So Many Wars
Even after she moved her suitcases to the villa,
the old man — his uncle — refused to grow flowers,
since they weren’t edible.
To live ninety years without tasting roses,
such a loss, like soldiers dying in a war
far from home.
Summers, until Chernobyl’s death clouds arrived,
she gathered zucchini, tomatoes,
fresh basil from the garden.
Most afternoons, the old man napped
in the rusted green car his nephew’s ex-wife
once drove into a lake at dusk.
Hands raw from digging in the overgrown garden,
she recalls the first time the old man
knocked on the door, asked for sweet coffee.
Between sips, he said, “during the war,
I kissed a French woman.”
What war, she asked, but he had forgotten.
Evenings, after watering the plants,
he rode his Vespa into town, back to his wife,
but talking about the woman in France, he cried.
As the song goes, “the heart sings remembering love.”
She walks by the vineyards clasping her hands
like a mother waiting for her son to return from battle.
The villa is now painted blue. Windows
in her old bedroom open, curtains shiver in the light.
After the old man died, she spent his lire,
the war pension he gave her, on creams & perfumed
powder. What war? She doesn’t know,
just like she doesn’t know if he had to kill
another man to earn his medals. When the woman
who drove into the lake at dusk finally got it right,
her ex-husband sent her flowers.
* * * * *
The Salt Cathedral in Zipaquirá
“Hard to un-learn the art of leaving / when I’ve had good teachers all my life / to show me how it’s done.”
Colombia, 2017
It was never about God, but about gold.
Spaniards liked to revise history
as my mother does, in Spanish & in English.
Quesada, like queso, cheese in Spanish,
the first language I learned.
I sit in the cathedral, a shrine
carved inside a salt mine, a dark,
windowless temple the Muiscas mined.
I’ve come here to pray,
to kneel in front of the altar under
a halite cross lit from above,
incense burning.
I pray I cross the ocean again,
pray I don’t find my suitcase
floating down Río Frío.
Because I’m growing tired
of running
because I’m running out of words
to explain how a river swells
inside me now
and then.
Hard to un-learn the art of leaving
when I’ve had good teachers all my life
to show me how it’s done.
* * * * *
Love Poem for My Brother
When my mother brought him from Colombia
at fifteen to start a new life,
to “Make something of yourself.”
He had never washed a plate or made a bed.
In Grandfather’s house in Bogotá
my brother’s rare forays into the kitchen
were to steal from the maid.
In the US, after school and ESOL class
Miguel would walk into shops,
ask for work in broken English.
After weeks of begging the owner
of a pizza parlor, he stood in a kitchen
washing strangers’ dirty plates.
Maybe that’s why he moved back to Bogotá
for two years and sat at a Zen Center
breathing in, and out, accepting change.
Now in West Virginia, for eight months
he’s been sitting at my kitchen table
staring into space. I talk, chop onions,
tomatoes, steam rice, boil water for pasta.
Today he emptied the dishwasher,
held a wine glass up to the light.