Jose Antonio Rodriguez, "Shelter"

Don’t misunderstand me, I love a good poem
Like half my Facebook friends, one that transports you
To a corner of the soul you didn’t know was there
Because you couldn’t find the precise metaphor,
Even if you felt it, like that time my parents saw
A local news story of an older woman asking for help
With an ailing husband, and I volunteered to drive them
To the address onscreen, a neighborhood
I’d never driven through, though it looked familiar
With its usual poverty: a few leaning boards called a house
And inside the woman from the news in half-light
Thanking us for the comforters in our hands and pointing
To a foldout chair where we could place them
Before introducing us to her husband, a scraggly beard
Beneath a crinkled blanket on a cot right there
In what would have been the living room, groaning
In the muted manner of those who know this is
As good as it’ll get, the woman’s non-stop small talk
About “So it is, life’s a struggle” and “Please stay awhile”
And “Take a seat,” as if we were long-missed relatives,
All this in Spanish, though I translate it here
Because I want to reach the widest audience
And not burden the monolingual English reader
When they’ve already gifted me their time by reading this,
Which I’ll call a poem, one that my parents can’t read,
As they only speak Spanish with that poor Mexican lilt of apology
Which kept them from interrupting the woman, a Spanish
I’ve kept but rarely use, though I did that moment
When I kept telling my mother “We have to go”
With an almost impolite urgency, because I couldn’t bear
One more minute in that near-replica of the room of my childhood,
Even as the woman said “He seems to be in such a hurry”
And my mother smiled, making excuses as we turned to leave,
While I bemoaned my parents’ passive politeness
So common in the Mexican in America, though by then
I was already a grad student in upstate New York
And down in South Texas for the winter break
Between semesters of reading Adichie and Alexie
And risking words together to find something
Like the point of this, some search for the reason
For the speaker’s love of poems, that pull
Of the written word as artifact, as a kind of tool
Against the sometimes overwhelming sadness about all of it—
Including the fact that some of us it seems will never be allowed
The time and energy to sit with a poem, like them
In that illusion of shelter, though perhaps
They were closer to poetry’s pursuit, that edge of oblivion
Where words begin becoming insufficient—the woman
With her frantic speech beseeching us and the man
Extending his bony hand out, as if from the cot itself,
The tremor of it trying to say something that sounded
Like a greeting, that sounded like a plea.

José Antonio Rodriguez