Listening to Julio,
my mother fell asleep on an old sunbonnet quilt
in her messy room
beside the road where drunks roar by
chasing fire engines, coating dust on three bushes
of pomegranates.
Some pomegranates, rusty fuchsia, arrayed
on the table in a stoneware bowl,
were rescued from dust and birds, and from a still-life husk of shadows in the gloom.

Each pomegranate is a seedy world
of praise and carnival
where rain reveals a lantern show
of loaves and fishes: fruit for Caliban.

As my mother sleeps, Persephone
seems to enter and observe the clutter.
The Dutch girls draw together under the colored shovels
of their hats, holding little spades and baskets.
Frutas, muchachas, y canastas
capture the music of sleep's oblivion.
The place, a faded star in a constellation.

There's even a rural road named Estrella
a little west of here, a place where
my mother would like to move, rolling her sleeves,
wearing her sunbonnet, perhaps,
but abandoning the pomegranates
as aliens are said to abandon other worlds
to seek out this one--
arriving in ships, cigar-shaped,
all dusty from the stars.


Copyright © Ramón E. Martínez, 1999, 2009.  All Rights Reserved.