by Ada Limón
or an eagle, but a poor suffering son, and even
if I hate these words and the drug that dragged
him there, he is etched in my mind, named
in language forever and only as: dead boy,
dead boy, and gone.
WHAT I WANT TO REMEMBER
Right before General Vallejo’s home,
with its stately stone and yellow walls,
there’s a field along the footpath
where spring rains bring the frogs,
a whole symphony of them, breaking
open the hours just after the sun
sinks into the Pacific Ocean only
an hour away. Why am I placing
you here? I’m on a plane going west
and all the humans are so loud
it hurts the blood. But once I sat
next to a path that was still warm
from the day’s heat, cross-legged
with my friend named Echo who taught
me how to amplify the strange sound
the frogs made by cupping my ears.
I need to hold this close within me,
when today’s news is full of dead children,
their faces opening their mouths for air
that will not come. Once I was a child too
and my friend and I sat for maybe an hour,
eyes adjusting to the night sky, cupping
and uncupping our ears to hear
the song the tenderest animals made.
OVERPASS
The road wasn’t as hazardous then,
when I’d walk to the steel guardrail,
lean my bendy girl body over, and stare
at the cold creek water. In a wet spring,
the water’d run clear and high, minnows
mouthing the sand and silt, a crawdad
shadowed by the shore’s long reeds.
I could stare for hours, something
always new in each watery wedge—
a bottle top, a man’s black boot, a toad.
Once, a raccoon’s carcass, half under
the overpass, half out, slowly decayed
over months. I’d check on him each day,
watching until the white bones of his hand
were totally skinless and seemed to reach
out toward the sun as it hit the water,
showing all five of his sweet tensile fingers
still clinging. I don’t think I worshipped
him, his deadness, but I liked the evidence
of him, how it felt like a job to daily
take note of his shifting into the sand.
THE MILLIONTH DREAM OF YOUR RETURN
At the tequila tasting bar called Izquierda Iguana
where the silvery agave plants were pure hydroponic
and upside down so you had to swerve around them
to get served, I suddenly remembered you were coming
in that evening, a special return. I rushed to the cavernous loft
where the power was all on one ancient grid so the lights
flickered each time someone opened the refrigerator,
and put on the white dress that you had once said made you look
like an angel with its real swan feathers and fool’s gold.
Then I sat for a long time in the night and waited. At dawn,
I woke with feathers sticky on my tongue and I remembered
you were dead all over again.
BALD EAGLES IN A FIELD
She was almost gone at that point,
enough so we could start to make plans.
Bright for a February near Fishtown,
Skagit Bay another sun on the earth
shining upward. On our way for groceries,
we saw one eagle in a field, then another.
I had never seen two bald eagles together
like that, and it felt like a sign, something
that would shift things forever, but it wasn’t
really, it was just a moment, dad and daughter
pulled over in the car, silent and breathing
for a singular instance before all we knew
took flight.
I’M SURE ABOUT MAGIC
After the artist Dario Robleto
With dust from every bone in the body,
and the strange material trinitite (a glass
forged in the heat of the 1945 atomic blasts),
the artist makes a spell for the dead. Me?
I cross the wide river the same color as trees,
thinking what could I excavate, melt, smash
of yours. The copper pots you bought to last
turned into a heavy necklace for all to see
like Cleopatra and her beloved Caesar coins,
late August, hot, overripe trailing black
dewberries cooked into an inky purple stain
for a tattoo on the wrist, juniper-laden cold gin
mixed with beeswax and lit from a stolen match
all wasted like your too-short life down the drain.
WONDER WOMAN
Standing at the swell of the muddy Mississippi
after the urgent care doctor had just said, Well,
sometimes shit happens, I fell fast and hard
for New Orleans all over again. Pain pills swirled
in the purse along with a spell for later. It’s taken
a while for me to admit, I am in a raging battle
with my body, a spinal column thirty-five degrees
bent, vertigo that comes and goes like a DC Comics
villain nobody can kill. Invisible pain is both
a blessing and a curse. You always look so happy,
said a stranger once as I shifted to my good side
grinning. But that day, alone on the riverbank,
brass blaring from the Steamboat Natchez,
out of the corner of my eye, I saw a girl, maybe half my age,
dressed, for no apparent reason, as Wonder Woman.
She strutted by in all her strength and glory, invincible,
eternal, and when I stood to clap (because who wouldn’t have),
she bowed and posed like she knew I needed a myth—
a woman, by a river, indestructible.
THE REAL REASON
I don’t have any tattoos is not my story to tell. It’s my
mother’s. Once, walking down Bedford Avenue in my twenties,
I called her as I did, as I do. I told her how I wanted a tattoo
on the back of my neck. Something minor, but permanent,
and she is an artist, I wanted her to create the design, a symbol,
a fish I dream of every night. An underwater talisman, a mother’s
gift on my body. To be clear, I thought she’d be honored. But do we
ever really know each other fully? A silence like a hospital room; she
was in tears. I swore then that I wouldn’t get one. Wouldn’t let a needle
touch my neck, my arm, my torso. I’d stay me, my skin the skin
she welcomed me into the world with. It wasn’t until later that
I knew it wasn’t so much the tattoo, but the marking, the idea
of scars. What you don’t know (and this is why this is not my story)
is that my mother is scarred from burns over a great deal of her body.
Most from an explosion that took her first child she was carrying
in her belly, others from the skin grafts where they took skin to cover
what needed it. She was in her late twenties when that happened.
Outside her studio in the center of town. You have to understand,
my mother is beautiful. Tall and elegant, thin and strong. I have not
known her any other way, her skin that I mapped with my young
fingers, its strange hardness in places, its patterns like quilts here,
riverbeds there. She’s wondrous, preternatural, survived fire,
&n
bsp; the ending of an unborn child. Heat and flame and death, all made
her into something seemingly magical, a phoenixess. What I know
now is she wanted something else for me. For me to wake each
morning and recognize my own flesh, for this one thing she made—
me—to remain how she intended, for one of us
to make it out unscathed.
THE YEAR OF THE GOLDFINCHES
There were two that hung and hovered
by the mud puddle and the musk thistle.
Flitting from one splintered fence post
to another, bathing in the rainwater’s glint
like it was a mirror to some other universe
where things were more acceptable, easier
than the place I lived. I’d watch for them:
the bright peacocking male, the low-watt
female, on each morning walk, days spent
digging for some sort of elusive answer
to the question my curving figure made.
Later, I learned that they were a symbol
of resurrection. Of course they were,
my two yellow-winged twins feasting
on thorns and liking it.
NOTES ON THE BELOW
For Mammoth Cave National Park
Tell me—humongous cavern, tell me, wet limestone, sandstone
caprock, bat-wing, sightless translucent cave shrimp,
this endless plummet into more of the unknown,
tell me how one keeps secrets for so long.
All my life, I’ve lived above the ground,
car wheels over paved roads, roots breaking through concrete,
and still I’ve not understood the reel of this life’s purpose.
Not so much living, but a hovering without sense.
What’s it like to be always night? No moon, but a few lit-up
circles at your many openings. Endless dark, still time
must enter you. Like a train, like a green river?
Tell me what it is to be the thing rooted in shadow.
To be the thing not touched by light (no, that’s not it)—
to not even need the light? I envy; I envy that.
Desire is a tricky thing, the boiling of the body’s wants,
more praise, more hands holding the knives away.
I’ve been the one who has craved and craved until I could not see
beyond my own greed. There’s a whole nation of us.
To forgive myself, I point to the earth as witness.
To you, your Frozen Niagara, your Fat Man’s Misery,
you with your 400 miles of interlocking caves that lead
only to more of you, tell me
what it is to be quiet, and yet still breathing.
Ruler of the Underlying, let me
speak to both the dead and the living as you do. Speak
to the ruined earth, the stalactites, the eastern small-footed bat,
to honor this: the length of days. To speak to the core
that creates and swallows, to speak not always to what’s
shouting, but to what’s underneath asking for nothing.
I am at the mouth of the cave. I am willing to crawl.
SUNDOWN & ALL THE DAMAGE DONE
Nearly nine and still the sun’s not slunk
into its nightly digs. The burnt-meat smell
of midweek cookouts and wet grass
hangs in the air like loose familiar summer
garb. Standing by the magnolia tree, I think
if I were to live as long as she did, I’d have
eleven more years. And if I were to live as long
as him, I’d have forty-nine. As long as him,
I’d be dead already. As long as her, this
would be my final year. There’s a strange
contentment to this countdown, a nodding
to this time, where I get to stand under
the waxy leaves of the ancient genus, a tree
that appeared before even the bees, and
watch as fireflies land on the tough tepals
until each broad flower glows like a torchlit
mausoleum. They call the beetle’s conspicuous
bioluminescence “a cold light,” but why then
do I still feel so much fire?
ON A LAMPPOST LONG AGO
I don’t know what to think of first
in the list
of all the things that are disappearing: fishes, birds, trees, flowers, bees,
and languages too. They say that if historical rates are averaged,
a language will die every four months.
In the time it takes to say I love you, or move in with someone,
or admit to the child you’re carrying, all the intricate words
of a language become extinct.
There are too many things to hold in the palm of the brain.
Your father with Alzheimer’s uses the word thing to describe
many different nouns and we guess the word he means.
When we get it right, he nods as if it’s obvious.
When we get it wrong, his face closes like a fist.
Out walking in the neighborhood, there’s a wide metal lamppost
that has scratched into it “Brandy Earlywine loves
Jack Pickett” and then there come the hearts. The barrage of hearts
scratched over and over as if, just in case we have forgotten
the word love, we will know its symbol. As if Miss Earlywine
wanted us to know that—even after she and Mr. Pickett
have passed on, their real hearts stopped, the ones that don’t look
anything like those little symbols—they frantically, furiously,
late one night under the streetlight while their parents thought
they were asleep, inscribed onto the body of something like
a permanent tree, a heart—so that even after their bodies
have ceased to be bodies, their mouths no longer capable of words,
that universal shape will tell you how she felt, one blue evening,
long ago, when there were still 7,000 languages that named and honored
the plants and animals each in their
own way, when your father said thing and we knew what it meant,
and the bees were big and round and buzzing.
OF ROOTS & ROAMERS
Have you ever noticed how the trees
change from state to state? Not all
at once, of course, more like a weaver
gradually weaving in another color
until the old trees become scarce
and new trees offer a shaded kingdom
all their own. Before I knew the names
of towns or roads, I could recognize
places by the trees: Northern California’s
smooth-skinned madrone, looming eucalyptus,
fuzzy fragrant flowers of the acacia. So
much of America belongs to the trees.
Even when we can’t agree on much,
there’s still the man returning from his
late shift at the local bar, who takes
a long look at the bird’s nest in the maple,
pats the trunk like a friend’s forearm,
mumbles something about staying safe,
and returns home. And the girl whose
slapdash tree fort we can see from our blurry
window, how she stands there to wave
at a world she does not even know
the half of yet. My grandmother once
complained she couldn’t see much
of America on her cross-country trip because
it was all just trees. Ask her, she’ll laugh as she
tells you. Still, without the bother of licenses
or attention to a state line, a border, they
just grow where they’ve grown all their lives:
there, a small stand of
white pine arrives,
there, a redwood begins to show itself along
the coastline, water oaks in the south, willows.
Their power is in not moving, so we must
move to them.
KILLING METHODS
Outside, after grieving for days,
I’m thinking of how we make stories,
pluck them like beetles out of the air,