To Gellacio Guillermo in Iowa City - Poem

Literary Review, Spring, 2000 by Eugene Gloria

   My window is serenaded by crickets.
   I try to sleep through the sawing
   of their cellos' sad music.
   Forgive me, I want none of it.

   You were in the mountains when my father's soldiers
   strolled into our classroom to escort me out
   of the campus. The army had infiltrated
   our cause to pluck from our ranks their own.

   You left before my father retired as a full colonel,
   before the nuns knelt in front of the dictator's tanks
   before the Maneros and the Alsa Masa
   scooped out and ate the brains of the dissident priest.

   And when you renounced the revolution
   and dreamed of corn and the language of Iowa,
   I came back to the Church, and then left again.
   Found true rebellion in marrying

   a man who spoke Hebrew and wanted to take me
   to Tel Aviv. Gellacio,
   I am reading you in English.
   Your brindled skin is sweating Iowa sun,

   your hair in a tight chignon,
   you, barefoot and G-stringed like the Manobo
   prince in St. Louis one hundred years ago.
   I want the Church to beg me back,

   long for the faint tinkle of the hand bell
   before the Elevation,
   the monstrance gold as unhusked grain
   drying on the asphalt road.

   I want to believe that sentences
   can hold bread in baskets, and multiply.
   Let the salvaged, naked as drowned cattle,
   find their way to my house.

   Ring the bell and call them in, Gellacio.
   Anything but this music,
   all silence and this nothing music.

Eugene Gloria's first collection of poems, Drivers at the Short-Time Motel, was a winner in the 1999 National Poetry Series Open Competition. Gloria's book was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa and will be published by Viking Penguin in June 2000. He lives with his wife, Karen, in Northampton, Massachusetts.