Pedro Trevino-Ramirez - Three Poems
The Williams Model on an Author's Torment
The Author Returns Home in December
Fishing With the Wardog
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The Williams Model on an Author’s Torment
Who am I to
describe the furnace
I am?—
to say dead do not
cross, but continue
to explode
and murder sons,
inimical corpse, slow
as seasoil
spared current?
—a cataclysm, field
erupt burning
meadowgrass
& teeth, rags.
I am mortal still, will
collapse from cigarette
smoke & mastu-
-rbation.
Best allow my tinder
speak of me, ash up,
from the detritus,
sulfurstone.
The Author Returns Home in December
Scarce anything change in my homeland,
snowchoked town, northplains
& copperslagshafts.
Time has killed many, thinned history
to rows of cabinbones, mossy stone.
Keweenaw buildings remain empty.
It is still too goddamn cold
to grow anything.
On splitgrey winter evenings, the sun
curls through birchbranch elbows
and darkens
modicums of gravel & salt; assumingly,
as it did years before on the black politic
of another man who smoked too much,
could not love the season, the long white
Fishing with the Wardog
My father was not executioner
nor highwayman, his sinker cast
into the Potomac,
boy, do you like catfish?
He was as man an earthenware
and did rare tilt. I thought he had
died or let to sleep upright; he was
a painted man, conceived in browns
& olive drab; adorned to the pier
while I the wind slighted. I had
seen this many nights:
the aztecman in hunt—
I had been prey and the blood of
sun, though the whiskers and river
eel proved better than I.
This man was not the moon,
pulling water from coves: Texas
passage to Appalachia, he was a
hint of silk or taut leather—
boy, this is where life goes, on a
hook, on a hook.—I am a man
with a curved steel spine, years
later, in the river, in the river.
.
