I still hear your voice in the sighs of the moon
like
children yelling in broken - Spanish
outside our
window,
"Mira la luna & how it shines
in pools of
grease," they say -
"Like the incandescent blue
eyes of that
abuelita who used to give us tortillas,
Mira!..."
... and my tears rest on sleepless pillow
cases, casting colors of oil in water;
each color a
different you still
breathing...
... holding my hand - a full
breast
held to an infant's mouth - nurturing my
ripped red
and calloused
skin torn from hours of working steel -
Mending them like
objects that crews of men
crafted
in the steel mill, those rod and irons that
are
as useless as air
is to a man
who does not breath it -
and you were the rise
and fall in my lungs,
that wind that lifted
clouds in the sky,
blowing curtains from their
sill
to let the sun rest on our bed,
in the early morning
you were,
the laughter of children that
at
times hummed melodies in the park
like the
sound of light that gets trapped
between
ripples of water -
where we used to fish in the
mountains,
where the smell of earth was
sweetened
with rootsembedded in the belly
of
your stomach,
Like Earth -
a farmer's lettuce crop - my hands
fragile from tugging at you
again and again...
And I wake to the silence of dishes
falling on
the kitchen floor
where you were harvested
well before your time,
when the earth grows
cold under the frost
of a hard winter...
And
the moon no longer breathes
its blue air