My father has adopted a Mexican boy named Maguey;
Eight years old, he speaks no English.
Brown skin, black eyes, white smile—
We talk about his animal friends. Who are you? I ask.
Your friend many days, he replies. The cats all like him, and I.
Driving out along a country road
I’ve driven many times before but
The wheel goes rubbery in the rutted mud.
Then a canyon, the road narrows, slopes down
Through closing walls of rock I no longer know.
Suddenly a creek, limestone shelves, pools of water.
I can’t navigate the drop-offs and step out into knee-deep water.
I climb the canyon wall, behind me
Maguey, sandy-haired and grown into a man
Midwest style. I call him Mike.
We climb up over green-mossed white granite
Boulders until we come out at the castle.
The grillwork, a briarpatch of rusted spikes,
and carved in the stone the bipartite shield still shows
Castil y Léon, the moss undisturbed since 1600.
Below, the Spanish coastal plain
spreads out, further still the gray Atlantic.
From the abandoned cemetery above the city, the ancient canons
fire.
We talk about death. There’s a defeat in Mike’s voice
I don’t know, a new tone of weariness and hurt.
Yet he strides ahead of me over the rocks,
and I follow, heading down toward the plain.
He has been this way since Leon died.
