Furious Dusk

David Campos

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780268023775
• eBook ISBN:
  9780268077334
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Rhina P. Espaillat, judge of the 2014 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, describes Furious Dusk, David Campos's winning collection, as "a work whose five parts trace a son's efforts—only partially successful—to fulfill his father's expectations and—perhaps even more difficult—understand those expectations enough to forgive them." The poet's reflections are catalyzed by learning of his father's impending death, which, in turn, forces him to examine his father's expectations against his own evolving concept of what it means to be a man.

The poems' speaker sifts through his past to find the speckles of memory that highlight the pressures to fit the mold of masculinity forged both by the Mexican culture of his father and the American culture he inhabits. The problematic norms of both rip the speaker in two directions as he recounts his father's severe parenting, as he explores the inability to father a child, as he witnesses human suffering, as he overeats and confronts the effects on his body, and, finally, as he realizes what it means to transcend these expectations. The speaker's epiphany frees him to reject masculine stereotypes and allows him to see himself simply as a human being. That realization, in turn, enables the speaker to see his father not only as "father," "husband," and "man," but as a citizen of Earth.

Through Campos's bold imagery and accessible language and themes, he memorably adds to the continuing conversation of the effects of cultural expectations on the children of immigrant parents.

V

AFTER HEARING OF MY FATHER’S PASSING

After César Vallejo

This afternoon it’s raining in Riverside

and I remember how the mountains of Los Angeles

slowly put on their long coat of pines

as we climbed trails up the steep inclines

of the heart; breaths were hard to take.

I’m sitting here drinking coffee

and thinking of my body and its ghost;

how easy its steam rises into nothingness,

like this coffee. This afternoon the conversation is bitter.

The fake-sugar packets are all lined up

according to their color: peach orchards

in a thick winter fog. This afternoon’s soft drizzle

is as insistent as memory. Its touch

I can’t escape under an umbrella.

You had gone to see your father,

who still worked his land, tending to the magueys

on his hill. You stopped saying I love you

after you returned. Did you hear the slow ache

bending like a bowstring in his voice;

the loss of his first son under the crumbling rocks

of a water tank? Maybe you felt the arrow

moving through your body’s landscape like a glacier.

I remember the mountains, the echo of shotgun blasts

herding quails into the sky. Father, I remember hearing you

say how much easier it would be to bury a father than a son.

This afternoon it is raining like that day I had no desire

to gut the deer hanging from the tree,

to carry the limp body over the hills,

to have its blood drip on my clothes

and dry in between my fingers.

I have no desire to lower your casket,

your body, into the ground, and watch it sway

before the hard wood of the coffin meets the soft earth.

I still remember the man who kept twenty paces ahead of me

up those mountains, who every now and then looked back

to make sure I was still there.

ARS POETICA

To hush the salt in my breath,

Neruda’s palms rise from the dirt—

the final blueprints of memory,

pine chewed into paper.

I’m so tired of being angry—

& the wedges of fingernails

buried into my palms.

It’s frustrating not knowing

how to build a wooden chair;

I can write its name.

I’ve mutilated my body enough

trying to mimic his ascent.

Even so, I will continue

though my hands will never be as splintered as his.

WHERE THE SIRENS GO

Mother’s voice cracks when she orders us into our rooms.

A piece of wet bolillo stuck in my little brother’s throat,

his lips turn the colors that choke the end of dusk.

I step on a toy fire truck and slip. The truck cracks

and the batteries spill into the hallway where Mother digs

into his mouth, her finger shaking before it disappears.

Dad, with tears on his cheeks, speaks into the phone

our address and the blue coming to lips.

The fire truck’s wheels keep spinning.

I pick up the batteries as I hear the sirens

and try to put them back but the truck is broken.

I wasn’t watching him like I was supposed to.

I was too into the movie we rented. Rise, damn it!

Breathe, damn it! The door opens. Firemen enter

just as my mother digs out the wet bolillo.

I keep trying to put the batteries back in

and finally use some tape my mother hands me

to patch the toy back up. I don’t sleep that night.

I watch him as he dreams. His chest rises and falls.

OPEN LETTER

You, Chief Dyer, defend the badge

in front of cameras. Their lights exposing

the creases on your face

when you speak. The polygraph of skin

spells out everything I want to know—

the victim was on the phone when he jumped

over the backyard’s brick fence

into the alley where small patches of grass grow,

where this supposed weapon (a cell phone) was held,

ready to fire. The news cuts away

to a man in his mid-twenties, no facial hair,

almost boyish if it weren’t for the tattoos

crawling up his neck, the ink black as tar

on the streets, a dog paw under one of his eyes,

and “Bulldogs” sprawled out across his scalp.

He looks like my brother. They share those eyes

broken by the pop-pop-pop of bullets.

Who knows if my brother would still be alive

if he didn’t jump to push down a girl

as a car drove by and spit up accusatory lead.

What if the angle were different and an artery burst

like a blossom? What if my brother was my cousin?

What if my cousin was just a friend? What if this friend

was another man? Or the boy who lives down the block from you?

What if this person was your brother

who jumped that brick fence t...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to the Poems by Rhina P. Espaillat
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• V