Parents
Shadows guard the corners of the kitchen
where she sits, lips twitching
cryptic rhythms to computer game's response.
I rinse the grapes and pluck them from their stems,
slice plums. It's
just the two of us, I say.
She nods. The two of
us, yet he is here
—semi-independent, argumentative
and loving son whose absence
leaves an empty space that one of us,
somehow, should fill.
I rearrange containers,
check the shrimp, stir sauces, stop.
"Off to the
movies . . . a bunch of us . . ." words
tossed aside in the same way he discards
candy wrappers, gum. No hug or kiss,
one shoe untied, yet mod pants on
(the latest style). I laugh, fingers turning
stove knobs, finding spoons, his image blending
into others: four or five of us (all boys)
perched behind the four or five of them
(all girls) to laugh, tell jokes, pull hair.
"What's that about?" I start to answer
stop. She seems so far away and he
so close. Time has buckled back
and I can reach across that loop
more easily than I can reach
across the table to the corner where she sits.
Her eyes ask who I am
and I, in answer, spread my hands
and tell her how, fourteen again,
I feel a little scared.
Spanish
Lesson
Words float past
a textbook stain,
remind me la and lo for her and it
but le for him (and le for her if indirect)
and mapa (like problema) takes an el
not la. My mind, like an old house,
forever needs
repair. Life as we think it,
a straight line
from birth to death.
But as we live it
there's a lot of
back and forth,
absorbing
things—what some call learning—
losing them (or
parts of them)
then having them
come back. La—like her
. . . what was
her name? She giggled at the way
I spoke,
precocious college boy, yet when I left
the party at her
parents' house pulled me aside
"ven güero, ven!" and in a
darkened bedroom
stripped and
whispered Now talk your funny funny
words . . . . To "know a person or a thing" is conocer;
quiero means I want or wish—but also
love. Her te quiero came with tears
the last time
that we kissed
and I stood
blinking at the closing door
unable to
pronounce my words. They're in the book
I open now, along
with others: Memories
as
well as rules. Repairs of things half
done.
Robert Joe Stout's fiction and poetry has appeared in the
anthologies Southwest, New Southern Poetry, and Survivors
of the Invention. A novel, Miss
Sally, was published by Bobbs-Merrill and another, Running Out the
Hurt, in 2012 by Black Rose. He also
has published the nonfiction books Why Immigrants Come to America and Blood
of the Serpent: Mexican Lives from Praeger and Algora respectively. He currently lives in Oaxaca, Mexico.
