Ars botánica
John Olivares Espinoza presents poems inspired by work as a gardener with his family
Botanical illustrations from the Codex Pictoricus Mexicanus, a set of drawings of Baja California’s plants and animals sketched around 1762 by the Jesuit Ignác Tirsch (1733–1781) during his missionary work in the Cape Region. (Courtesy of the National Library of the Czech Republic). Cited as Fig. 3 in: Garcillán, Pedro & Gonzalez-Abraham, Charlotte & Ezcurra, E. “The Cartographers of Life: Two Centuries of Mapping the Natural History of Baja California.” Journal of the Southwest 52 (2010), p. 8. 10.2307/27920207
POET’S NOTE
Both of my parents are Mexican immigrants. Both of them grew up as laborers. My mother eventually transitioned into a role as an educator after high school, but my father, after years as a migrant worker, settled into the role of running his own business as a landscaper in the desert resort towns of the Coachella Valley, California.
Be it as such, my dad eventually brought my two brothers and me to work with him. It wasn’t just to help out. He didn’t need the help all that much. He hired other workers, all of them new arrivals from Mexico, working their first job on U.S. soil to help him get the job done and on time. If anything, we were a liability and an impediment, except for my older brother, who was experienced and skilled in labor because he had been doing it longer than we had. Dad did it to keep us off the streets and out of gangs, to value hard work, and to simultaneously hate it enough to pursue a college education so that we could have the options he didn’t.
As kids, we worked any day of the week we weren’t in school. This meant working in the cold during our two-week Christmas break, in the cool during our one-week spring break, and in the merciless heat of three summer months in between grades. For years, our weekends looked like this: 12 hours of work on Saturdays and Mass on Sunday mornings before some rest, as Sundays were intended. So I made close associations with work and prayer.
Eventually, I went to the university and studied the craft of poetry. After my teacher introduced me to great poets of the working class, such as Gary Soto and Phillip Levine, I mined my own experiences with work as subjects for my poems. With that, I unconsciously began to incorporate Catholic imagery into my early poems. Clearly seeing what I was doing, my teacher, the poet Christopher Buckley, himself a product of Catholic school, helped guide me in my use of the metaphors, the imagery, and the voice of the verses I heard in church. Even the cadences of hymns and prayers still have an influence on my poems to this day.
I wrote all of these poems in my early to mid-20s, with the exception of “Ars Poética After Len Roberts,” which I wrote in my early 30s. Having better control of language today than in my earlier efforts, I have gone back to revise these poems since the publication of The Date Fruit Elegies because my poems never want to be finished as long as I’m alive and able. I thank the editors of HTI Open Plaza for the opportunity to present them here.
—John Olivares Espinoza
San Antonio, TX, April 2022
Falling from the Tree of Heaven
The ailanthus or “Tree of Heaven” is native to Asia, where it is considered medicinal; common in neglected urban areas, it is considered a noxious weed and vigorous invasive species in Europe and North America. Source: Botanical.com
I lift a trash can worth my weight of crushed oleander leaves,
climb the peak of the ladder leaning against the dump truck,
shake the crush out of the can like cereal out of its box, pause,
catch another breath of dry air, as I watch both my brothers
below stack tree branches on their shoulders. Our father climbs
a ladder until he disappears into the tree. Contreras, above him,
stands on two branches, trimming away the ailanthus
boughs that fall like locks of hair from a barber’s shears.
When one tags our father on the shoulder, he plummets,
gracefully, landing on his back across a short brick wall,
and not on the many cushions of branches piled below.
I should run to him. I can’t. We stare at him, lying there,
his body bent like the hedge clipper’s handle—those same clippers,
just moments before, he held in his hands, up in the tree.
Father lies stunned. His lower body, a bridge over the walkway.
Can you move? Feel your legs? Wiggle your fingers?
Things I learned to ask by reading comic books, when Bane
snapped Batman’s back across his knee and Alfred had to ask.
We keep asking questions, to keep from hearing the wrong answer,
because it’s him. My father. The blue and black that is not Batman.
My little brother Albert calls out to the homeowner, who limps out
with a metal cane, a tank holstered at the hip, tubes running
up his nose, a half-bottle of Wild Turkey and a glass in his clutch.
After a few shots of bourbon, Father sits up against the protest
of his lumbar and latissimus dorsi. His face transitions from red
to white before us, as if Christ turned a tomato into an onion.
When the blush returns to his face, our father has us complete
the job without him. He’ll be back to work in two days, leading us
to believe his spine is an iron rod. Or that in heaven,
the arms of an angel must throb from their catch.
These Hands, These Roots
Three studies of hands; after Guercino; plate 7 Engraving (1619-1620) by Oliviero Gatti. © The Trustees of the British Museum
Go on, tell me
My hands look like yours,
Nails clipped, filed, buffed, shined.
They weren’t always so.
Gardening forged
These hands.
Hands working so deep in
The soil they wanted to stay as roots.
My fingers were collectors
Of splinters.
A beautiful gardener
Once told me some women
Inspect men’s nails for black crescents
That tell them all they need to know
About your bluecollarhood.
Maybe I had hope,
But what about Lupe, whose
Fingertips we preserved in his ice chest
After the mower blade he freed
From clumps of grass
Sliced them off?
So I push back my cuticles,
Clip my hangnails, & moisturize with
aloe lotion to even my odds at dating.
If I don’t, what will
Become of me when
My skin loosens at the knuckles
& arthritis braids my fingers from age?
Until then, hold my hand tight
With a bit of faith
That my other hand
Will wipe the sweat from my brow
Under the perspiration of work and love
And the fact I know no other way
To wrestle out a life for us.
The City of Date Fruits and Bullet Wounds
For Alfred and Sam
Detail from Sans Souci Restaurant vintage matchbook cover, Indio, CA. Source: Cardboard America Collection
You’re cruising the streets
Of Indio. It’s Friday,
Late night in the city
Of date fruits and bullet wounds.
You’re driving. Your best friend
Next to you tugging
At his seatbelt. Two others
In the backseat:
The one sitting left stares at the neon
Lights of the 7-Eleven as you wait
for the left turn signal on HWY-111.
The other one sees two cars
Pull up next to yours.
They mistake your best friend
For his older brother,
Yell out a few fuck yous
And hijos de putas,
Strike your car with beer bottles.
Each minute feels as long as a city
Block, never nearly as short as our lives.
When you two were seven,
Ten maybe, I remember
You skinny like my father’s
Yard rakes, and like my father’s
Yard rake, you were leaning
Against a grapefruit tree.
Your best friend doing
Pull-ups on a branch,
My brother keeping count.
You and Sam grew up
Together like two grapefruits
On the same stem, the ones
We peeled in the dusk
Of an October Monday.
What did you both not know
About each other?
The first whiskers in the sink,
The first brush with death.
My brother always spoke
Of you two side by side on
The streets of this mud-dark world.
These memories spread thin
Like field dust on our shoes
After a shortcut home.
That’s where we want
To go, right? But not the homes
Like our houses, but places like where
You bumped into my brother
And me with our grandpa
Outside the market.
A Hershey’s Kiss melted
Inside your cheek, your legs
Still broomsticks.
It’s these places where we dropped
A bit of our souls
Like pennies
From our pockets.
Alfred, stay like you are
In my first memory:
Not when you’re in your car
And two boys step out and fire.
Not when you duck
Under the dash knowing glass
Can’t stop a bullet any more
Than a chest bone.
Fuck it, you say, I’m hit.
You throw yourself over
Your best friend to blanket him,
Take a few more shots for his sake,
Until some homeboys
Watching from across the street
Scare off the locos with a few pops
of their own. The engine
Bleeds transmission oil.
Sam feels your last breath
on the back of his neck.
I only want the grapefruit
Peels in the dirt,
My brother and I
In the parking lot
After a candy trip to the market
with grandfather, watching you
unfoil one piece of chocolate
After another.
Study of crossed feet; after Guercino; plate 10 Engraving (1619-1691) by Oliviero Gatti. © The Trustees of the British Museum
The Story My Grandfather Told My Mother a Few Months Before His Death
Tired of these viejos moaning for painkillers, fed up with the stink of disinfectants, anoche, I fled this place of horrors. I slept for three days to save up strength in my legs and let the swelling in my feet deflate. The clock read half past twelve. I wore a paper gown sin zapatos to stay quiet. I walked along the shoulder of the highway and stepped on piedras, bottle caps, and glass—clear, green, and tan.
And you didn’t come across any coyotes out in the desert?
I flung rocks at two or three. Bared my teeth and growled. Los coyotes weren’t the problem. The cars were. Faster they drive en la noche, afraid of espíritus walking in the dark. I struggled against the wind resistance, lost my balance and tumbled on the shoulder with the Styrofoam cups. Before my body came to a stop, another car passed through and I rolled again. One car raced after another, until I picked up enough wind to somersault with the plastic bags. I hovered over an onion field and remembered I knew how to fly. Every night, as a boy, I flew to the fields to pick some of the next day’s crops so there would be less work for us.
Did you fly through the chimney?
Why didn’t I think of that? When I arrived at el rancho, I was too weak to unhook the chain and let myself in. And after all that trouble. I rested on a stump and etched self-portraits on rocks for every decade I lived. When I had enough rest I walked back to the nursing home. I stepped on the thorns of dried palo verde sticks. I snuck into bed at dawn without being missed. When I woke up you were here.
Maybe it was a dream, Apá? It sounds like a dream.
No era sueño, mija. Check the bottoms of my feet for thorns. Check and pull them out.
Ars Poética After Len Roberts
“Quintus Horatius Flaccus,” imaginary portrait of Horace by Anton Alexander von Werner (1843-1915). Horace’s poem "Ars Poetica [The Art of Poetry]," written c. 19 BC, which advises poets on the art of writing poetry and drama, has inspired poets and authors since.
It’s not just honey bees the backyard
lavender attracts, but wasps, yellow jackets,
bumble bees robust as black olives.
The etymology of husband is the master
of the house. For esposo, it is both vow
and pledge. This is one of many pledges:
on Sundays, I back in my wife’s Volkswagen
for a baptism by garden hose. My mind drifts
with the glow of cloud patches,
peach at dusk, behind the crisscross
of sagging telephone wires and power
lines. I towel the front bumper imagining
my father’s visit next week, how he’ll
take the lead on the wash when he notices
the streaks I leave across the glass.
He’ll point out the new mole on my face,
and ask again why I haven’t nailed the loose
planks on the fence? He’ll buff the grill
with a chamois ahead of me, repeating
the names of bees en español: la abeja,
la avispa, el abejorro…
I know he does this to beef up my Spanish.
He’s going to tell me that by my age
he already had three sons with my mom
and a house to master over. But not to be hard
on myself. He knows I’m trying. He knows
of the hours I spend with a journal
and the all-seeing poems of César Vallejo.
He says to keep up the writing despite
the generic brands in the pantry, to just
keep my pledges to my Calafia, who’s inside
breading chicken for dinner.Behind the fence
is the tattooed neighbor.
He’s mid-way drunk on Michelob, telling
his pops to buzz off. Before my dad vanishes,
he says to translate the opening stanza,
there will be an oral quiz next week,
and that this moment is the sole thing I own:
the house is not mine.
The trash bins are city property. The lavender
belongs to la abeja, la avispa, y el abejorro
grueso como una aceituna negra.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
“These Hands, These Roots,” "Falling from the Tree of Heaven," "Story My Grandfather Told me...", and "City of Date Fruits and Bullets Wounds" are from The Date Fruit Elegies (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2008). Copyright © 2008 by John Olivares Espinoza. Used with the permission of Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe.
“Ars Poética After Len Roberts” originally appeared in New Letters, Vol. 79, No. 1 (Fall 2012-2013).
