Three Poems

Un Vino Hermoso

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All summer I’ve worked with Carlos,
a short, barrel-chested El Salvadorian
who only speaks Spanish,
with a gold crown on his right canine,
and scars on his knuckles
from when he worked as a mason.
Pointing to a web of scars
across three fingers,
Carlos tells me about
his old job cutting trees.
Each day he would fall one,
cut it into four pieces,
and carry the sections on his shoulder,
one foot in front of the next,
over the mountain to the mill.
For the first time in years,
I’m thinking in Spanish.
I know this is not my doing.
Like wine, I’ve absorbed characteristics
from those around me.
The barrel room where I work
has five strands of unknown yeast,
ambient in the cellar,
single-celled fungi,
microscopic mushrooms
in the air. No one’s sure
where they come from.
So much goes into
a beautiful wine,
un vino hermoso.
Carlos calls me amigo.
He likes helping
make the wine here,
but he dreams of working
on a fishing boat
in Alaska. In my dreams,
I visit Carlos. His wife
serves us beer and wine,
and after lunch,
Carlos and I tell stories
about the places we have been
and the people we have met,
as we follow a trail to the beach
from his ranch in Sonsonate.

The Divorcée

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Fifteen minutes before
we open the tasting room,
I set out the spittoons
and water carafes, and sip
my coffee, listening
to a woman across the bar.
After her husband left her,
she gave up his name
and the house, and took
the rest in the shuffle.
Her red lipstick stains
the glass. She hums a tune
I remember hearing
on the radio as a child
while I played with wooden
blocks at my father’s feet
as he recited Emerson: “I intoxicated
And by the draught assimilated,
May float at pleasure through all natures.”
I move across the bar to polish glasses.
Each round, crystal mouth sings
as I use a damp cotton cloth
to polish the rim, all pitch
and resonance and sheen.

Harmonic Distortion

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When I was three, my father asked me
what does James Brown say,
and I shouted, Ow! I feel good!

At five, we danced to Bob Dylan’s harmonica
on a splintered redwood floor, buckets
placed about to catch the rain

leaking through the roof, the dark,
knotted beams with human faces hidden
in the wood grains that looked down at me,

watched me like the boy who lived reflected
in the windows behind the dinner table
piled with magazines, poems, a calendar

with appointments: teeth cleaning, surgery,
taxes, Music in the Mountains, an event
my parents cater for the musicians because

we can’t afford the concert tickets. In 1993,
after listening to Bach for the first time,
performed in a forested glen,

long after its composition, all I wanted
was to run, to persist as pure melody,
a name echoing from someone’s lips.