Whitman quote
over the couch next to the bed.
I said it was a big blockheaded thing to think
you should always face forward.
Over and over, I looked out the window
at our parked cars under the oak.
I sat through March. I sat through April
like a fat cardinal. I scolded you
about Whitman. Said I thought the lines old
and overripe and obvious, and now—
what I think now is all my life I’ve paid
in transpositions.
What I think now is that in spring,
when you still wanted to, we should have married.
