Machete by Tomás Q. Morín

Author:Tomás Q. Morín [Morín, Tomás Q.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

Royal Silence

for c. dale young

This much I know, as I came down the mountain

and the valleys were revealed and my ears

clogged so that all I could hear was the inside

of my own head, I became a brother for a while

to the nineteenth-century hunter who dressed

in that green between olive and ivy, the one the Jets

still wear, though they haven’t been in the hunt

since Broadway Joe wore pantyhose for Beauty Mist

or danced around the Orange Bowl like a buck

in rut darting and dodging across a field of blue

daisies in late fall, a dumb creature to be sure

for all its nobility, and I probably couldn’t

ever shoot one, not that I’ve tried, besides

someone said you shouldn’t carry loathing

in your heart when you aim at a deer or a grouse

or a bear, which it would pain me to do,

especially the bear, who can sound like a Hare Krishna

when he’s happy, his head bobbing, every huff

and grunt in a clear timbre, except when he’s angry,

the bear that is, his pitch is closer to a bull’s

or a bullfrog’s, a bull bullfrog declaiming

in a Polish accent that silence is royal,

and natural, and that the world only speaks

when we have committed a sin or two

against it—this is an old ribbit, he says, retold

over and over through history; think Memphis

and Rwanda; think Chile and Warsaw; think

New Delhi and Granada where that romantic

disciple of everything green who is dead, who was shot,

that sleepless King of the pond, still croaks

into the green wind “Verde que te quiero verde”

loud enough to wake the dead and keep them so.

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