Means nothing beauty—beauty means.
The faces I mean, which are always bone-thin
And irreversibly immaculate. The eyes themselves
Distant, though they’re created for the opposite.
The shell of the legs, which are violin cases elongating
As though the instrument itself were falling into a black hole.
I think this is the way it works: you begin as a boy
Thinking the whole thing is air and water and flowers.
You think a feast will spread out in front of you, and she will too,
The moon like a bedspread. But then you find yourself
In a room with a large screen TV that clicks on as though
It were built in the eighties. You peer outside and there’s
Only the traffic of loneliness, and courthouses, and dead grass,
The shuffling of work boots. Your books sit on the shelf.
They could be about any subject but they contain poetry
And how-to lessons on the writing of poetry. You realize
that your bones are truly bones in there, the toothpaste runs out.
That it’s labor to cook every day. That you didn’t really try
In any of your college classes. You ruminate on lost opportunities
To tell that person off, to stand up for yourself. To live.
You eat constantly pushing your glasses back up on your nose.
Then, you look at women again. You look at beauty,
Which the armies of culture demand you watch all the time.
And they’re luminous but empty. They’re angels,
But angels don’t exist. Interesting thing, God is still there.
And stronger. He tells you to walk your dog in your slippers.
He tells you there are no women and men. Just souls
Swirling in and around the city. Just air, just poetry.
Alejandro Escudé’s first book of poems, “My Earthbound Eye,” was published in September 2013 upon winning the 2012 Sacramento Poetry Center Award. He received a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis. Alejandro works as an English teacher, having taught at the secondary level for many years. Originally from Argentina, he immigrated to California at an early age. A new collection, “The Book of the Unclaimed Dead,” published by Main Street Rag Press, is now available on the MSR website. Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his dog, a feisty terrier named Jake.