José Luis Gutiérrez

Dream Migration

This pigeon with a broken wing
justifies my fear of flying.
Windows are traps of clarity
made to ensnare the sky.
How many windows depends
on how many skies my mind
can hold without shattering
into a million mosaic pieces.
A matryoshka doll of days
nesting different skies.
Or memory palace of clouds
in nomadic configurations
spelling both hello and good-bye
like faces staring from the back
of their own heads in certain paintings.
Because of the myth of breath
trees are necessary and birds uneasy
at their perch remind me
how we’re all animals caught
in the same blue distances
of our dreaming in case
fog with a chance of mountains
a sea or moon epiphany and tides
give way to the gift of rising.
Sooth-say your ways, said
the blue-gray gnatcatcher,
arriving on yesterday’s wind
to alight on the crab apple tree
outside my window.
One of its feathers can pack
a zillion top quarks, the densest
particle in the universe,
and not miss a wingbeat
in the coming migration.
There’s this memory of my father
showing me how to fly a kite
before loss found a foothold.
A park blazed with the last
of summer’s hydrogen.
The bright red jellyfish kite he held
firmly anchored in air’s feral trough
and dazzling us with its streamers.
The day promised to stay forever.
His gestures demonstrated what in speech
he withheld: that the trick lies in holding the string
while slowly letting go.

---

Other Side of Bright

Losing steps into this shimmering finale,
the blood hour when the day folds itself
into a luminous suitcase on the horizon

ocean pawning its solar bounty to a blue dragon
soaring down, the sidereal’s curtain call
sequined with stars, known ellipticals unfolding

the road each footfall engenders a gradient dance
of numbers losing count, figure eight dissolving
in the moebius clouds,so much radiance

makes me think of Cecil B. DeMille
if he’d done a production of Helen of Troy,
the face that launched a thousand flaming

garbage barges, for so much beauty
there’s carbon load, entropy, drone strikes
and birds flying backward into ever

downhill’s one-way slide we knew from up
would lead to this final conflagration
called breath.


​
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José Luis Gutiérrez is a San Francisco-based poet. His work has appeared in The Cortland Review, Eratio, Margie, Juked, DMQ,among others.