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The Legal Studies Forum
Volume 30, Number 1/2 (2006) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum Lawyers & Poets Scenes | | Dreams IRIS GOMEZ _________________ Light-years A child recedes from the window to bed as her parents walk out of the house. Gone, the light of the sun reflected on the faces of the child and two suited brothers, hand in hand, before the camera clicked. Gone, the lamplight and its bright fish, swimming against layers of shade as if they felt the sea. Even the sky leaves the last of the light to darkness for one who falls into that sleep alone from which a childhood passes. [693]
The Green World the room was made of a summer evening champagne air filtered through mosquito netting above a child's bed its wood painted dark green like the bottom of a canoe or the leaves of rubber trees the child paddled her canoe to the room in her grandfather's house leaves brushed her skin mosquito netting waved lightly as a sail above her face so still she could almost hear his heartbeat she dipped her hands in the river of her grandfather's life the Magdalena rolled in a constant rain of evening dying before she realized evenings die and she paddled to where there was no such solitudealways the gliding through the green world's pale light [694]
Café Con Leche Down the mint green corridors of a public hospital, my sandals slapped to the tap of my mother's heels. I tried to outpace the echo- Jackson Memorial, artificially brightened. People in wildly matched clothing. A cacophony of accents. The hot shuffle through air-conditioned wings for free shots, checkups, or bad news. On the wings of a tiny transistor, I nearly flew out of there with the easy come, easy go of the world's broken hearts, but the ride would have ended the same. Nowhere to land but under the canopied window of the Cuban sandwich shop. Intact half of a family- mother and daughter, considering our fortunes in a single café con leche between us. [695]
Oranges, A River I. She is marching toward the tip of the peninsula. Black roads, trees only as tall as the girl bearing heat on her shoulders. In her pockets: oranges a hand puzzles over-the intact faith of molecules, clinging to each other. Witness to the fall of her father's sanity in the house with the patio fringed by citrus trees, she had peeled his words away to their corrupted core. When the others turned, refused to see his mind rusting in air, reason itself evaporated, and she fled. II. All day, she walks toward rest and the imagined glass of cold water. Imagines a thousand glasses spilling on this flattest of asphalts. The simple rule of gravity. The unknown power of fate. Her childhood was a glimmer of oranges, topping trees long passed; a field of illusions; the ruptured halo of the cord she dangled from in that first blind state- how to see beyond Florida, to where the Earth might prove round again? [696]
III. Evening lifts the heat off her shoulders; black anhingas lift their weighted wings as water below them slowly moves the thick grass. Somewhere north, the river's heart is a mother's-breaking into small capillaries a great breath blows through. IV. But if a river moves past rotting trees, their tangle breeds-long pods set adrift on quiet water, like baby mummies to find their souls. In such darkness, a girl rises, entwined in family as hardwoods in the arms of strangler figs. Mangrove, hammock, new land must amass in the interior waters where an orange lights its own way. [697]
Dark Matter It's not only rain, indifferent as rooftops, beating back human talk, that erases. How to hold on to a snail, a newborn, the way we used to cry over love, to what we felt at all. So much behind us. Tired, we drive home from work, watch television, almost intuit something, and sigh while winged scientists search our skies for missing particles of light, the measure of time, floating out there in the night. Will they find our light, our permanence, unfurled like that old dark matter, hope? [698]
Farmer's Child A child, running down the hill, fills the frosted landscape with the wild blue flame of her eyes. Poof! Disappear: the apple trees; barns; the field; fields. A lone apple dribbles down the flat, black highways of the world. Her mother watches, wants to fire at winter's geometries hurling toward her child, her coatless child who faces them all in her armor of consciousness, her lace dress. [699]
Jigsaw - Seattle, Washington All of us love snow. We're tall, spirited, dreamy. Men want us because they want something, and we remind them of it. ‡ Sparkling clean in our little blue hats, we cut straight through the ocean. We have a purpose. Our paths cross each other like the legs of a girl in white tights as she practices her tendus. ‡ A star explodes, scatters me into the middle of the world. I, Master of Illusion, blur sky and water. ‡ Clouds in waiting beg me to, so I disappear. See how the sky-curtain parts and my top appears- a white Acropolis guarding the ocean of hope. The key to my missing facade: your faith in me. [700]
‡ To dazzled skies,we twirl- parachute puffs of pink, green, purple, tangerine- and land you soundlessly in Puget Sound. [701]
Agapé A train of skies carried the white smoke of clouds across a summer that lifted me to greater and greater blues until, when I had fallen for the uncut emerald of the Cascades' inner valleys, touched the heart of an orchid so small it might have broken, and been swept, wind-blown, into the arms of glaciers- all the living called me from their canyons, and I, fully exposed to love, called back. [702]
Night Sailing On a certain night, wind is an instrument, wrecked against poor skies. All matter blown loose from its moorings, past and future incite the pines that loom with large arms. One wooden boat holds the world: a pair of hands, lamp, deck of cards. The present-more accurate than a map, thinned by time like our lives. We've forgotten more than what's bad or ugly. Swirling in the omnipotent dark are the lost stars. [703]
Fusion We stand in front of a red brick building where we met as college students, surrounded by spires breaking through the even blue of sky as points of the cosmos rip from their fire. We put our arms around each other, the space between, a child who might succumb to the fatal air of time. Among the breezes veering by, we refuge in what brick and leaves and cheery students felt all day as sunlight, burning logs in every center, emblazing us through dark. [704]
Son Son: sound, tune,Waves washed rock in beats I slept to, crawled to, rode my wordless first uncertainties upon. Flutters of sound, each moment crushed in others. Everything hit shore. Splash. Splash. Water, breaking earth. Earth, salting water. [705]
Doppler Bells ring from a fortress above a thousand hands of water, each holding up the lost diamond of the Caribbean, flaring a blue cotinga to one sky, a cardinal to the other, and in between: the proud macaw, silk cord of color through his city-Cartagena- loosening the breeze. Breeze, pulling a sunset of fruit from dark green leaves. Dark-brushing every eyelid. From this star, parked like a tourist above that sleeping city where I was born, I say my prayers against the laws of science, which might return a diminished spectrum- as if the origin of any life would float away, leaving light, an old fisherman, to drag in what was left. [706]
Blue Arm As if the roar were torn from the pastel houses of a coastline, and in the U.S., years later, it rained a salty rain, misplaced- an ocean looked for me like a story that broke away from the words in some new kind of fiction. From Isla Negra, you reached out with an old fishing net, turned aquamarine by all the summers of childhood, as my grandfather once reached for our dog, to pull a bone from his throat and save him. Your blue arm fished out the splintering norte and brought me to my senses. [707]
The Two Tías Spinster aunts, one might have called them in another time. They came from where sisters could grow old without husbands, fold up nightgowns together each morning, then wonder what the day might bring? Nieces and nephews to fill with dichos- De los arroyos chicos se hacen los grandes ríos. Small streams make big rivers. Pero para qué echar agua al mar? Why throw water into the sea? All through our childhood, we waited politely for suitcases to open on handmade dresses and bocadillo. We waded through lavender, cumin, the fragrance of secrets our exhausted mothers had lost all interest in. And after we had almost forgotten the rhythm of the dichos, our younger aunt's illness called us back- to nibble on cakes again, sip our tinto from miniature painted china cups and help the other aunt keep the secret. Cancer, washing away our tía's bones, a shore life deserted to feather voice. Palabras y plumas -words and feathers- [708]
el viento las lleva -the wind takes away. Mas vale poco que nada. A little is better than none. [709]
Safari 1. In the beginning, we walked on all fours. Our sky was generous, near to us with its few clouds. Monsoons came, scattered us beyond that first horizon- Africa's children, moving slowly to twilight with dark-haired wildebeest, single file. 2. That sky was her robe; her flame-of-the-forest lips speak our mother tongue; her hands of ancient, twisted baobab reach toward the pale mirage of childhood, shining in dust- in dust-devils, her longing to resurrect, from the soda lake of memory, baby teeth and bones asleep in the water. [710]
Why We Let Go Because the stars are far away, too small, and we could never hold them anyway, and if we could, the heat might kill us- so we blow out our longing for them, hoping that like a birthday they'll come again. Because- from our darkened planet, the ground might release an enchanted slipper. A dancer, to tap out those last sparks of summer fire. Because desire too crackles with meteors- no one knowing if they'll hit or trail fresh stars for our children to count like sheep as they learn to let go of counting. We don't know why we let go of what we count on, why the numbers, lucky or not, pirouette from reach, while our sleeping hands, like compasses, point out at the beyond. [711]
Iris Gomez was born in Cartagena, Colombia and immigrated to the U.S. as a child. She has an MFA in poetry and works as a public interest attorney in Boston with the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute in Boston. She teaches immigration law at Boston University School of Law. Gomez is the author of two collections of poetry, Housicwhissick Blue: Poetry of the Blue Hills Reservation (Mellen Poetry Press, 2003) and When Comets Rained (CustomWords, 2004). She is currently at work on a novel. The poems here all appear in Iris Gomez, When Comets Rained (CustomWords 2004). "Light-years" was first published in River Oak Review, "The Green World" in compost, "Café Con Leche" in Baybury Review, "Oranges, A River" in the G.W. Review, "Dark Matter" in Quantum Tao, "Farmer's Child" in The Hawai'i Pacific Review, "Agapé" in Rockhurst Review, "Night Sailing" in Small Brushes, "Doppler" in Visions International, "The Two Tias," in Curbside Review, "Why We Let Go" in Comstock Review. |
