Let's start with a poem called "The Line,"
and there is some mention of the lynching
of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in this poem
just as a heads up and there is also
some reflection on copper mining in it
and growing up in a copper mining town.
The epigraph is "a serious surplus population
that needs eliminating."
So now we are equals, verdad?
All along, eyeing the same banks,
As though we might surface on the same shore,
Bare backs to the sun, wet shirts in hand,
boots aside, those too.
You keep saying El otro lado,
See you there face to face, no worries.
The last good lynching was a long time ago.
Ropes, belts, canteens sway in the tree.
The trees sings with lightness.
In time the fruit shrank in the heat,
Grinned wide from the bone,
Dropped to the dirt.
Rot.
The earthworm's heart.
This now, a knot, a fishing spot.
The sweet blood smell of the hook right through,
The impaled form right through,
Either soft end writhing on the line.
Beneath the surface neither vertebral nor articulate.
It sways under water,
Guts in skin.
It sways from the other side, verdad?
Not a lure but a rumor,
A mirror of parallel end.
We'd fished the shallows with stripped willows,
With a hellgrammite drifting in the current.
And that's where we trapped our leviathan.
Iridescent scales that slid away from our hands
Where we crossed the swinging bridge
And found effigy and sign:
Death to scabs crossing the line.
A volleyball head and a pair of shovels for limbs,
The hanging white sheet, the slashed body of many.
A volleyball head and a pair of shovels for limbs,
Effigy and sign, death to scabs crossing the line.
Where we crossed the swinging bridge,
And found iridescent scales that slid away from our hands,
And that's where we trapped our leviathan.
With a hellgrammite drifting in the current,
We'd fished the shallows with stripped willows.
Y verdad, the cities on either side of the river
Watch one another from the eyes of their televisions.
Their headlines race beneath glass.
They have taken my father's body,
And I do not know where they have laid him.
Glass and light.
Love as the sinker, the line sinking deep.
The last time I saw my father was in a dream,
Seated on every side of the table of ancestors,
And belonging so fully he ceased to exist.
They arrived on the other side at the tree,
At the end of this world,
And the tree drank deeply.
Love as a secret,
Unbearable map.
Tell me, verdad,
Where have you laid the body,
And I will bear him away,
I will bear him away,
I will bear him away.