Llanto for carlos sandoval (1948-1990).

Pisare yo el polvico
atan menudico.
--Cervantes

I wish we were all a tribe
and that when the news came
the tribe could gather,
painted in earth colors,
with the dust of grief in our hair,
to dance for a day and a night
in a stupor of rhythm and movement,
shuffle and footfall,
breathing as one for you;
the remorseless drums
a heartbeat for you;
horns of tusk and seashell,
shofar and abeng,
with unearthly cry
calling to you from this earth.

Our dance grinds the earth to powder.
In the firelight and that dust,
driven by drumbeats and cries,
our grief calls upon memory,
putting together all that each of us knew
till your image is there before us,
a cloud of smoke in the fire,
a pillar of fire in the swirling dust.

Each of us takes it in,
and our exhausted bodies
keep your image alive
in the firelight on the dust
till your sons have seen and known
the man they would never know.

Then we can let you go,
let the dust die down,
and the fire die,
and the dancing die, and the drums.
The night dies into a grey dawn.
Dead-tired, dazed, each dancer
goes his own way.
Down that road, long or short,
each carries this new memory,
the miracle we worked
for the miracle you were.
*
There is no tribe.
The stutter of my hearbeat,
when the news came,
and the cold tears,
were shared with no one.
However loud I shout,
my breath, while it lasts,
might move the motes of the air
but it cannot move your dust.

I can only imagine the tribe
and the enormous labor of its love.
But that conspiracy of dreaming
makes you present to me
as long as the wind lasts,
and the dust, and the years.