37 El mundo
Even in dreams, your father is working,
and in the version you’d been having for weeks,
he lifts a large replica of the world, places it
on his back, and because his body here defies
logic and physics, carries it up a hill, which,
after you wake up, you know is a metaphor
for twelve-hour shifts, for pounding nails
into wood, for sliding steel into slots again
and again, and for the days when his back
is shaped into a crooked punctuation,
and his feet, marking the floor into a hieroglyph,
have lost more of their purpose, becoming quiet
when he gets home, so that all you see of him
is not comparisons to language, but two
swollen limbs, a body reclined on a La-Z-Boy,
a father relieved to call this silence his own.
and in the version you’d been having for weeks,
he lifts a large replica of the world, places it
on his back, and because his body here defies
logic and physics, carries it up a hill, which,
after you wake up, you know is a metaphor
for twelve-hour shifts, for pounding nails
into wood, for sliding steel into slots again
and again, and for the days when his back
is shaped into a crooked punctuation,
and his feet, marking the floor into a hieroglyph,
have lost more of their purpose, becoming quiet
when he gets home, so that all you see of him
is not comparisons to language, but two
swollen limbs, a body reclined on a La-Z-Boy,
a father relieved to call this silence his own.
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Disclaimer
We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2021 by Esteban Rodríguez, “37 El mundo” from Wildness Issue No. 2, August, 2021. Poem reprinted by permission of the author and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.