Issue 44.1 Summer/Fall 2023

A Letter from the Village of Trees

Trees

for Gloria

 

A whole year in which the fields mourn the absence

of horses, in which you sat in the open, in a country

away from me, drinking mint tea as a projector played

Los Olvidados, Oum, So What if The Goats Die.

 

I was stuck in the village, living with an anthropologist

from Belgium, writing vignettes about trees, their shadows,

the swiftness of language. And on the day of the dead,

 

I walked away from the quiet of my room, from the fellowship

of the restless, that space where what is alive laments the heat,

the lamp holding back darkness, the white curtains which separated

our lives. Around the many roads that led to the river of rituals,

 

abode of those still tethered to earth, the old men,

the old workers beaten into the edge of dust, waited

by the store, waiting to order from the bowlegged clerk

gin, rum, cigarettes gotten from a faraway city.

 

The shacks between the store and Queen’s Road,

made out of nylon, folded and unfolded in the wind.

The language of worry was alive, shared on each door

like the blood of a firstborn lamb. And on passing

these crumbs of desolation, I saw them,

 

the old men, staring into distance, turning the movement

of boats into stories they will tell by moonlight;

stories of hostels forgotten at the edge of foreign cities

where men washed plates, dead bodies, old skin, and even

restrooms where a man after using a urinal spat out

his words, leaving it on the ground – a dead thing

waiting to be cleaned.

 

I had nothing to interpret to the world, nothing to say

to the anthropologist who walked beside me, saying,

I have studied your people and their docile ways,

their acceptance of tyrants. And as I turned to the night,

I heard the ending of a Greek play, a school boy roaring

in all seriousness into the sky, O Ithaka, I have loved you

through sorrow, I have loved you through the stars,

the anagram of wonder, through the vastness of the world.

 

Photo by https://unsplash.com/@merifoodface?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=refer…