For José Emilio Pacheco who said, “I like poetry to be the interior voice, the voice no one hears, the voice of the person reading it.”
1
What animal is waiting to hear what we have to say?
Not one. Not the red-winged blackbird,
the speckled trout
or the French Chartreux. Beg an iguana
for editorial advice.
Whatever we do, slim drift on the wind.
We could talk forever, never equaling the dawn song of the thrush.
Pacheco said, “Fish don’t torture. Their banks don’t ever charge interest.”
We open our mouths.
We find and hide the words.
2
My friend who knew him says, “I thought of him
as a businessman only. A lawyer? Had no idea he wrote poems.”
She found him dignified, stately, quiet.
Papers, envelopes, nice neckties, polished desk.
José Emilio, your “certain silences”
were invisible girders.
They held everything up. Childhood stories,
first moments, “. . . we go never to come back.”
No wonder you translated Beckett, Yevtushenko . . .
belonging to other worlds deepened our own.
You wanted to ask your old teachers if the Future—“Tomorrow”—
lived up to their dreams. Everyone’s hard work, supposed to count for everything, right?
Who predicted torture, murder, people
disappeared?
Didn’t those people work hard too?
Which animals live like this?
Could metaphor soothe or save?
There are nine moths to every one butterfly.
Your poems at first surrealistic, then closer to home.
Fancy awards, dramatic titles, did not intrigue.
Your pants fell down when meeting a king, but you hiked them up, calling it a cure for vanity.
We love you forever for moments like this.
Leaning into your pages all those years—
working and working. “All that is truly ours now
is the day that is beginning.” Once we gleaned what went on in high places—
our job to build something better.