^{{for the D.A.C.A DREAMers and all our nation’s immigrants}}

^{. . . my veins don’t end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life . . .}

^{. . . mis venas no terminan en mí
sino en la sange unánime
de los que luchan por la vida . . .}

^{—Roque Dalton, “Como tú”}

Como tú, I question history’s blur in my eyes
each time I face a mirror. Like a mirror, I gaze
into my palm a wrinkled map I still can’t read,
my lifeline an unnamed road I can’t find, can’t
trace back to the fork in my parents’ trek
that cradled me here. Como tú, I woke up to
this dream of a country I didn’t choose, that
didn’t choose me—trapped in the nightmare
of its hateful glares. Como tú, I’m also from
the lakes and farms, waterfalls and prairies
of another country I can’t fully claim either.
Como tú, I am either a mirage living among
these faces and streets that raised me here,
or I’m nothing, a memory forgotten by all
I was taken from and can’t return to again.

Like memory, at times I wish I could erase
the music of my name in Spanish, at times
I cherish it, and despise my other syllables
clashing in English. Como tú, I want to speak
of myself in two languages at once. Despite
my tongues, no word defines me. Like words,
I read my footprints like my past, erased by
waves of circumstance, my future uncertain
as wind. Like the wind, como tú, I carry songs,
howls, whispers, thunder’s growl. Like thunder,
I’m a foreign-borne cloud that’s drifted here,
I’m lightning, and the balm of rain. Como tú,
our blood rains for the dirty thirst of this land.
Like thirst, like hunger, we ache with the need
to save ourselves, and our country from itself.

^{J’ai rapporté du désespoir un panier si petit mon amour, qu’on a pu le tresser en osier.
I brought from despair a basket so small, my love, that it might have been woven of willow.
                                                                                       —Rene Char}

to speak is not yet to have spoken.

the not-yet of a white realm of nothing left

neither for itself nor another

a no-longer already there, along with the arrival of what has been 

light and the reverse of light

terror as walking blind along the breaking sea, body in whom I lived

the not-yet of death darkening what it briefly illuminates

an unknown place as between languages

back and forth, breath to breath as a calm

in the surround rises, fireflies in lindens, an ache of pine

you have yourself within you

yourself, you have her, and there is nothing

that cannot be seen

open then to the coming of what comes

was when the
lights were
out

the whole city
in darkness

& we drove north
to our friend’s
yellow apt.
where she had
power & we
could work

later we stayed
in the darkened
apt. you sick
in bed & me
writing ambitiously
by candle light
in thin blue
books

your neighbor had
a generator &
after a while
we had a little
bit of light

I walked the
dog & you
were still
a little bit
sick

we sat on a stoop
one day in the
late afternoon
we had very little
money. enough for
a strong cappuccino
which we shared
sitting there &
suddenly the
city was lit.

the figures of my speech are patterns
rather than the local people you know in the common

they have angles trajected more determinedly
than the neighbor who forgets and walks away

my figures are less the   mafiosi of the village meaning —
more the ancestors they imagine behind them

wanting blood thirsty
to live.               my figures really are just a line.

the figures of my speech are just lines drawn 
between     across the faces     of walls facing off

each other    all they have 
all the calculated tricks and disguises

spoken of things that go up to come down
erasure and begin again       the further picture.

After they had been in the woods,
after the living tongue woke Helen’s
hand, afterwards they went back
to the little house of exile, Annie and
Helen, who had lived in the silent
dark, like a bat without radar in
the back of a cave, and she picked up
the broken doll she had dismembered
that morning in her rage, and limb
by limb, her agile fingers moving 
with their fine intelligence over each
part, she re-membered the little figure
of the human, and, though she
was inside now, and it was still dark,
she remembered the missing sun
with a slow wash of warmth 
on her shoulders, on her back
as when you step shivering out of 
a dank shade into the sun’s sudden
balm—and as the warmth spread,
it felt like the other side of water, 
and that is when she knew how
light on water looks, and she put
her outspread hands into the idea
of it, and she lifted the lines of light,
cross-hatched like a web, out of 
the water, and, dripping, stretched 
the golden net of meaning in the light.

It’s the inside which comes out, as I contemplate
him there half in sunlight, weeding diligently
a Midwestern lawn. On my persons, I have only notes
and a drying pen, the memory of onion blossoms
scenting in a window. Reflection is my native medium.
I am never arriving, only speaking briefly on material
conditions between myself and others. My country
inoculates me lovingly, over time. My country grasps me
like desire. I will show you my credentials, which is to say
my vivid description, if you ask. Here we are, my father
and I, never hostile, a small offering: pointless cut flowers
appear on the kitchen table when one finally arrives
into disposable income. Still possible. Am I living? Do I
accept revision as my godhead and savior?
I do and I am, and in the name of my Chinese father now
dragging the tools back inside, brow shining but always
a grin, faithless except to protect whatever I still have time
to become, Amen.