by Ray Gonzalez
American Poets Continuum Series
In four previous collections of poetry, Ray Gonzalez has traveled
to the heart of the Southwestern and Mexican-American experience
and emerged with poems of
astonishing power. In Cabato Sentora, his fifth, Gonzalez revisits the themes
he explored in his previous book, The Heat of Arrivals (BOA Editions, Ltd., 1996):
the desert Southwest, its flowers and its scorpions; the search for self, and
Gonzalez’ own Chicano heritage and its often bitter history. Indeed, the
book itself is dedicated to "the silence of my father and grandfathers.
For the language of their silence."
"
In this new collection, Ray Gonzalez locates the driven passion
of poetry within his family, his ancestors, his people and their
stories’ root mysteries... Cabato Sentora is at
once a ramifying and fulfilling book." —William Heyen
Beyond
Having
And,
always, there is desire like
the
orange and banana changing
texture
on the kitchen shelf.
Their
skins sink slowly into themselves.
There
is the liquid of lust and thirst,
an
open gloss of choice and cutting,
a lying
down toward the wind,
the
heaving you were warned about.
And,
soon, there is love like
miniature
spellings embedded in the shoulder,
waiting
to be misspelled, washed,
brought
back by perception that fades
with
what moves below the arm,
hinging
on a doubt cried away.
There
is the mistake of giving name
to
the prune, the print bitten off
and
covered over by black hair--
its
numbers kept secret,
long
strands in the tale of the carpet,
the
pomegranate, the hundred ways
of
staying there.
And,
besides, there is danger of riding desire
until
it carves you into its swollen throat,
steel-cry
of possession and the infinite blessing
of
fingers missing from the first time,
fingernails
tracing the shape of the strawberry
to
memorize roughness without leaving.
There
is the flavor and the understanding,
a place
to rest the eye after traveling,
a force
that binds you together
without
you knowing red marks
on
your back are places where wings
would
have risen if you were an angel.
Available editions:
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Paperback
ISBN: 1-880238-70-5
Price: $12.50
Publishing Date: January 1999
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