Ray Gonzalez

He walks to the other side of the room where two bare feet wait by the sofa. The toes move slightly as he approaches, but he hasn't recognized the ankles yet. He knows bare feet can be friendly or the worst enemies a quiet man can have. If the toenails are long and dirty, there is no chance. If they are trimmed and healthy, something will happen. He stands in front of the sofa and looks down at the waiting feet. The right toe curls a bit, then gets stiff in attention. The left toes suddenly point upward, then relax. If the room wasn't so dark, he could find out who the feet belong to. They don't look like a man's and might be a woman's, though the nails are not painted. He can't see above the ankles as if a pair of pants or long skirt are hiding the legs. He can't make out any sitting figure and wonders if it was difficult to get here barefoot, or if there are shoes hiding somewhere under the sofa. Did these feet think on their own and part ways with their owner? He fights the urge to bend down and kiss each ankle.
...

Given to me by my sister as a gift,
the tiny Indian doll stands with no arms.

Given to me so I can raise my hands
...

The volcano in my grandmother's Mexican village
smothered the town, though the girl escaped because
the axis of revolution sent her family into exile,
...

after Kees' 'Travels in North America'
1. Santa Fe

'The walls are old,' he says.
I turn in the plaza and nod to Weldon Kees,
...

For those who ran in the streets,
there were no faces to welcome them back.
José escaped and loved the war.
...

Kick in the heart.
Kick the starting lance.
Throw the ground a word and stand back.
The color of terror is the envy
...

on turning forty
They draw me closer like the hands
of one grandmother I kissed upon
visiting her in the barrio.
...

Awake in the desert to the sound of calling.
Must be the mountain, I thought.

The violent border, I assumed, though the boundary
line between the living and the dead was erased years ago.
...

I sit with my railroad face and ask God to forgive me
for being a straight line toward the dead
who were buried with their poor clothes
in the Arizona desert of iron borders.
...

Seven of them pinned in blood by
long, shiny tails, three of them still

alive and writhing against the wood,
...

They call the mountain Carlos because
it is brown, though its purple slopes
at dusk suggest other names.
Those who name it have to brand
...

Julius Caesar's head was cut off
and fed to the barbarians waiting
outside the walls of Rome.
Salvador Dali wore one orange
...

after Julio Cortazar

The destroyer of compasses is my brother. He lies in the wet fields of war and dies young, his spirit rising above the soil to be trapped in the great books that tell a different story because magnetic north has been demolished, the master of compasses witnessing the coffin and flag draped with the glory of the weeping mothers and the lying generals that perform without the four directions turning their sweat to blood. The destroyer of compasses is my brother. He eats the same meal as I, though the bird of migration is set in its cage and cannot flee, its shriek waking the young and resolving the old. When the bird is eaten, the boy takes its compass apart, hiding the magnetic needle in his left ear, leaving the blazing feathers behind. He follows the vibration to the south where his family emerges wrapped in robes the savage priest left behind. The destroyer of compasses wants to be my brother, but I am too old to give advice, the glass on the compass touched by our father who doubted its magic-the devices of love and death hidden in the shoes of the stone men who refuse to be shown direction and drink the mud of their angry sons, the loyal followers, and the boys who insist they must defend the earth from its barren kind. The destroyer of compasses is my brother. He flies, lifting the sorrow of lies beyond the broken fields of rock where the compass refuses to point, its frenzy the dance in the engine of the heart, the compass the last circle spinning wildly before the young man finds out where he is bound.
...