Consideration of the Guitar: New and Selected Poems

This collection balances ample selections from award-winning poet Ray Gonzalez's six previous books with thirty new poems. Gonzalez's early poems are dominated by Southwest desert landscapes and deal with the pressure of conflicts between border cultures. More recent poems upend prevailing stories about historical figures, artists, and writers, create new animal myths, and push traditional boundaries of the free verse lyric deeper into surrealism. Consideration of the Guitar was a finalist for the 2006 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry.

Federico Garcia Lorca's Desk

It was tied with guitar strings
into a sack that held pigeon feathers,
the hair of lost dogs—cardboard
from a box of trinkets
he received from North Africa.
Garcia Lorca's desk was a bundle
of things bearing down like an easy shot,
words recalled when discontent
was a shade of black,
coffee beans stolen in silence—
a clock over the hillswaiting
for the next moon.

Garcia Lorca's desk was a head
of lettuce, a bowl of goat soup,
the place where tiny hands
were named for their fingers,
ink spotting the pages to buy time
before three doors were slammed.
Garcia Lorca's desk was his vow
to stir the rain with rootless awe,
then hide for years, come out
singing, reciting poems
from the warmth of laps,
paper flattened on the desk
so the sun could read.

Garcia Lorca's desk was found
decaying in an empty field
where they lined him up,
the feathers falling out,
guitar strings rounding the sky
with wired light that sank
into the soft paper he used
to wipe his hands
before he was shot.