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Please, excuse my shadow. I can’t 

stop leaving. I don’t know how

to name what I don’t know

well enough to render

in a single sitting. Every poem

about us seems an impossible labor,

like forgetting the face

of the sea, or trying to find

a more perfect name for water.

And the body is beautifully there, like hoarfrost.

Tears on its face now glimmering like dimes

falling from a slot machine, or a stream, thought lost,

that breaks through fresh snow at wintertime.

From Brother Salvage, posted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press

It was true that Eva’s male colleagues had by now ceased to joke among themselves that a hopeless crush on Professor Mueller ought to be included among the requirements for the major in philosophy, but this was not because the students no longer fell in love with her. They did, at a rate which had of course slackened over the years but was still not inconsiderable. It was an irony—of course quite lost on Eva, who was steadfastly oblivious to the dramas in which she figured—that many who sat raptly listening to their professor’s lectures on the “futility of the passions,” on the need to transform the passive emotions directed towards objects and people outside ourselves into the active emotions of the intellect, were swollen with an advanced case of that same passive desire whose elimination was being eloquently, even passionately, urged upon them.

And we divorced in the survives            and O

It was a comedy            and first you ever slept with me

And marry me and marry me and O

How fat I used to be

In Lima, dying is the local sport. Those who die in phantasmagoric fashion, violently, spectacularly, are celebrated in the fifty-cent papers beneath appropriately gory headlines: DRIVER GETS MELON BURST or NARCO SHOOTOUT, BYSTANDERS EAT LEAD. I don’t work at that kind of newspaper, but if I did, I would write those headlines too. Like my father, I never refuse work. I’ve covered drug busts, double homicides, fires at discos and markets, traffic accidents, bombs in shopping centers. I’ve profiled corrupt politicians, drunken has-been soccer players, artists who hate the world. But I’ve never covered the unexpected death of a middle-aged worker in a public hospital. Mourned by his wife. His child. His other wife. Her children.

My father’s dying was not news.