Virgil Suarez
La Noche
“It is the light of houses in the distance
punctuating the night.”David Ignatow, “Night”
walking the dog in the dusk hours,
fireflies jump from the tall grass
as if to say hello, charm far-off mates
with their flash of longing, out again
on the path around the bend, pass
the pond from where the frogs beckon
as though they await rain, and I think
of my father and how much he loved
the sound of frogs and rain falling
on the tin roof of our patio
in Havana when he’d come home late
in the day, tired from killing horses
from which he fed the zoo lions; he’d lay
on his yute sack hammock my mother
sewed for him one birthday, and he’d
fall soundly asleep, and I would sneak
up on him because there were days
(and nights) when I would not see him,
and I would smell him, hear the rhythm
of his breathing, and I looked down
his open mouth, a dark cavern in the fresh
night, and I thought one day my father
would swallow me, my aimless life,
and he does, tonight, he does, like exile,
like this walking into the evening
darkness when, like Hansel & Gretel,
I look upon the distant house lights
as those crumbs left behind, follow them
to find my own way back to my own house.
Page(s) 140
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