From “Small Sargasso Mountains” [“In the amber light”]

In the amber light, the dog’s eyes beg for the touch of Francisco’s chubby hand. I’m almost certain his hands were like that. On the wall to my left, there’s a portrait in pencil of my mom as a young woman. I look at it in the mornings, when the slanted sunlight touches its frame. “For Marcia, Paris ’52,” next to an illegible signature. One winter morning, Siobhan and I saw Goya’s Witches’ Sabbath at the MFA in Boston. I told her about my dream of garlands entangled around a bull’s horns. In one of the murals in the National Palace in Mexico City, which I often visited with my dad as a child, there is a young Indigenous man on his knees, tied up with a red-hot branding iron held close to his cheek. Whenever I saw it I thought, “Brown like mine.” My dad, brother, and I used to take the metro line two from the General Anaya station to the Bellas Artes station. We would walk down Madero Avenue and stop at the American Bookstore where a friend of Dad’s worked. Then, on to Templo Mayor. One time, Dad told us a legend about an uncle of ours who got lost around the secondhand bookstores of Donceles Street, never to be seen again. In the afternoon, we would eat at the Spanish Casino, where the buzz from Isabel La Católica Avenue would come up through the French windows. I always used to ask for Basque-style snails. One evening almost at dusk he told us that the correct word was not traffic but transit while we were waiting for a kaleidoscope of butterflies to pass so we could cross the street.