William Archila: California Poets Part 8, Four Poems
January 8th, 2025
California Poets: Part VIII
William Archila
Four Poems
[I caught a plane exploring the abundance of...]
I caught a plane exploring the abundance of Los Angeles
luminous light where the names of the dead take up
the empty spaces. Something was broken. Something
about nothing. The country told me to go. The dogs bark
to avoid thinking. I cannot escape it. There’s a street of dogs
in El Salvador where it’s impossible to find meaning.
They said corpses were multiplying the empty spaces.
My family advised I stay indoors as much as possible. I was lost.
I was Juned. There was music. That summer heat stuck
to my skin like a sponge. An elder swimming the waters
of a river that I will someday have to cross is another
of God’s disguises. The siblings still had to pay for services.
The reporter says bodies were found in the morgue rotting.
If I close my eyes for a few seconds, I am likely to miss it.
[When I come home & roam the cornhusk...]
When I come home & roam the cornhusk at dusk, my god
crouches on the couch chomping on wood chips & ashes.
I read him facts about tattered ruins & scattered masses
till I’m so ready to thicken the air like a bro who knows
absolutely nothing. When I come home, I tell him there’s
an ash trace of fingers on the walls. A trail of faint smudges
from the fridge to the couch. He piles up the facts to bedevil
my trap. My god, he’s at it again. Out my window, his face
pops up, never lets up. My god, in my ear, his book of curses,
down the chimney howling like a monkey. My god, cast
this outcast out of my house & all the other duendes as well.
Even conquistadors experienced the sublime, carbon-stained
shadow of his body. When they leaned over the cliff, peered
at the river below, hands holding back the dirt in their mouths.
Three Minutes with Mingus
When I read of poets & their lives,
son of a milkman & seamstress, raised
in a whistle-stop town or village, a child
who spent his after-school hours deep
in the pages of a library book, I want to go
back to my childhood, back to the war,
rescue that boy under the bed, listening
to what bullets can do to a man, take him
out of the homeland, enroll him in school,
his class-size ten, unfold the fables
of the sea, a Spanish galleon slamming up
& down the high waters. This is why
I write poems, why I prefer solitude
when I listen to your lazy sound
of brass on the phonograph. You give
language to black roosters & fossil bones,
break down phrases between the LA River
& the yellow taxi cabs of New York.
I picture you in Watts, the 240-pound
wrath of a bass player building up steam,
woodshedding for the strictly segregated
hood, those who seek a tiny shot of God,
digging through hard pan, the hammer’s
grunt & blow. I need a gutbucket of gospel,
the flat land of cotton to catch all those
Chinese acrobats bubbling inside your head.
When I think of the day I will no longer
hold a pencil within my hand or glance
upon the spines of my books, I hear
Picasso’s Guernica in your half-choked
cries, a gray workhorse lost in a fire’s
spiraling notes, a shrieking tenor sax
for the woman falling out of a burning house.
I want to tell you if I wrote like you pick
& pat in Blues and Roots, I would understand
the caravel of my childhood, loose
without oars or sails, rolling on the swells
of a distant sea. That’s all I got, Mr. Mingus.
I give you the archaeology of my words,
every painstaking sound I utter when I come
to the end of a line, especially the stressed
beats of a tiny country I lost long ago.
Guayaberas
In my boyhood, all the men
wore them, a light body shirt
with pleats running down the breast,
two top pockets for pens, notepads,
two bottom ones for keys or loose change,
each sewn with a button
in the middle of the pouch,
a complement tailored to the slit
at the side of the hip. If you look
at photographs in family albums,
men stand against palm trees,
their short-sleeved guayaberas
caught in sunlight, their Panama hats
tipped to the sky. There’s a black and white
of my father, stumbling along fields
of cane, head full of rum,
mouth in an o, probably
singing a bolero of Old San Juan.
On days like these, the sun burned
like an onion in oil. Women hung
guayaberas on windows to dry.
Shirtless, men picked up their barefoot babies
off the floor, held them against their bellies
as if talking to a god. Even my school uniform
was a blue guayabera, but nothing
like my father’s favorite: white,
long-sleeved, above the left breast
a tiny pocket, perfectly slender for a cigar,
arabesque designs vertically stretched.
When the evening breeze lulled
from tree to tree, he serenaded
my mother, guitars and tongues of rum
below her balcony; the trio strumming,
plucking till one in the morning.
I don’t know what came first,
war or years of exile,
but everyone — shakers of maracas, cutters
of cane, rollers of tobacco — stopped wearing them,
hung them back in the closet, waiting
for their children to grow,
an arc of parrots to fly across the sky
at five in the evening. In another country,
fathers in their silver hair sit
on their porches, their sons, now men,
hold babies in the air, guayaberas nicely pressed.
Author Bio:
William Archila is the winner of the 2023 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for his collection S is For. He is the author of The Art of Exile which was awarded the International Latino Book Award, and The Gravedigger’s Archaeology which received the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize. He was also awarded the 2023 Jack Hazard fellowship. He has been published in Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Review, AGNl, Copper Nickle, Colorado Review, Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, TriQuarterly and the anthologies The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Latino Poetry The library of America Anthology, and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States. In 2010, he was named a Debut poet by Poets & Writers. He is a PEN Center USA West Emerging Voices fellow. He is an associate editor of Tía Chucha Press. He lives in Los Angeles, on Tongva land.
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