He is trying

He is trying. He is a good person.

He hears the little girl he loves crying and fights strong urges to run to her, where she walks barefoot on the muddy path across from his house, to hug her, squeeze her, and then roar and claw and kill to show her safety, strength, no reason to cry. With her she would not be so poor. She would not need so much.

But he gets tired. At night his dreams torment him: insane laughter, sick hungry children. These things haunt him. He remembers reading long articles on poverty, passionate books on saving the world, and how he wanted to immerse himself in those problems, know these people, live with them, love them, help them. Reading, then, he understood they were victims, that corruption, repression, capitalism—these things were to blame.

Here, however, he is not understanding them, nor they him. There are barriers of language and culture. You can imagine.

So he leaves and heads to the city where people look like him and spend money like he can. He drinks with friends and laughs and complains about the people in his village. They go to strip clubs and he sees very young girls waiting in gas stations, street corners, very late at night, all of it fuzzy because of cheap beer—70 cents a can! Then he goes back to his village and hurts more because he never refreshes himself through these visits, and he is never proud of them. He is ashamed.

But here they talk in incorrect Spanish and he corrects their errors. The mystery of this country, the beauty—like the obsidian rocks that fall from lightning bolts, the sirens who haunt the ocean coast, the gentle volcanoes blanketed with fog, the aroma of coffee plants and rain and the brightly painted houses, all of this is lost. He is trying to get it back.

But he cannot see what they see. He wakes at 4:30 AM to plant corn, heads to the fields with water and a little food and a small group of men and he wants it to be romantic, like Walt Whitman or someone else famous and natural, but it is not. It is frustrating because they cannot teach him well and he is hot and tired and not accustomed to work like this. What´s more, he simply cannot see the holes where they have already planted. Each man holds his line, walking in a curve along the hillside, planting two grains of corn every two feet. He cannot see the difference in the ground, with its leaves and grass and footprints, and so his line weaves back and forth, up and down, and this means he cannot plant corn very well.

The men and boys are brutish and large and lie to girls, get them pregnant. They misbehave in his classes at school. They are ignorant and seem to have no interest in learning anything.

Mostly he wishes the problems just were further away. They need to back up, give him some space, because he is frustrated and tired and when he tries to sleep his cell phone rings at midnight because its alarm function is broken. He thinks of travels to Cartagena, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, of wine bottles and scarfs and more sophisticated things, of metal forks and knives.

He remembers working as a cook in a homeless shelter in Seattle. How minivans and SUV´s with liberal screams of bumper stickers always pulled up on weekends loaded with clothes and food, heavy sacks of canned goods and thick wool sweaters. How happy the donors were, helping!!!, giving!!!, cleaning up, making new. And how he and the kitchen staff always spent the next hour throwing out the shirts no one woud ever wear, even homeless kids, and wondering what in God´s name they could prepare with twenty more cans of green beans and Bean and Bacon soup.

De donde era yo

De donde era yo

Cuando te conocí tu hermana me preguntó ¿de dónde era yo?
Y hace tanto tiempo desde que me fui que hasta a mi se me olvidó de donde era
Y mucho menos porque importaba

¿Basta decir que soy del mismo mundo tuyo, de la sangre tuya, que busco
El mismo amor tuyo, el calor de tus brazos, la delgadez de tus dedos en mi pelo,
Tus besos arrastrándome hasta la mañana, dándome paz por las noches como ésta, con el viento aullando y las ramas de los palos cayendo en las calles?

Ahorita todo afuera parece tan peligroso y frio. Las estrellas no me dejan.
Su luz me asusta. Salgo al patio y me pierdo en las constelaciones, los colores infinitos.
Desde que te conocí este viento no ha calmado.
Creo tener valor suficiente para amarte.

Hace tres días vi pasar los azacuanes, la larga cola tan alta, fueron miles,
Regresando del Caribe.

Todo cambiará. Ya sé. Y sé también que no te conozco tanto, ni cerca de lo suficiente para escribirte así. Sé que me equivoco, pero
Ni modo. Ya no tengo patria.
Acá en este poema, de aquí soy.

Y tengo que aguantar perder/te/todo de más.

letter to a friend

and how is life in seattle and your crazy plans for latin american adventures and kayla and all that jazz ad are you still riding the bus with your stereo whistling at girls because i can really whistle at girls now, i mean, the long and thin salvadoran whistle, high cool you look great in those pants whistle i mean you should fucking hear me!!!!!!!!!!!