After the Fall of the Dictatorship, and: Unmarried, Late Twenties

After the Fall of the Dictatorship

I lived in Spain so long ago, the prime ministerFrom that time no longer can recall—thoughHe is still alive—serving as the prime minister of Spain.I read this in the online Spanish newspaper'sCoverage of the death of the leader of the pce—The Communist Carrillo—who reentered SpainAfter a thirty-year exile, at the same time I arrivedTo teach English to little Ernesto, not a live-in tutor,But one who lived close, and close to the railroadThat brought me to the ibm employees to teachEnglish, and the heartfelt, lonely woman who offered meHer hand when I got woozy watching her full lipsRepeat, The pencil is on the floor. In retrospect,It was bliss in that dawn to be alive, thoughThe labor strife, the police clubs that hit me hard on the ribs,The miscarriages of children no one wantedTo bring to term, making love in windowless roomsTo young widows who loved you, they said, that nightOnly, and then watching the owner fire the strikingLanguage teachers, the dust from the drainedBanks of the river rising from the ardent soccer playersAll made life uncomfortably too alive, too vivid.Even the egg salesman at the open-air marketWho sold eggs only, his mother silent beside the cratesIn the back of his stall, even he was too generous,Offering me the chance to watch tv in his home,The tv they had worked a decade to buy, he claimed.Even the beach where you'd find not shells but Claws from chickens, tidily knotted condoms, peltsFrom something once alive. I'd swim out pastReason's limits where no one else swam, findingClose at hand plastic bags drifting like jellyfish,And drift myself, watching the black-hulled tankersSlowly come into port, slowly leave the port,Not knowing that would be the image that would stayWith me, the huge, quiet, cloud-staining shipsThat would come to me in my dreams, bringing goodsTo shore, then soundlessly taking everything away.

Unmarried, Late Twenties

When I was a child, I fought as a child, but when I became a man,I could hardly bear the thought of kicking in someone's stomachAnd head, the way I had seen other men do, usually at a night basketball game,

Or football, or at the bar where the fight that started with cue sticksWould take itself outside and one man would use his hands to cover his faceAs the others, who were offended, tried to kick some sense into his spine

Until he became almost senseless. It was always hard to keep onDrinking after that, or find something else to do, so I'd just drive aroundUntil I'd dead-end at the river and look out into what I could only hear,

And I sometimes would feel soothed by the way the river calmly took everything awayAnd replaced it with something else that was just the same, the over and overRiding on the volumes of under-water that I could barely imagine, a kind of tank

Of pressure that pushed uncomfortably against its sides, and I'd thinkSometimes of the Indians who used to live here when the river had fish,Before they were taken away by guns and cannon and filth,

And I sometimes thought of setting the river on fire or clocking a tree,But would usually settle for lifting some rock about the size of my headAnd hurling it, great grenade, then listening as it opened up the black water

And settled down probably only a few feet from shore, if that.Then I'd go back home where I lived in my late twenties and think ofWays out of the fix and resist, until I was on my knees, the prayer

I would pray about meeting a woman I thought could take me out of this.