Que Significa
I thought it’ d be cooler, here,
in late June, but all night I’m kicking off the sheets
and pulling them back over my body in the stillness
of my room, until I remember, suddenly,
those summers as a boy, lying in the twin bed
with you. That was before the highway, when
one needed to drive up and down the mountains
to get from one side of the island to the other, and
Salinas, where fishing nets hung to dry
in branches along the shore and we swam
in a clearing among the mangroves or rocked
in a hammock behind the house where my mother and
your father were born, still seemed untouched
by “America.” Sometimes, at the bakery, or with
the woman who sold lottery tickets outside
the restaurant, or as the men drove us in the back
of their trucks past the sugarcane fields, not understanding
a word or turn of phrase, a joke someone made,
I’ d ask, Que significa, but it was already
over or too hard to explain, you’ d say. I grew
homesick for English. One summer, at the movies,
you cried so hard, it scared me, the screen lighting your wet face.
One summer, sprawled out on the floor in front
of the tv in our bathing suits, we began
to wrestle, laughing until our hands, then our mouths
moved across our bodies, driven by a force we let
guide us. Then someone stopped, and we lay
in the sunlit room breathing hard. Someone must have
gotten up and walked away. Someone must have made
small talk until we could pretend it never happened.
Quiro verte, you said on the phone
years later, both of us now with children
of our own. And when I made it back one day
to the island, I drove to your house, knocking on
the large door at the agreed-upon time,
but no one answered. The flamboyant trees
were in bloom, their bright red blossoms scattered on
the street, and it didn’t take long to get back
to my hotel, but I got lost. I’ d never been
to that part of the city and so much had changed.
