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Robert Espinoza USA (Mexican American) The Finished Sky
Our American unease has grown accustomed
to the sudden storm and whir of his arrivals.
Something in each of us divines his mad velocity—
a blurred, primal red tailing an electric blue.
The crowds of gossip and their greedy mastheads
chew on those mere, millisecond miracles.
The skeptics, the clergy and the thinkers—
everyone gluing, shred to shred, an insistent reply.
What is this fleeting emblem? they demand.
Will a rescue ever bear our ordinary names?
Even my father—atheist as an indeterminate equation—
takes to a stale mysticism in his final, forlorn years.
Alone at night, I claim this super man as mine.
I huff a latent invocation into his muscled neck,
tattoo a salivary verse across his arm span,
instruct his palm to a cadence, watch him burst.
He understands I yearn for news, not headlines.
We will soar the skyline of this city as it sunders,
trace the itinerary of a racing train, release
to an atmosphere of gas, a dominant, mackerel sky.
And when the what-if's electrify into a current,
when war's motivating forces rile into turbulence—
plagues, atomic fire, my mother's disaffected grasp—
I'll sink his uniform in sulfur, revise his story.
We had known that he was myth imagined into being.
Comic but not uncommon. An orphan raised by farmers.
A winged boy with penetrating eyes, directionless,
as limited and inauthentic as religion.
You made me up, he cries out. Now finish me off.
Copyright,
Robert Espinoza. |