6 poems
from Reasons for the Dark to Be Afraid
Master of Fine Arts
to Vicente Huidobro
God is an exiled carpenter
from an even grander universe
where He first had to be raised,
educated, and socialized before
they gave Him a reality to govern
and this is the one He got stuck with.
We’re in the same position, which isn’t
what He expected. I mean, what’s so great
about God, God, God? I translate Lorca
and he says, “Love, love, love,”
and now I’m suspicious of statues.
What’s so beautiful about a monument
are the centuries of bystanders
reading the dedicative plaque and at once
feeling lifted to historical significance
and like the gorgeous, memorized
names of the famously dead
have been demystified. They’re there,
beside us, desperate for a bathroom
and some nourishment and a society
that likes their ideas more than the one
that killed them. And God
knows all about that, being a minor poet
Himself, even in His homeland, where He’s riled up
in eternal quarantine from the beings He’s demanded
to love Him, or else.
Vicente, our God is not
an elegant condor marinating on a branch
but the dynasty of pigeons who, because
they don’t mind walking, deny us the chance
to toss our crumbs at the sky.
Peripheral Explosions
There’s no Icarus without sea, sky, trumpets,
no remorse in the painted ricochet of realities and rockets.
When the plane lands and becomes a car
and the spoon catapults an egg, the eye
prefers to close, repulsed by light
like a bedroom. A skeleton
uses its spine as a walking stick
to hitchhike across the country
and dig up its one true love.
Without a story, it’s still a story.
Time passes, you’re reading, that’s the story,
and an image has no need to narrate.
It lives in your eye, under an assembly line of perceptions.
In the Detention Center, badged guards roam,
praying to the portrait of your desperation,
which seems so natural to them, it becomes an exhibit
your entire existence gets stored beneath.
O ghost in a large white sheet, eye sockets scissored open—
behind every firing squad, a photographer; the Antichrist calling Christ
the Antichrist; the body the only bystander—
but not in this realm.
I used to be a sack of cells,
now I’m the Architect of Water.
A Conversation on Poetics
No, the other one. Aristotle said
what? Surely we’ve evolved from there.
Surely story can be investigated
even proven false on false pretenses
even when the antidote is to marvel
as marbles marvel at the numb face
of thumbnail. It sounds better
than it is is a compliment. Since
when is musing better than music?
It’s not like it doesn’t come from us.
In Place of Heaven
The Moirai care after your lifeline, a string with wire inside it.
Homer refers to the three Fates—Clotho, the Spinner (guess what she does?);
Lachesis, the Allotter; and Atropos, the Inflexible (guess what she does?)—
as a singular entity: Moira, just fate, which caused Hesiod to scoff
before asserting their rightful genealogies
in his own poetry, because he was sick of it being Homer
who decided what fate was, or the Fates, our version of them,
and how many, and which gender, and in which society
on this planet in the history of the whole world
is anyone ever going to be truly free? Where are the gods
who will finally tell us what we’ve been feeling all along
is the miracle they intended?
A bird smushed in the forest
reminds me of rolling pins. To hear, right after, the sonic boom
of many vultures’ wings flapping out of the trees high above us
and be startled by their number and the force they leave behind,
shaking all the leaves, is to know some freedom exists
in solitary, sensual pursuits not everyone can access,
and those who can, not too much. Maybe Homer made them one
because it took all three to spin a life that gave time
to solitary and sensual pursuits, in addition to social obligations—
not to mention art, which, if you want real time for,
requires some of it to be sloshed out unto the world like red tide
for many tourists to come by and say, “This is not why
I came to the beach.”
Like my life, I wish this poem began
when I began to understand it. At first, I thought it was about
the easy confluence of contemporary and classic myth—
centaurs in car commercials, kings in their castles
with credit-card debt—in the sense that solutions
need problems to solve them, but the tug-o-war between options
becomes ritual in your frontal lobe, habit in your bones,
until you reach an epiphany that was long ago an afterthought
in someone else’s mind, in many minds, enough to be called a movement.
In Cien años de soledad, Melquíades’s scroll is a dry riverbed
that fills with blood as he writes. His pen is the hand of Moira
enacted in another form. Many poems were harmed
in the making of this poem. All of them mine.
Remnants of Empire
The equestrian statues of kings
from various plazas I’ve seen
come together in the plaza
of the mind, crowding a small garden
with Charles’s, and Edwards’s—
the stench of piss ringed around
each base making logical the many
footprints denoting a darkness
of soil between strokes of green.
This impulse has to be questioned.
A country is made up of people
as an ocean is a mausoleum
of raindrops dying for unity,
as the sun’s embers yearn
to be distinguished as flares.
Why else put a statue up there,
if not to say, in this land,
these are the statues? Why not
make them larger than life to imply
History’s bigness, and dominance?
You wake to it every day.
Landscape of Sun with Burning Horses.
Landscape of Landscapes Superimposed—
bad idea. All the world aches. The aches
accumulate into something greater. The horses
carry something heavier than kings—metal,
which is why they ordered their legs
so thin, their bases so heavy,
they cannot run.
Babylon
When the white glove strips
the eyebrows from my forehead,
the emeralds from the gutters
between my teeth, then
then we can leave the party
and explore the stupid streets
of closed banks and black light
bulbs. The river bisects the city
like a tongue gliding over grout.
The windows are open to let
the smoke in. I choose to breathe it,
no better than a tree watching its offering of oxygen
ignite the houses it serves.
ii
Ripen, ripen like a sun-seared ruby.
The ground groans as it stretches,
each atom of dirt competing to gain weight.
There, there,
where even the bricks are asked
for papers, where the packed bus
shatters the communal shroud,
leaving you behind,
there, there,
the clock is black with hands.
iii
Nowhere are we not chased,
not grabbed after by ghosts
like the Golem feeling the full
weight of its clay limbs.
Death doesn’t hear his own rattle
as he stumbles from casket to crime scene,
car crash to cathedral—
can’t feel his cloak drag
the big and small clock hands
trying to pin him down like a tent—
and if you think
for one second that the seashells
cemented into balconies love the salt
of foot soles more than they miss
being pushed by impassible waves,
Death is learning to mouth your name.
Daniel Ruiz is a Puerto Rican poet and translator. He is a recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and the Michener Center for Writers. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, his poems can or will be found in POETRY, Crazyhorse, Missouri Review, Bennington Review, Meridian, and elsewhere.