Dionisio D. Martínez
Did We Betray the
River
Did we betray the river or did the river betray
us? You’ve noticed, I’m
sure, how, under certain conditions, a ladder
leaning on a wall is a draw-
bridge waiting for a sailboat that keeps
delaying its journey, calling
the
man who operates the bridge, layering elaborate excuses so neatly
that
the man only hears one excuse: the boat’s coming, just not yet, not
while
the water’s in control of the situation. The man waits—drawbridge
up,
traffic on hold. Sometimes the world is all patience and silence
and
there is nothing you can do to stir up trouble. The driver who keeps
a
knife beneath the seat is tapping on the dashboard a song coming from
another
car. This is an exception. Others are praying to their private
rivers,
as if the one just ahead were not there: seeing is too easy: one
acquires
increasingly complex needs, like the taste of earth just
turned
by oxen who know the plow as well as a man knows his river. We
know
this blue’s an illusion: the things that shelter us are colorless and
hover
just so, not quite halos and not quite hats, and they can all be named
even
if the names are arbitrary, even if they’re not quite words. Our boat
waits
for the water to go from blue to brown to ocher, as in a Turner
vision—a
realism so crude it borders on beauty, the way beauty
was
meant to touch us: with its repulsive allure, its unwashed mirrors of
heavy
morning fog. We have to look head-on, and learn to forget again.
—in
memoriam: A. O.
Once
a man, always a man. The measure of a man. A shadow of the
measure.
This man, a father, is hibiscus, grand oak, eucalyptus root. This
man,
a soldier, is palm frond and sugar pine and cedar. This one sprouts
the
unexpected branches that will be our shelter. Transmigration is
good
for the soil—the pasture all rot and renewal and crooked trees with
tiny
pears that (by their own admission) would rather grow upwind from
the
world’s incentives. These men have heard eternity’s a cinch, but you
have
to walk without disturbing this quilt of poppies and forget-me-
nots
before you understand that, even here, there’s only so much room
for
the restless—ivy, kudzu, wandering jew. Tough to believe in the end
when
obstacles have the courtesy to step aside. This wall. This gate. This
useless
row of fenceposts—each of them a man who thought he was
alone,
unencumbered by the hiss and the hum of things almost grinding to
a
halt, things bluffing and no one calling them on it; each post a man who
turned
down offers from Narcissus himself; each man declined because
he
would not bow to the drowned, unsettled face looking up at him—two
targets
equidistant from the surface. Such a steadfast march toward the
unforeseen:
lacking water, he reconstructs himself in the sheen of the bent
grass—closing
parenthesis, reminder of the open/empty clause, chronic
pain
and stance of one who prays to the patron saint of best intentions.
You’ve
been sleeping on someone else’s pillows (your head can’t tell
the
difference) and now you wake bewildered by terms like office hours
and
Daylight Savings Time, fearing they are towns you have missed
on
the way. You look down at the ravine. A man is planting a night-
blooming
cereus in the wrong soil. You wish there were something you
could
do, but the beams above you rattle when you try to speak. This is
where
you stand, literally: if you move, if you so much as contemplate
walking
out, and the room implodes, the ceiling—innocent byproduct
of
shelter—will suffer the fate of the roof. Your place in the matter
seemed
clear until you started to rename the things you could’ve had by
now
if you’d only known how to want them. The man falls into the long
ravine.
You try not to stare, and fasten the blinders as you did when
you
passed the woman with three arms—because you didn’t want her to
know
that you knew just how fortunate she was. Especially after all your
ranting
against excess. You had to show her, reminding yourself in the
process,
that (in an utterance beyond words) you had always praised
undeserved
laughter, rivers overflowing, the entrails of a dormant
volcano
scaled by tourists who take their cue from the locals. They
have
no assurances or room for doubt. Just after dusk, they come down
the
hard lava steps with candles in their hands, mocking a mild eruption.