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luís soares

Blog do escritor Luís Soares

David Dominguez - Reading

             —For My Students

 

Breakfast, and I’m eating plain yogurt, figs from my garden, and honey.

             I’m sitting in a lawn chair on the backyard patio—

 

life is good, and the sunlight warming my lap and the pages 

             of a book remind me of Tucson 

 

and the subterranean apartment I rented alone and far from home.

             There was a sofa in front of my one window 

 

where at noon the sun burned briefly on the cushions as starlings 

             stirred in the trees with their admonishments.

 

Stepping back there now, I remember feeling hopeless after reading 

             Lorca’s “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías.”

 

I recall how I put the book on the coffee table and closed my eyes 

             and saw blood glowing in my arteries.

 

In the leaves, the starlings went on with their disconnected chatter,

             and I said to myself, “I’ll never write anything like

 

‘And the bull alone with a high heart! At five o’clock in the afternoon.’”

             For three months, I didn’t write one word

 

but instead passed the days swimming in the public pool where, 

             from my half-closed eyes, I watched light ride

 

the splashing water or resting on the surface when I floated, face down, 

             sinking with fear: “What do I do now?” I asked.

 

Some nights, I filled my red truck with gas and drove west on the 19 

             until my headlights flooded the desert, and when 

 

the city was less than pinpoints of glitter, and when all I could hear 

             was the whine of silence in my ears, 

 

I parked alongside the highway, leaned against my pickup, and stared

             at stars so sure of themselves as they shone

 

that I believed they couldn’t help but give me something that would

             make me sit at my desk and write. 

 

I felt directionless and wanted to walk out into the landscape, 

             but I feared snakes and scorpions 

 

hiding in the buckhorn and staghorn as I recalled my father’s words, 

             “You’ll be lost forever on the far side of the moon”—

 

words that haunted me as I imagined slipping into lunar shadows 

             that no human telescope would spot 

 

as I wandered lost and ripped with nostalgia for the nights I read

             in used bookstores on Campbell—a time when 

 

the future seemed so clear I smelled it in dirt that somebody 

             rinsed from the sidewalk as I walked home. 

 

Then, one night while sipping black coffee along the side of the 19, 

             I remembered lying on the living room floor

 

as my father and I listened to Brahms’s “Lullaby,” which inspired me

             to practice “Away in a Manger” on my trumpet: 

 

“It’s a lullaby. Play it like that,” my father said as my sixth grade lips 

             struggled to phrase notes that would 

 

please a child under the beating stars, and remembering this, 

             I looked up to the oblivious heavens 

 

and tied words to images—Cassiopeia, Perseus, Cygnus, Pegasus—

             and let them sing clearly through my mind.