Coming Home — Blackbird Archive

← v17n2, Fall 2018

Coming Home

The fruit piles up impossibly, a balance

that is unbalanced to desire, aping a truck

of clouds shoveled by weather into bulk

like luggage rubbled on the carousel

haloed by passengers still waiting for their bags.

Light, too, has grown greedy with patience.

It lurks on the domed roof of the pale house

atop the bone and olive escarpment. It magmas

in the arena’s gut, burps in the irate cloud.

Tired of fencing the track of the temporal race,

of being the needle that minds the universe,

it warms the nested sigh of the thickening mound.

Comforting that light is also languor driven.

Though waking with us, it denies we’re kin.

art place

Ricardo Pau-Llosa

Ricardo Pau-Llosa is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Man (2014), Parable Hunter (2008), and The Mastery Impulse (2003), all from Carnegie Mellon University Press. His collection Intruder between Rivers/Intruso entre ríos , an English-Spanish edition of twenty five previously published poems with translations by Enrico Mario Santí, was released in early 2018. He is also the author of numerous essays and monographs on modern Latin American artists, including Olga de Amaral, Fernando de Szyszlo, Rogelio Polesello, and Agustín Fernández. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review , december , The Hudson Review , and Poetry , among others. Photo by Philip Talleyrand