In memory of Luis Omar Salinas
Moon glow, salt spray,
atoms of desire spinning
off the waves . . .
I know it can’t be Immanuel Kant
& The Mystics
beachcombing before the preternatural palms,
before the empirical
back-beat of the surf . . .
no, it looks a lot like you
in an existential
pork-pie hat,
a filter cigarette
making circle-eights
before the determinism
of the tide—
compadre, experience says,
it could only be you,
rolling up the sleeves
of a white agnostic shirt,
lemon blossoms
and the burnt wick of your heart on the air
as you tip your hat to the sea,
the ashes of romance spilling
out, having climbed your last balcony
with roses
and a mandolin
to entreat the Madonnas
of tenderness.
Compañero,
I still drive an old Chevy
with the wind wings open,
with a quart of Lucky Lager
in the trunk,
without a prayer
or rational explanation,
and think of you. . . .
It seemed
there were 100 disquisitions
left to arm-wrestle
to the floor of indecision
before we took up the logical positivism
of death
which all along we’d planned
on tossing back
with the sea wrack and stinking kelp
to the committee
on the theory of theories.
You refused to sit
for the final
examination of the orthodox and obscure,
and like the gulls
reciting rosaries in the sky,
held convocations
with the impoverished
where the subject of the soul
never came up.
I still find myself asking
what could have been
so all-fired empirical
about our hell-bent youth?
Our lives
blooming for a while
like the sun over Mazatlan where
you grappled with specters
about the immediate failures
of rationalism and instant coffee,
where you wrote odes
to the pragmatism of sparrows
across lunch sacks,
across the blood-streaked dusk,
denouncing every linguistic
smoke screen rising
like driftwood fires along the beach.
Didn’t we submit
our epistemological shoes
to the tides,
to the whirlwinds
and typhoons of light,
only to end up
at 2 am in the Eagle Café,
floating among more lost souls
and minor galaxies of grease?
Now it looks like it’s air to air for us
as your comrade
Neftali said.
Like him, you’ve ascended with the salt air,
with the dust from the fields,
and I’m well more than halfway
out to sea.
What flag should I hoist now
so God might see us
and know we are not about to repent
the hundred anarchies
of our hearts?
Here we are,
the sea still blank
and unreadable—
the sky, offering little
but a low bank of clouds
in our defense,
against the abandonment
of stars.
Christopher Buckley’s recent books are Star Journal: Selected Poems, Univ. of Pittsburgh Press; AGNOSTIC, Lynx House Press, 2019, and The Pre-Eternity of the World, Stephen F. Austin State Univ. Press January 2021.
He has recently edited: The Long Embrace: 21 Contemporary Poets on the Long Poems of Philip Levine, Lynx House Press; and NAMING THE LOST: THE FRESNO POETS—Interviews & Essays, Stephen F. Austin State Univ. Press, both due Fall 2020.
Photo by Guille . on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND