Believing is seeing

Why should I believe you?

You say I can forget and start over.

You say the past is over and done.

Why should I believe you?

You say it’s just a matter of time.

You say I can turn over the page.

Why should I believe you?

Do you know what words are?

Have you ever read a book or a poem? Or written a poem?

Why should I believe you?

Have you ever, like San Ero de Armenteira, heard a bird sing after three hundred years, a song that encircled world and returned to its branch to keep singing?

Why should I believe you?

Have you ever heard Fogar de Breogán sung in the Quintana?

Why should I believe you?

Have you ever seen Käthe Kollwitz’s museum in Berlin?

Why should I believe you?

Have you ever given birth or watched your dog have eleven puppies on the kitchen floor?

Why should I believe you?

Have you ever found your baby ring after six decades and lost it in a parking lot three days later?

Why should I believe you?

Have you ever planted a ginkgo tree or seen one a hundred feet tall beside a library?

Have you ever fallen in love with the other side of the ocean or with a flower or a cat?

Have you ever been certain your parents were perfect and poverty a gift?

Have you ever hated war with every cell in your body?

Start over?

My body is a magnet. Everything sticks to it and usually enters it to sit there until I feel.

Like a sharp pebble on a beach when you’re barefoot.

Like a deer running at your headlights in a raging snowstorm, hitting your car and dropping dead because you’re an assassin.

Like a twenty-one gun salute at a graveside.

Like wintergreen or lady’s slippers in the woods.

Like seeing the Codex Calixtinus or the Cantigas de Santa María in person.

Like sitting on the dock of a bay, a warm lake, or a river.

Every blade, every grain, every pinch of rock salt enters your body and sits there for as long as it needs to, then moves on and inward.

Every diamond in the sky sings inside your head forever, gleaming.

Every lettuce, tomato, or caged bird follows you home and enters your veins. Sometimes they sing.

Every bomb and firing squad rips your heart out and you bleed inward.

And the stones never stop. The ancient walls scream inside your sobbing. Your body wraps its scarred arms around them. You can never let go.

Have you ever seen a phoenix burn or a simurgh hatch?

Have you ever patted the shell of a turtle and loved it?

Have you ever had a nail pierce your foot or spike your heart through a poem?

Your body can walk through a valley of shadows where death is watching and you see clearly that the shadows will love you forever.

Your body holds every single word you ever heard or will hear, long after your ears cannot. They remain in your mind and multiply like loaves and fishes, satisfying your hunger for something with no syllables.

Your tongue defies gravity and lifts cups and plates to the clouds that soften the ocean, unaware of their color.

You reach for fruit or burred chestnuts and your fingers come away stained green by black walnut juice you use to write stories of an unwarring world.

Your head bows and you weep until the scarecrow in the cornfield smiles, beckoning for you to give birth, despite the pain.

You kneel on broken glass, knees bleeding, and see the madness if the ritual you perpetuate, the corpiño, the little body, salvation.

Ashes to ashes.

Your body is a soft animal in a poem about wild geese by Mary Oliver and it loves, because the alternative cannot abide.

Why should I believe you?

Your body recalls every grain of salt and sand it ever licked, every page stained by the DNA of your fingers, every book that makes your shelves sag, every closet with secrets belonging to ones you’ve loved and missed.

You know the flavor of blood, the scent of lichens of many colors, the horror of feijoada burned in a pot due to distraction.

You learned foreign words and stashed them in every cell until they oozed out your pores and you rubbed them back into your skin, happily. You are a walking dictionary, but only because sounds and lists were good friends.

You say starting over is possible. That forgetting is not impossible.

Why should I believe you?

Why should I want to add anything new to all that I already have? To suitcases and studios already full to overflowing?

Why should I believe you?

Rain from two continents overflows in my molecules, drips and splashes, forms oases in the middle of my railingless ocean thanks to a poem I read long ago, in another century. I never learned to swim, but will never drown. I was not meant to die in any desert, will never need to drink sand. Eyes like salt mines, I move west to east and back, heart nailed to two shores that hold me.

The shoulders are encased in rainbows that grew from a special box of 72 colors or more, tracing decades of lemon yellow, copper, flesh color in arcs of chromatic delirium. Proof is there, in my books, if needed.

My arms have carried Rosetti around, still calling out siren square dances that move through the verses of Remember me when I am gone away. That’s how breathing is sustained. If the notes ever stop, if dancing ceases, I’ll cry out first couple left and circle two hands round, making sure there’ll be a hot time in the old town. Immortal me because those songs were mine before I was born. Memory is so very long.

Some things I keep in a trunk of minutes as long as centuries. No lock needed. No chance they’ll disappear. No fear they’ll go silent under the skin that holds them,

My body is all the old stone bridges in Portugal I’ve walked over, all the others in a Galicia where I was born fifteen centuries ago. Two countries that filled my veins with free-running albariño, leaving me sober, tranquil, and with defenses that can withstand the onrush of any horde. Just try me: I’ll be standing when others are gone, when the hollyhocks have wilted, and the barn with its starlings has burned. I hold the ashes safely inside me, hold every last minute before time and after, so why would I ever believe you? Why would I ever listen to words that are less than the wind?

I am you, you are me, and I simply cannot believe you. We are too full of world.