On its brittle vine, my grandfather’s voice
ripened with stories he thought forgotten.
The time he gashed his elbow on the tracks.
The time a boy overturned an altar of votive candles,
almost alighting the church. The time he stole
a wrestling figurine from the town market
only to have it stolen from him. We slept
in his childhood home in Nuevo Laredo near
a cemetery. Beyond his father’s headstone,
construction lights glowed, and drills shrieked
Like children, tin-tongued. A Wal-Mart’s steel frame
Incited local youth, whose chants I could only parse
the music of. Others snuck onsite and worked shovels,
haggling afterward for pay. Inside the house’s walls,
creatures scratched the night’s percussion. Half-dreamt
ants hauled off slivers of leftover bread. I awoke
to my grandfather’s mumbling in the adjacent room.
My brothers lay beside me. I felt homesickness unfurling
from my gut as a spangled sadness. A longing so sure
of its direction—toward the river that marches
according to its nature, down the past of least
resistance—giving freely its terrible advice.
_____________________________
Excerpted from J. Estanislao Lopez’s We Borrowed Gentleness, available via Alice James Books
