The poet, Angel Garcia, writes the following about his poem, “Vestiges”: “For years I’ve been tracing my lineage, the historical record of where and whom my family comes from. While the research has been a process of recovery, through anecdotes and occasional artifacts, I’ve realized that I’m too late. There are wide and deep swaths of what I do not and never will know concerning the ancestors whose pasts I am trying to write through. Despite the loneliness this causes, the profound sense of loss, this poem offers a critique that hinges on my speaker’s selfishness. It asks, who am I to write through their lives?”
Not the riverbank. Not the sedges
or the black hum
of blow flies that feed off a corpse.
Not the river. Not
its indifferent current. Not the bridge
or how it bemoans
the loss of someone who’s left town
—the year, the date,
unimportant. Not the address scribbled
onto scrap paper.
Not the hospital or the room at home,
pulsing and humid.
Not the midwife who prays between
parted legs. Not
the just born baby. Not his open mouth
forming its first
word because the word is stillborn. Not
the afterbirth,
its collapse, a memory of its last breath.
No. None of this.
I pretend I’m well-mannered and polite.
Wet with my grief.
Barefoot. Burdened by footprints I follow,
those I’ve trekked
in the mud. I’ve come with no good sense
of discretion. I seek
sins and secrets, what remains I excavate
from the coffin
or confessional. My tongue is pickled
in a jar of ink.
The months have fed from my body
by the handful.
Even so, I foam at the mouth for what
was never mine.
Copyright © 2022 by Ángel García.
