10/9/2017 Poetry by Elias SiqueirosMigrants After lunch, sit, sit, here among the peanut shells, here in the swell of the downriver current where the bluesman sits and plays a guitar with razor blades. He’s got new shoes, a haircut, a seashell at his mouth like a harmonica. Like a polka beat comes the heart thrill, the sky meets his eye with a camera-ready smile. I am all this I see, antipodal, armored-heavy, a seagull sort-of, all this I think is the land grown from suburban roots given proclivities to be so much natural flora, U-hauls moving in formation through the last hope of an aurora blinked out of the west, saying go back east, no one can afford Huntington Beach. So we gather the songs and prayer books. We gather the mossy mirrors and caravan back to low rents and maple trees and inverted steps. I hear you, guitar player, hear your promise, and walk out to the car thinking history is nothing but financial necessity. Old man playing blues along a dark red river, there is no imagination which does not come together as necessity. The guitar player’s not real because I am not his father. I cannot create purely out of a longing for his representation. He is a ghost of my needing. He is the country I’m not seeing. The End Of History Everything at the end of history has this incredibly empty sound like hitting a tin can at its side. A mountain could crumble at the lips, and it would not matter, what was said could not be taken back. What was human reverts to its image of blueberry waffles, a Coptic signboard governing the emotions with an interior want, a spastic moving of the sofa from one end of the living room to the other. She came to me after so many dreams wearing the same T-shirt as the one I always slept in. The end of history is a time when we no longer need the critics to interpret our times for us. For them we have eaten out enough, drunk enough alcohol, to be bled through, to want the concrete system of fingers, bones, and starch of which humanity is barely a branch. -and the doors open to the possibility of being wrong, of being wrong all the time- Beauty is still a carpentry worth learning. Fences are still planted where they come up highest when the language, full of burrs, holds to the fingers in a bit of pain. Liquid presence, the shape is the condition and the need, what then that it rots at the end of a beach and we hold no particular regret? Kyle has gone to work for Halliburton but here he is with wings attached and nears in knee-deep isolation to prod the corpse as it is in mind coal, fracked gas, memory of Mary’s diamond final structure. Though there are no angels there are near Galveston gas stations along the highway with sacred flames of war. I say, look there, the pelicans come up with their jowls purple and their pockets campfire heavy. Let your walk select no quicker destination, no immediate interference. A man in a San Antonio bus station walked about with a great tumor on his forehead. He took pictures from his Nikon through a big lens of anything that moved or clung to an original idea of itself. His eyes were made over into a new thing, fashionably wide, and see there, in his step, the tower which shall rise from long naps. Mary, young again, nearing the coast of god- awful country wearing only a university T-shirt and a baseball cap. The people in the country were like the first people, the ones she never met. The homes were like the first houses, the ones she could not believe in. The children were as her child but not ‘ slaughtered at whim. She could not know the large concussion of people by whom she’d become human again without war and without symbol. ![]() Bio: Elias Siqueiros is a Texas poet resettled in New England. His work has appeared in Milk, Moria, Stirring, Word Riot, DecomP, and elsewhere. He is the author of the poetry collection The Heart Of An Animal. Comments are closed.
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