LC GUTIERREZ

My Mother is Beautiful, Still,

even while death tugs at her hair
and patches of her mind float away.
She waits for me, but I am now in heaven
thousands of miles, an ocean and continents
apart, in the high, hard, mesa of La Mancha
past the stark, southern suburbs of Madrid
scorched and parched in the summer and dead
frozen in the escarcha of winter months
greyed and ugly as dirt and the burgeoning
blocks of Amazon warehouses.

I escape on weekends, where Cervantes once lived
and run the rolling rows of nothing green
but for the olives’ thirsty drab. The rain
remembered, this spring, and stayed for weeks.
Everything has exploded in leaves and weeds
and wild, wildflowers in carpets of red
and white and purple and gold.
The stalks of freegrowth high as my head.
A sky that spreads in the blue and clear
that only a Spanish eye can reach.

I run alone where nothing will catch me.
But then, again, her living garden.
She’d stuff the ground along the sunbaked sides
of our house with crowns of eaten pineapples.
New ones would sprout and call the squirrels.
So very small, but how she’d make things grow.
Soon, I’ll pull the weeds where she can no longer
reach: my father seated, silent, planted.

I could find no better place than free
and flowing through flowered hills.
I have run this route again so many times,
but never seen the way with these same eyes:
carried, numb and cool as though in flight.
Soon I’ll hold her veining hand,
what’s left of us holding on.
Even at this blinding distance,
she is still so very beautiful.

LC Gutierrez is an erstwhile academic and product of many places in the deep southern US and the Caribbean. He currently lives, writes, teaches, and plays trombone in Madrid, Spain. His work is published or forthcoming in many wonderful journals, such as Notre Dame Review, Tampa Review, Rust and Moth, Hobart, Blood Orange Review, and Trampset. He is a poetry reader for West Trade Review.