Night Train to Chicago

BY GUILLERMO LAZO

Let’s get off at Osceola
And grab our coonskin caps, boys.
Forgetting the farmer’s fields
And head for the wild patch of land
In the corner of yon field
And flatten our bodies
Against the ground
Filling our nostrils with
The smell of black Iowa dirt
Near the Des Moines River.

Let’s shoot an azimuth of 270 degrees
Due west and head westward
Past the lank, slank
Cowboy towns of Durango
Or what’s left of Neal’s
Larimer Street.
Let’s even taste that black
Dirt ‘til it feeds
The red bones in us and
We’re moving like Natty Bumpo
As coyotes at the edge of town.

La Otra

BY GUILLERMO LAZO

Tú eres la tranquilidad
En mi cerebro ruidoso
Y por tú cara
Puedo ver el rostro del universo
El universo es el cosmos
Es lo que hace nuestro mundo posible
Qué hace tú posible
Hoy es muy intempestivo
de integrar nuestra materia
en una canción de existencia
como la lluvia en la arena
qué hace tú posible

Kynthos

BY GUILLERMO LAZO

On a gravelly road in Germany
In the early morning light
I write the name of my beloved
In the dirt
With the toe of my combat boot
As I pull guard
Her perfumed card
Calls me
From the Rocky Mountains westward
Half a world away
As I stand guard
Over 37 years of topsoil
In the early morning light

She is the Greeks to me
She is Kynthos – Diana
Protectress of the wild young
Purveyor of knowledge
And she is America
With real wilderness
And rawboned hands and puritanical ethic
And miles and miles of endless onset.

Guillermo Lazo was born and raised in Chicago. Univ of Illinois BA Ed 1974. Univ of Colorado BA Literature 1986. Editor and Publisher of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal of the Arts (Poetry Magazine 1978-1984). Author of Surround Me As Burlap (Pueblo Poetry Project 1980 Pueblo, CO), Ching Poems (March Abrazo Press, Carlos Cumpian ed.), Bathers of the Med Sea (1989 Baculite Publishing – Canadian Printing). Articles: Confessions of a Marrano (Halapid Magazine Anousim Society of Crypto Jews 2001).