el nuevo idioma

The house, when you enter, seems immense.
You cannot fathom all the rooms,
the reds upon greens upon blues of peeling paint,
the people everywhere, emerging and disappearing from
doors that swing inwards and doors that swing outwards.
In the entryway, midwives and dulas greet you
holding eggs, rose petals, rosemary.

First, food is required. You are offered a seat at the table.
For several minutes, all you know is the hard wood of the seat against your bones,
until the parade of tamales, tlayudas, spiced peanuts and lime arrives,
demanding that all your senses commit themselves to the task of consumption.
Around you, the cadence of the meal swirls between mouths and plates,
sometimes nasal, sometimes hissing,
hollowing out into round sounds and solid, flat ahhhs.

You surface perhaps hours later and realize you are eating alone.
Rather, you, alone, are eating.
Those who smiled at your arrival have pushed back their chairs, have turned away.
You are still picking the lettuce out of your teeth.

A trickle of blood emerges from a crack in the cement block walls;
And that is when the band starts,
With the blare of a horn that makes the heart push through the skin.
The other brasses – saxes, trumpets, tubas – spring to life
and tingle through your torso, legs, and arms.
The sound creates and obliterates memory;
it pulls you forward and backwards.

When it stops (too soon) you feel the emptiness of the room,
the walls higher, the corners darker than before,
a heavier ceiling and floor.
Everyone has left. No note, no sign. Only the feeling of learning - after the fact -
that you had been in the company of greatness.

Yet…an open door beckons with firelight;
a bed beckons with blankets. And so, the night makes this house a refuge.
You dream of trees, following their roots into the intoxicating earth,
and then pushing deeper, squeezing through the labyrinths of earthworms.
You awake gasping for air.
Eyes hard and wide, returning, becoming liquid, and finally resting upon a string of ants
connecting, in their upside-down journey across the ceiling,
the open window with a rotting mango on the night table.

It has been two days or two weeks.
Someone knocks at the door (a question? a request?),
and every sense responds,
yet you lay still,
holding the moment before standing, misunderstanding,
Until at last you rise, advance, open.

Too late. The air is reassembling itself around a lingering scent of corn and cotton.
You speak to the empty space, fill it with your words,
more and more,
determined not to fall in.
The nouns accumulate first, then verbs, adjectives, prepositions.
They begin to take their own shape, piling higher and higher,
here and there providing footholds,
and you ascend.

What appeared to be a ceiling yields as you climb,
yet the walls draw closer,
and the air holds you in the thick embrace of a disfavored aunt.
Water and oil seep from above and, more than once, you slip.
A little higher, and small green leaves fall toward you,
blossoms of bouganvilla and tiny feathers
stick to your face and hair.
At last, a speck of sky growing bigger and bigger.

Hands are reaching through the opening, and then
you are expanding into a morning breeze, as light devours everything.
A young man puts his arm around your shoulder, and the blindness recedes.
Soon you can see to arms-length,
then to the edges of the wide roof:
a bevy of beer-drinkers, sunbathers, and children chasing birds.
Then, further, the mountains and valley – the distance revealing
lines between farm and pasture,
constellations of houses and trees,
a name and a place for each small object.

From above, clouds change the tone and texture of everything
as they pass in front of the sun.
And then words start to fall like leaves
and rise like balloons,
each one a memory
and a promise.