I Don’t Know If You Can Hear the River

It seems to be dragging its freight
like an enormous beast.

On Monday at dawn,
two children saw a body
floating in the current,
limp, like a rag doll.
I told them that in rivers
there are no corpses,
that this was just gossip.

Yesterday the children came back,
saying they’d seen another body, downstream
floating among some ferns.
I didn’t answer back
because I know they throw bodies
into La Miel, our river:
bodies of prostitutes, of the old puppeteer,
of that young man who wore earrings…
nobody has counted those bodies.

My father—this was years ago—
was walking by the riverbank.
Someone saw him struggling,
heard some shots,
then a splash in the water…
and he didn’t come home.
My father, who slept little
and made the sun rise early,
who challenged the devil himself
and preached to god,
who shared his lunch with the cats,
the doves, and the dogs,
who called out the one they’d named “Panther,”
made him turn pale and flee into the bushes….
my father, that stubborn man, never returned home.

Maybe you notice that smell in his room
of sheets in storage, of moldy books.
That window he’d open to feel the sunlight
and listen to the cicadas
has been closed for years.
What’d happened to his remains?
Perhaps his bones got trapped among the stones
or the waters of La Miel carried them away
down to the river it joins:
Magdalena, that other river,
where they throw the dead.

And to think at its birthplace
our river used to smell of honey.
Now it’s a cemetery.
And to think “Magdalena”
is what they call a woman
who never stops crying.