Pilgrims
With the sun fevered on his flesh,
he’d traverse our driveway, take,
with each step, mental measurements
of the ground, the grass, practicing,
beneath his mumbled breath, the pitch
he had pitched in neighborhoods for years.
I’d imagine his journey from his truck
to our door as something biblical, part
of a story where a man — the progeny
of sin that doesn’t skip a generation —
must leave his wife and son at home,
search the most obscure corners of the earth
for work. And this was it, a constellation
of motor homes, half-built houses
and houses no larger than shacks,
which regardless of what profit they yielded,
he kept returning to, because men like him,
as I assumed from his sweat and sun-
branded skin, had crossed the same river
my father crossed to get here, and knew
what it meant to trek the limbo
where a country ends. And because
my father poured his body into twelve-hour
shifts, they shared, without knowing it
or each other, more than brotherhood
or bond, and more than I could understand
when I’d answer the door, tell him,
in a Spanish that wasn’t mine to own,
that we had our own equipment,
that we would soon mow the lawn,
tame a world I was happy to describe
not as neglected, but overgrown.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
Postcard
Across the half-opened, heat-worn window,
a sharp and sudden glare pierces the wrinkled
tint of glass, thaws the drowsy map of creases
on my temples, cheeks, on my eyes still too sticky
to open completely. My reflection, phantom-like
and weak, yawns slowly into frame, studies me
as I restart my game, count the steady flow
of passing plates: the Oklahoma’s, Arizona’s,
one lost Hawaii far from anything that mirrors
paradise — the sea swapped for mirages on the steep
humps of interstate, on the cloudless and drought-
parched plains, where acres of grazing cattle,
thinned almost to carcasses, blur quickly into
a camera flash. See the flash, see the boy,
see the jagged shades of anonymous trees drape
the hills all day, feel the buckled claustrophobia
of his backseat body, as his father’s voice,
heavy with the hum of asphalt, announces
the miles they still have left. This is a cross-state
drive of faded billboards, endless sagebrush,
crowded rest stops and unemployed landmarks,
a countryside the boy quietly grows to accept,
until they reach the first signs of city life
at a motel parking lot, where his family stops,
checks and settles in, inhales the stale history
of their room’s neglect, the whitewashed
wallpaper peeling back like dead skin,
the watermarks of broken pipes still bleeding
through the floral-patterned designs,
and the off-colored lines of missing landscape
paintings that left only a stained remnant of art.
Even with their absence, with the running
faucet, television static, the boy listens to his
silhouetted mother at the doorway,
to the soft creak as she leans against
the splintered frame, speaks to the faceless
maid with a posture he can’t pronounce,
with the ease in which they exchange accounts
of their former lives, the slow, back and forth
roll of their Spanish tongues echoed with
an accent of diaspora, a past he doesn’t need
her translation to understand, and doesn’t want
now that night, glazed in a string of theme park
lights, mutes him into a first-time awe,
a newfound sense of ordinariness walking
blindly through the crowd, or with the warm
and soda-scented breeze hugging him as he watches
the rusted myriad of rides, stares down at the height
of his own legs swaying from a Ferris wheel car,
weightless on that iron constellation of fun,
that clockwise cycle of perspective lasting
just enough, that when he steps off, finds
his mother and father standing like aged pillars
of salt, he’s sure he’s captured a life
meant for someone else.