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

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

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.