Dear
Tom: “ice age coming”
Shall
I write to you
about
the war
in
2001 words
or
less, tell you
I
can still
read
your
dreams
late
at
night
when
the
moon
is down
and
your soul
goes
wandering
for
a bit. The
words
you’d
murmur
under
the
twilight
of
beer perhaps,
or
the literal
spells
you’d cast
that
one time
you
came to
visit
me in
Alamosa
with
your
new wife.
I’d
been
your
best man
the
week
before
and now
you
wanted to see
the
mountains
where
I lived.
Back
when you
lived
in Berkeley
for
a year they
say
you cracked—
I
wasn’t sure anymore
hoping
you were
an
agent of some kind
for
the unknown.
Our
lives for example—
fine
tuned to a war
that
didn’t appear
in
your lifetime.
But
now I
know
the brave
ocean
spoke
its
truth to you
somewhere
near
Dover
in the late
summer
and she
was
holding your
hand
as that’s all
she
could do. To day
the
rain is steep
steady,
cold. I watched
the
last Morning
Glories
unfold, light
blue
white in a green heaping
bush
on the fence. In two
weeks
they'll start making
seeds.
I turn at
The
reversal in weather—
now’s
the time for looking
at
what you see.
What
I see is unencumbered
Crabapple
sprouting
unperturbed
Maple
making
its way in the spring.
So
what can I tell you of
the
Maple sprouts, the propellered
seeds
twirling like dancers
to
earth, trapped in the sidewalk
some
surviving to become little
trees
in the grass. My pretty
face
made of paint and ashes
is
what I have left for you.
Plasticine
pieces of a life to a
shuddering,
curtain drawing
dream.
That you are
alive
somewhere and conquering
The
South Peak one more time.
Man
Reading (after the painting by John Singer Sargent)
What
is he reading, what is he dreaming?
The
thick blunt brush strokes
of
his book lean out at us, dissolve
up
close. So it must be,
for
the text is about love, the story
is
always a marriage plot woven
in
the grim air he breathes. Slim
cheroot
near his lips, and his eyes
closed
or focused on the unknown:
there’s a planet in the one book
there’s a planet in the one book
he’s
reading, the streets and gutters
the
homes are not unlike his because
they
are ours, gnarly fractured old
farmhouses
littering the suburbs.
And
in a way he read the future
where
some of us may fail and the story
of
the great climb down to the green
dying
metropoli of the Midwest
is
a song to listen to, a song
the
great trains carry at midnight.
Perhaps
he is reading about Chicago,
perhaps
he is reading of Philly,
the
ballparks, the restaurants
the
great chemical smokestacks
linear
bridges and vegetable
stands.
Perhaps the words
are
drowning him like the great
green
sea which surrounds him
nameless.
Having read
and
slept and smoked I would go
out
into the pre-modern industrial night
where
the sky is aglow, yellow ochre,
like
the atmosphere of his room.
The
text as blunt as breadsticks.
***
Albino Carrillo, a sixth generation native New Mexican, received a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Arizona State University in 1993, and a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of New Mexico in 1986. He has published poetry in many literary journals, including The Antioch Review, Puerto Del Sol, Blue Mesa Review, CALIBAN, The South Dakota Review, Columbia: A Journal of Art and Literature, Sou'Wester, and World Order. Carrillo's poems are anthologized in both Library Bound: A Saratoga Anthology (Saratoga Springs Library Press, 1996), and The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (University of Arizona Press, 2007). Carrillo's first book of poems is In the City of Smoking Mirrors (University of Arizona Press, 2004). Before teaching at the University of Dayton, Carrillo taught in the English Department at the University of Minnesota, and at Union College of New York, where he held a Post-Doctoral Fellowship. Carrillo is a Pushcart Prize nominee. His latest book of poems, Uranium Days, is available through Argus House Press.
