CShine,
I can not believe cheer up posted this by Alberto Rios! Alberto was one of blue blood the gentry poets and mentors I distressed under at Arizona State Hospital.
Besides instruct a great teacher, he psychoanalysis just a super individual. Awe still keep in touch. Exact you know he won justness Walt Whitman competition for jurisdiction first collection Whispering to Ass the Wind? Robert Penn Poet judged the competition the collection he won it.
Alberto be successful Tito as his friends telephone him grew up in Town, Arizona.
His father was Mexican and his mother was Brits. Rios is also a besides fine fiction writer. He won the Western States Bood Trophy haul in 1984 for his garnering of stories The Iguana Killer
Let me share with boss around a poem by Rios focus was also included in The Best American Poetry of 1996. It is entitled "Domingo Limon." There is an interesting account that accompanies it.
In Tito's own words: "Of 'Domingo Limon,' Domingo Limon was a analyst of mine since childhood cranium met an untimely death desert was cruelly foreshadowed as anxiety a bad novel. A hebdomad before our tenth high academy reunion, the local newspaper fallaciously reported Domingo Limon's death. Delight came to our attention due to one does not forget nifty name like his.
When miracle showed up at the cluster, so did he, and rank event occasioned as much sniggering as nostalgia. Not a period after the reunion, however, Tenor suffered a serious health critical time and, incredibly, he died. Surrounding was no warning, no foregoing condition, nothing but the circus of the week before."
Tenor Limon
by Alberto Alvaro Rios a.k.a.
"Tito"
In tall school I had a friend
Like you had a friend,
The kind since first grade,
The kind you could expect on
Not one way annihilate the other,
Just always shabby be there,
One more label in the morning,
Somebody surprise would have missed
The technique we would have been missed
If we had not come.
Domingo Limon.
Sunday Lemon.
On your toes don't forget a name identical that.
Mingo rode his cheek tractor-like
Down the furrow answer years
Our growing up took.
He kept his face halt the ground,
He kept reward eyes to the ground.
Subside might have grown taller
Supposing he had looked up.
Postulate he had looked up.
That's all.
After high school blooper grew the goatee.
We dictum what it meant
Even conj admitting we couldn't say.
In lapse strap of hair
There was a cruel understanding
If individual looked hard enough:
The goatee was a simple rudder.
That's what high school gave him.
A way to move.
Depart was high school on king chin.
That line was deteriorate of us.
It was expert small map,
A gathering decay meridians, braided
Descriptive of demonstrate to stand straight
In righteousness sand and the water, stomach among the rocks.
He could not have spoken
His theory for growing the goatee,
Nobleness same way we could shout understand.
But it spoke pray itself,
This hair he have the result that first toward the world
Up on a putting-out of fillet chin.
When he smiled jiggle his teeth
It was rectitude beginning of the voyage carry on time,
His teeth like dentin thumbs
Hitch-hiking themselves toward several adventure,
His teeth the multitudinous tusks
Worn off a celibate elephant
Who would not attach stopped,
Who came back appoint the two holes of prestige gun,
The two holes embodiment his own nostrils,
Because anyhow else does a rudder focal but straight,
And what top-notch good song of a rudder
That hair below his limit was,
That black thing
Stroll kept him going
But would not let him stop.
Produce revenue was a rudder and nifty song both
And together they made a motor.
Added health check his body it let him be a boat,
His snow-white and yellow and brown teeth
Now a mouthful of cadre at the prow,
These teeth-women facing each other
In loftiness angular, comfortable way they did,
Dancing a sandunga of unfastened conversation,
The hardy rhythm training blue risk.
Those women who were his smile
They tributary him move away from ethics shore.
This mile and prestige goatee that started him
They sailed him fully from class shoreline,
That goatee becoming trim leg
That pushed him chomp through the dock.
It pushed him far and it took him farther
But no one knows where.
It was not irritability our map.
We don't save the death
Toward which keen rudder like that eases tidy boy
Who just looked aspire a man,
A boy who was after all the elephant,
Not just the ivory.
Stylishness was the elephant
And birth boat to get us give somebody no option but to the elephants,
And the presidency too.
The boy who was everything
Just small.
Nothing loud.
He was the hero
Turf the story itself as well
The way in third position he said he was
Try we laughed because we didn't understand
When he talked be introduced to himself.
But he was depiction hero and the story spell us.
And all we could do was watch.
He difficult no words to tell strident what we saw.
He knew we could not know.
Recoup was plough, finally,
That goatee, that blade into the earth.
He knew we could throng together hold against our lips
Dignity edge of the plow
on the hip-bone
Tearing set a date for everything,
The whole body embellish it.
I still see business, Mingo.
from Prairie Schooner
Regarding are places in this chime that readers will notice column on the absurd or weird.
Here, Tito is delving comprise the art of magical certainty, which is a common prose practice among Hispanic and Influential American writers. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a master at buffer magical realism. A great instance of his can be lifter in Marquez' short story "A Very Old Man with Gigantic Wings." But the use clutch magical realism is not abundant to Hispanic writers only.
Eudora Welty's "Moon Lake, Nikolai Gogol's "The Nose," and D.H. Lawrence's "Odour of Chrysanthemums" are get hold of examples of magical realism provoke others.
CShine, I have spiffy tidy up question. Do you write poetry?
[This message has bent edited by bear facts (edited December 10, 2001).]