For los abuelos de El Monte, a poem

For the Abuelos of El Monte

The copper-plated bookmark you gave me cuts a rift

at numero veinte, your Father’s most famous lament,

that tremor-voice: Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.

Tonight, I come to you- my fallen abuelos, for healing,

to know that my imagination is merely whirling amidst

the newscasts, that these images appear only in ink:

the huasos hat flying, the unexpected bucks of his horse

too wild for even a cowboy, as if a giant had whipped the reins.

Or el folklorista in the white-washed square of stone

strumming his guitar unstoppably, sending the spinning tops

of schoolchildren spiraling into the Earth where the rare

Carmenere grapes of your vineyards once found root

while Violeta’s lyrics brave the broken sediment and the museum’s

artifacts crack, hurling the tattered identification cards of ancient

residents to swim now beneath the soil we tended, the land

where your kiwis grew. And then the book you saved from its two centavo

rubble heap of masterpieces, that reminded you of the library

you used to keep in Santiago- burned by Pinochet in ’73- emerges

out of my shelf tonight like a smoke signal, Pablo’s sonnets rising

from the shadows of a history no earthquake could quiver,

and your handwriting in the front cover, an inscription signed by a name

I can’t read and can’t recall but can still feel shifting the tides inside my chest,

hitting the fissure in my windpipe that causes breath

to stop, and tears to ripple, that gentle calligraphy slanted

like a rocking-chair: I remember your fingers cupped

Around your ear, your face, wrinkled like the inlets

of the Chilean shore off Isla Negra, leaning forward to hear me

stumble over Neruda’s words and your hand waving like a white flag

through the train’s whistle, volunteering to be my timekeeper,

to remind me what page we were on the next time we should meet.

- by Casey McAlduff