Monday, March 25, 2013


Huitzilopochtli watches his twin carry father’s ashes

My father,
who didn’t live to see the apocalypse
is resting now
on the sun deck of a silver yacht
named Zen Master Echu
It is the evening
following his internment,
and in the land of the dead
he’ll eat the sweat
ripe flesh of a grapes grown
on Andean foothills.  He’ll swim
for a while in a clear green lagoon
that looks like somewhere
in Puerto Rico.  They say my mother
will be waiting in a hotel room
overlooking the Atlantic
where souls go sailing by
in the clear air like clear sails.
And he will have choices:
no longer existing in air, or for sunshine,
he’ll listen to the great ghost band
his father commands in one corner of the graveyard—
You see, the land of the dead
reverberates with the strained music
filtered from human memory,
scraped from hands that once held
babies, joints, and saxophones.  

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