Love not as origin
but as exodus. A parting and then
another. Dust of your country
rolling off like sweat or my name from your tongue
in the time you loved me. That autumn
mosquitos ripened in the walls of your apartment
and made a border fence on my skin.
Here, our touch is trespass. Here, the way is shut.
I became the robber whom you fed windows
fed me frame after frame: your silhouette
sleeping, silhouette cutting mangoes
silhouette with other ghosts—
You never told me, twice you were deported
before you made it to Nogales, alone and only nine
years old, saguaro shadows
pantomime. The owls flex against the sky
tiger sifts its stripes of sun and absence
making it day then night. I erase
and picture you as I always do,
more windfall than friend, more brother to me than fig.
Home como ancla, no como cadenas, rather you as a worm, hooked
in a little fishing village by the sea
away from the desert calling
the iguanas Mother, though they could give you no suck.
I imagine you back in El Salvador,
gambling at a funeral, dice stirring up dirt.
The legs on a pair of ghost roses clipped and joined to your lapel.
You won’t die now but you’ll be disappointed you didn’t
on a mushroom trip in a car of friends,
one Muskogean morning, wheels and wheels
and not a scream will break
through your lobster grin. Don’t lie and say
you’ve been here and loved this soil.
I am unfamiliar with any other images: you on a hill
in an ocean of tall grasses. You inside Alaska
with ice like chocolate around your mouth.
You in Montana under paperweight sky, land
flat as a pulse.
I won’t like to you and say I don’t want you to make my heartland your home.
You plant kisses here
but don’t weed them.
Your bear-mouth
leaves raspberries in my broken skin.
You’re playing
hard to get, Friend, and it’s getting hard on me
not to vacate my skirt and lift my thighs in this dry bed
of burned-up rivers. My neck is breathless unfurling
lungs into a map of where you’ve been.
So if immigrating is loving two women,
which one of us do you dream in?
What’s another woman to the other woman
except an extra pair of hands to bring in the harvest
but I can’t take you home.
I’m not a coyote
that way. I’m the girl you guided gently through the reeds
down to the loading docks. We lie on our backs
watched October get cut to pieces by helicopter.
I wish to see you free of any need I whisper, look out over the
vastness and forgive it all.
In sleep last night, I helped you pull three boats ashore into your port.
One for you, one for me, one for her. One for home. One for home. One for home
See the rope burns, the labor
of trying to bring what you love close enough
to tie down and then ride out
again onto the waves
assuring the land animal that appears in all your poems,
this time the mule doesn’t drown.
This time I don’t keep a vigil until you return.
This time you get to go and make it back to everyone.
And in the fields where we dream there aren’t oil drums.
