12-1-2020
John Murillo
DISTANT LOVER (OR, WHEN YOU’RE TEACHING IN AMHERST AND, WHILE ON A LATE NIGHT WALK, YOUR WIFE CALLS FROM BROOKLYN TO SAY GOODNIGHT)
The dead of February, and everything
sexual. So sexual the icicles skirting the
barn.
Sexual the animals huddled inside,
shivering. Sexual the cloud disappearing,
appearing again, from your half-open
mouth. The moon swollen bright. Sexual the
trees, stark
naked, all their branches spread and
undulating in the wind. Sexual the tundra.
Sexual
the blackest snow by the road, made blacker
by the city worker’s plow. Sexual, the
snowman leaning in a midnight yard. So
sexual
dead February, the small town windows lit
from inside, fogging, watching you burn.
DOLORES, MAYBE.
I’ve never spoken to anyone about this. Until now, until you.
I slept once in a field beyond the
riverbank, a flock of nightjars watching
over me.
That was the summer a farmer found his daughter
hanging in the hayloft, and wished, for the first
time, he had not touched her so.
I wish I could say we were close—the girl and
I, I mean—but only knew her to wave hello,
and walked her, once, halfway up the road
before turning finally into my grandmother’s yard.
This was Ontario, California. 1983.
Which is to say, there was no river.
And I wouldn’t know a nightjar if it bit me.
But the girl was real. And the day they found her, that was
real. And the dress she wore, same as on our walk—
periwinkle, she called it; I called it blue, blue
with bright yellow flowers all over
—the dress and the flowers, they too were real.
And on our walk, I remember, we cut through the rail
yard, and came upon a dead coyote lying near the tracks.
A frail and dusty heap of regret, he was companion to no one.
Stone still, staring. Our shadows stretched long and covering the animal.
She told me something, I want to say, about loneliness.
Something I’ve since forgotten, the way I’ve forgotten—
though I can see her face as if she were standing right here—her very
name. Let’s call her Dolores, from dolor. Spanish for anguish.
And whatever the sky, however lovely that
afternoon, I remember mostly the wind,
how a breeze unraveled what was left of a braid,
and when I tried to brush from Dolores’s
brow a few loose strands, how she flinched,
how she ran the rest of the way home,
how I never saw her after that,
except when they carried her from the barn—her periwinkle
dress, her blue legs and arms, and the fields
ablaze with daisies.
I spent the rest of that summer in the rail yard
with my dead coyote, watching trains loaded and leaving.
All summer long, I’d pelt him with stones.
All summer long, I’d use the stones to spell the girl’s name—
Dolores, maybe—in the dirt.
All summer long, fire ants crawled over and between each
letter—her name, now, its own small town.
A season of heat and heavy rains washed my coyote to nothing.
Only teeth and a few stubborn bones
that refused, finally, to go down.
Weeks into autumn, someone found the father
hanged from the same groaning tie-beams,
the hayloft black with bottle flies.
But that was 1983. Ontario, California.
Which is to say, the bottle flies are dead. So, too, the ants. And neither field nor barn is
where I left it.
I’ve never spoken to anyone about this. Until now, until you.
I gathered a handful of my coyote’s bones, his teeth, and strung them all on
fishing wire—
a talisman to ward off anguish. A talisman I hold out to you now. Please. Come closer. Take
this from my hand.
VARIATION ON A THEME BY ELIZABETH BISHOP
Start with loss. Lose everything. Then lose it all again.
Lose a good woman on a bad day. Find a better
woman, then lose five friends chasing her. Learn to
lose as if
your life depended on it. Learn that your life depends on
it. Learn it like karate, like riding a bike. Learn it, master
it.
Lose money, lose time, lose your natural mind.
Get left behind, then learn to leave others. Lose and
lose again. Measure a father’s coffin against a
cousin’s crashing T-cells. Kiss your sister through
prison glass. Know why your woman’s not
answering her phone.
Lose sleep. Lose religion. Lose your wallet in El Segundo.
Open your window. Listen: the last slow notes
of a Donny Hathaway song. A child crying. Listen:
a drunk man is cussing out the moon. He sounds like
your dead uncle, who, before he left, lost a leg
to sugar. Shame. Learn what’s given can be taken; what can be taken,
will. This you can bet on
without losing. Sure as nightfall and an empty bed.
Lose
and lose again. Lose until it’s second nature. Losing
farther, losing faster. Lean out your open window,
listen: the child is laughing now. No, it’s the drunk man
again in the street, losing his voice, suffering each
invisible star.
-from Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way Books 2020), selected by Fall 2020 PoemoftheWeek.com Guest Editor Angela Narcisco Torres
John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections, Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher 2010, Four Way 2020), finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award, and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way Books 2020). His honors include a Pushcart Prize, the J Howard and Barbara MJ Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Cave Canem Foundation, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Best American Poetry 2017, 2019, and 2020. He is an assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University and also teaches in the low residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada College.