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  • Royal Silence, and: Red Herring
  • Tomás Q. Morín (bio)

Royal Silence

This much I know, as I came down the mountain and the valleys were revealed and my ears clogged so that all I could hear was the inside of my own head, I became a brother for a while to the nineteenth-century hunter who dressed in that green between olive and ivy, the one the Jets still wear, though they haven’t been in the hunt since Broadway Joe wore pantyhose for Beautymist or danced around the Orange Bowl like a buck in rut darting and dodging across a field of blue daisies in late fall, a dumb creature to be sure for all its nobility, and I probably couldn’t ever shoot one, not that I’ve tried, besides someone said you shouldn’t carry loathing in your heart when you aim at a deer or a grouse or a bear, which it would pain me to do, especially the bear, who can sound like a Hare Krishna when he’s happy, his head bobbing, every huff and grunt in a clear timbre, except when he’s angry, the bear that is, his pitch is closer to a bull’s or a bullfrog’s, a bull bullfrog declaiming in a Polish accent that silence is royal, and natural, and that the world only speaks when we have committed a sin or two against it—this is an old ribbit, he says, retold over and over through history; think Memphis and Rwanda, think Chile and Warsaw, think New Delhi and Granada where that romantic disciple of everything green who is dead, who was shot, that sleepless King of the pond, still croaks into the green wind Verde que te quiero verde loud enough to wake the dead and keep them so. [End Page 52]

Red Herring

I say “my love” in a reluctant French, even though I hate the French, not the people who never did me harm, just the nectar-hearted sounds of mon amour, mon chérie, that always live in the right mouth on the brink of tumbling into beauty, a sad truth revealed to me when I overheard a socialite ordering a café noisette on the Champs-Élysées with the same river of honey spilling from the lips of a street vendor offering directions to the nearest toilet. With all apologies to the French, I’m deaf and dumb to harmony, unless it’s guttural, which is my shortcoming, one of many to be sure, and so to the reader whose uncle dresses hair in Marseilles or whose grandparents sell tires or blue eggs or both in the wards of Haiti and New Orleans and Algeria, dear reader, to you who wonder why my tin ear even bothered with your native tongue instead of following Romeo’s lead and saying “O teacher of bright torches,” or Goethe’s Die Leiden . . . for that matter, which is no less accurate no matter how you translate sorrows, my whole point was to use a romance language to persuade you cher lecteur that this is really a poem about love, and not smoked fish or the vagaries of words, although one could love a herring I suppose if the timing was right and the moon shone just so and the fish could order a pizza for two in near perfect French, which I could never do over the phone in any language without repeating myself, [End Page 53] but which my elegant herring would have no trouble doing on account of her thinner lips and mezzo-soprano which has the power to save some pitiful soul from the torture of wrestling my mumbled request for black olives, mushrooms, pepperoni, from English into English. [End Page 54]

Tomás Q. Morín

Tomás Q. Morín is the winner of Boulevard magazine’s Emerging Poets Contest. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Slate, Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, Narrative, and Poetry International.

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