Klein on Mourning

By Francisco Aragón Francisco Aragon

not straight, but in waves 

It seems every advance in the process

deepens the subject’s relations to

inner objects, happiness in regaining them

after feeling adrift and lost, an increased

trust because they appear good

and helpful after all, as in the child

step by step, building his relations to

external objects, gaining not only from things

pleasant, but from ways in which the child

overcomes frustrations . . . Mrs. A, for instance:

finally walking down familiar streets with a friend:

an attempt at old bonds. Yet moments into the stroll

the number of bustling people is too much,

the buildings strange, the sunlight artificial, bleak . . .

so that she has to retreat indoors into

a restaurant for a chair, but even there the walls

are buckling, the diners and waiters blurred—

indifferent to what she carries inside, her home

suddenly the only tolerable place—

pictures of her boy, his drawings,

in each and every room.

Source: Puerta del Sol (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2005)

Biography

Poet, translator, essayist, editor, and San Francisco native Francisco Aragón studied Spanish at the University of California at Berkeley and New York University. He earned an MA from the University of California at Davis and an MFA from the University of Notre Dame.

Exploring how language and genre both connect and diverge, Aragón’s poems locate personal experience within a wider cultural and historical conversation. Aragón’s . . .

Continue reading this biography