Juan Felipe Herrera: Five poems from Giraffe on Fire

American Poetry Review, The, Jul 1995 by Felipe Herrera, Juan

My leg stiffens. The crutch that holds me has become my aromatic rosary.

My exact duplicate sits behind me. He wears the same sickness.

The cabinet in the front is halfway open. Dali says that this is proper,

that I should find the ecstasy on this shore, in the form of a wooden box,

in Van Gogh's love for green boats sliced with bloody stripes.

The sea goes through me.

I remember my mother's death this way: the last taxi

in San Jose, the wrong street, 4th street to the abandoned

apartments of the homeless instead of the hospital. This

comes to me in times of quiet and rebelliousness.

Ten days the doctor said.

Is she ready for her sacraments the priest said.

We were in a mechanical room of hoses and meters,

tubes and needles. I was sitting with her as she looked up

for the last time. As I held her hand.

What could we say at this time? What were the words worth?

How could I apply the face cream holding itself inside the jar?

The horizon has a gospel. It sings for me far ahead

where the grayness becomes whiteness. I stretch out my right leg

and place a handkerchief over my bad knee.

My dead eye peeks through the furniture.

Chucho and Velasquez, my cell brothers wait for me.

We wear the same clothes when the sea rolls out its bread.

We pick up stones

and scratch our names on sand. We sit bowed and astute.

The replicas behind us do the same. Our dead mothers float

far from where we sit. They drink from the green bottles still

on their medicine chest. The little chest of drawers, the one

that smells of apples and duck feathers.

Juan Felipe Herrera's forthcoming books include: Calling the Doves, Children's Book Press, Fall 1995; Mayan Drifter; Chicano Post in the Lowlands of America, Temple University Press, Spring 1996; and Love After the Riots, Curbstone Press, Spring 1996. These poems are from his currently unpublished collection, Giraffe on Fire.