The Meat Packers Son
[A poetic Lament: in prose]

You are like a sparrow that is not here:

The fat guy with the white mustache—The Asian lady nearby, smiling, listening to a bronze skinned guy –(next table over) under the umbrella of the café, next to mine: We’re all just people going to die, under the naked sky, some stuck in beehives. —We’re all thinking it’s far off, thinking it will never come to that, but death comes, we see it all around, it just isn’t our time, and I’m just a meat packer’s son, making a rhyme.

‘Old man,’ they call me now, capped with a receding hairline, a few white hairs, here and there, a drought, rising inside my brain, knotted muscles everywhere; once unimaginable, like vapor clouds in my eyes. I see my Mother in that old sofa chair, she’s saying, “I never expected to live so long,” how strange it seemed back then, now, I got one upstairs.

My saga is hammering, I live in a labyrinthine circle, with root deep bones, knuckles, shoulder, chromosomes, breaking down; dreams not worth much anymore: they come during darkness and vanish before dawn. I have a grimace on my face, like the cool breeze from the ocean, which moistens my eyes; winter in Lima is always too unruffled, upon the topsoil of my face.

The old fat man’s gone to the can; to my left, the new breed, he sits at the table, computer above his knees, a cup of coffee, by his elbow, nothing else, he’s got the world by the tail, but it looks to me like a lonely table.

The fat man now is standing, looking for change; I’ll never see him again! He got his camera in hand; I wonder if he’ll live to see the pictures, I hope he so. But I suppose I really don’t care, out of sight, out of mind, I’m just a meat packers son, one with a soft face, crab-claws who fought in Vietnam.

Mother, Mother, what ill-bred son have you so wisely kept, if you could see me again? I’m mouth less, eyeless, bald and fat, it would have killed you instead. Mother, you praised my poetry once, un-teachable I was, but I learned, I learned dear mother—and now you are somewhere floating above me, listening. Like bluebirds that never were, life has come and left her. And left me in the kingdom you bore me to, you even had to help me tie my shoes, so helpless I must have been, way back when. My eyes nowadays, seem as if they are in milk-covered glasses; I was proud to be a meat packer’s son, I still am, I told everyone, under this now, flat dull sun.

I wonder where the old fat man went—? Like life to death, he came and diminished—; wonder if he was a hell of an old warrior, like my mother and I: lifting the delicate hammers in life, catgut stitches on our hearts. Peaceable she died, with the Lord, Jesus Christ by her side.

I wander if they have bald angels up above, insane world down here: like entering a nightmare; waiting for death, for the wood and stones over our heads.

[End]

Images of light are flimsy, I have leaf-size veins, that seem to have a lack of action, filled with something; I used to call my mother “The Queen bee,” she used to smile when I said that, like sugar roses; I’m on my second cup of coffee, a heat lamp over my head, the night market of Miraflores, is being set up, over in the park, everyone’s looking to me, to be, camouflaged, conspicuous.

I’m looking about, tables, tables, heads and bodies, I think a meat packers son, how she’d love to come home and tell me of all the gossip going on, down at the stockyards, like snowflakes, in Minnesota, falling down over head, and we laughed; I wonder how many boxes of bacon, she had to pack?



#1405 7/29/2006; written at El Parquetito, Miraflores, Lima, Peru