Читать книгу Dusk & Dust - Esteban Rodríguez - Страница 10
ОглавлениеMid-August. The last of July’s clouds curdle
like expired milk, stain the dry Bermuda grass
with shifting Rorschach shadows, and with a sense
the afternoon will offer nothing more than sweat
and stale air. I sit and watch the parched cactus
perched along the splintered porch-rail: pot-ridden,
small, ripe with polka-dotted patches of green skin
peeling off, with a crown of spines cloaked
in a history of dirt, and worn by the sudden flares
of gravel rising locust-like around our home,
feeding every notion that the rain has fled,
become a fugitive spread like folklore in the north.
Not even God can save this place from geography,
not even the devil wants his fever back, an old spell
he cast, but couldn’t force himself to love,
as the rare breeze I love scuttles across my father’s
barren scalp, then moves down the bandana noosed
around his neck, the brown and sweat-clotting pores
of middle-age flesh, that entire arthritic skeleton
that resurrects into its daily chores again, relentless
like the sun, and that like the open grave of land
he was born on, has evolved to embrace the slow
embalming heat; the blisters, the burns, the small
stampede of mangy cattle he wrangles in our corral.
Though I feel the need to help him with another
day’s work, I hold back when his body language
suggests my hands are too young and handsome,
when I see his thick and scabbed calluses mapped
on his palms, and feel my own gripping the soft pad
of a ballpoint pen, sketching the cactus and him
along my textbook margins, because even if
this afterschool image was fading before I started,
decomposing like papyrus, at least there’s enough
space here for them to live, and for me to sketch
myself between them, let my stick-figure body
bleed through every page, wondering who,
if anyone, will find these portraits next year,
if they’ll study the way our faces melted, visualize
what little life there was for us to absorb.
