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    Feel Puma: Poems
    Feel Puma: Poems
    Feel Puma: Poems
    Ebook108 pages40 minutes

    Feel Puma: Poems

    By Ray Gonzalez

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    About this ebook

    In Feel Puma, Ray Gonzalez traces his love of reading, philosophy, and learning with poems constantly in conversation—with each other, with texts by other writers and the writers themselves, with world history and his personal history and people he has encountered. Woven over three sections, this unique collection is a complex and gorgeous dive into creativity and the inner life of a poet at the height of his craft.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of New Mexico Press
    Release dateAug 15, 2020
    ISBN9780826361707
    Feel Puma: Poems
    Author

    Ray Gonzalez

    Ray Gonzalez is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Feel Puma: Poems (UNM Press), The Heat of Arrivals, The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande, and Soul Over Lightning. He is the recipient of many awards, including the PEN Oakland–Josephine Miles Book Award, the Latino Heritage Award, and the Minnesota Book Award. He lives in Farmington, Minnesota, and is a professor emeritus of literature and creative writing at the University of Minnesota.

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      Book preview

      Feel Puma - Ray Gonzalez

      PART ONE

      LAS RAMAS

      I began to listen inside the stanza of a poem and heard individual sounds as gripa or airlo or ar calling to each other. A gripa is a creature that cries out, an airlo a floating wing. I don’t know what an ar might be, though it tunes itself. What kind of union did these sounds proclaim? Hearing these cries put me on the other side of the poem, where growth resides. I moved among forceful sounds in my first attempt at the poem. What would happen if a gripa left the poet behind? Decisions about the language would be based on the after-darkness following the encounter. Radiant light between words fertilizes syllables around it. For length, I chose eight lines, which permit a speaker to make his move. It was the sound of my open mouth, la rama coming out, the word related to a Spanish word for root. The notes that fell off las ramas allowed the shadows in the poem to encircle the throat of the speaker, as in roots spreading around a tree trunk, this situation changing constantly because the more you add sound to the poem, new words appear on their own, thus entering the text as the speaker pulls las ramas out of his chest before finishing the poem.

      FEEL PUMA

      I want to write, but I feel puma

      CÉSAR VALLEJO

      Feel puma when the black

      animal draws near, its shadow

      growing in the written snow,

      the blossom opening in rivers

      and flooded dams where

      mountain ice freezes

      the stalking tongue.

      Feel puma the claws of fate.

      Feel puma when the black

      creature fills the arms and

      legs with instinct for the prey,

      plays stone plays anvil plays god,

      blasts roads in a ruined country,

      the hunter entangled in the trees,

      unable to write what he saw.

      Feel puma when the black

      figure disappears, puts faith

      in scorpions and birds, a white

      landscape marking magic with

      plants and roots from the tree

      of quenching silence—the notes

      of the unborn.

      THE GATE OF WRITING

      opens when the cottonwoods don’t

      sway together any longer, a voice

      rising to speak past the gate,

      the text given a chance to become

      as dark as the earth, a secret existence

      erased from pure sentences,

      the response driving the open palm

      of the traveler to examine the stars

      as if something guards the entryway,

      a form moving toward the resolution

      left out of the dream, words from

      the past scattered beyond accuracy,

      eating its light so no one rescues

      the drowned and nothing is written

      to bring a prophecy where the gate

      is left open and the faithful swim back

      and close it, tomorrow’s paragraphs

      a different story without an end.

      THE BOOK

      I

      The book is invisible.

      It has been read many times.

      It is illustrated

      but can never be seen.

      The book opens to one blank page

      and the story begins there.

      It is missing a page or two.

      The tale is being changed.

      The book belongs to no one because

      its sentences erase words, though

      it remembers each reader.

      Some of its pages are bent.

      It sits open under a lamp.

      Its chapters are longer than the table.

      The book is filed on the shelf with

      its cover like any other cover.

      It offers readers one reading

      in a lifetime.

      The book is never finished.

      The ending always comes first.

      II

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