WINTER TWO/ “Caminante, no hay camino/ Traveler, there is no road…”

21 December 2025

Combate, Puerto Rico

Ordinary Faculties/Teaching a Cat to Talk

I first heard Antonio Machado’s poem from the lips of a woman I love. It was dark & the road was dirt; full of deep, imperceptible potholes. Also her laughter. Her recitation was music for me— recognizing a word here & there: caminante, son tus huellas el camino y nada más;/caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar. Her recitation was also generous— repeating lines, slowly translating words again & again, but in pockets so they weren’t disconnected from the music or the road or her laughter— Traveler, your footprints are the road, nothing else./ Traveler, there is no road; you make your own path as you walk. Rather than the shortcut of translation, she allowed me to walk the poem. A more interesting & felt coherence emerged, one that required illegible music, potholes, incoherence, & something like grace— all the ways life seems to have her way with us anyway.

Al andar se hace el camino, /y al volver la vista atrás/se ve senda que nunca/ se ha de volver a pisar.

This walking/listening kept me from paying too much attention to how many times we almost landed dangerously in a ditch— a persistent reality, which my friend met laughing.

As you walk, you make your own road,/ and when you look back/ you see the path/ you will never travel again.

Caminante, no hay camino/sino estelas en la mar.

Traveler, there is no road;/ only a ship’s wake on the sea.

*

In the morning, all the horizons were water & wind: Faro lighthouse in the distance, also Bahia de Boquerón, Salinas, Sucia. Reina Mora seed birds & coqui sang between miracle Neem thorns & the slow sulk of iguanas. Combate was a swirl of opposites—ocean but desert, harsh but soft. It felt like the edge of the world— magic & prayer, but not that. It was ordinary. The kind of ordinary that talks so much its easy to take for granted— the way an ordinary sky is a thousand masterpieces of light & it’s impossible to witness each of them. My friend painted them every day, “pulling the light from the dark, ” she said. When she could.

Between dark music, potholes & morning’s open sky, I slept deeply. I dreamed of a boat out at sea— not moving away from or toward a lighthouse because the lighthouse was/was on the boat. It was a different kind of sailing/navigating, no promise of safety in it.

*

5 January 2026

President Nicolás Maduro & his wife Cilia were kidnapped in Venezuela a couple days ago & brought here to NY. The ocean & her currents all talking at once; a ship’s wake invaded. Ceiba & Vieques skies split with monstrous birds— opening old wounds (& military bases).

It’s just after 7am here in the Hudson Valley. The sun is a shy lemon/ whisper beginning to blush. Two red foxes run between trees in the snow. This writing is deceptive— memory-interludes, patches of sky & transitory clouds, salty & cold. Sentences can take hours/days because I keep leaving to ride the wave. Grief paces these pages. I forget where I read it, but it’s useful advice: Only move as fast as you can feel. So is the open letter by Bayo Akómoláfé & Marta Benavides— The Times are Urgent: Let’s Slow Down.

I learned recently that foxes use magnetoreception to hunt. In his book How to Love a Forest, Ethan Tapper describes how some creatures have magnetite, (a biomagnetic mineral made by bacteria), in their bodies. It lives in bird beaks & fish noses, & turns nervous systems into receptors of the earth’s magnetic field. It is not known to live in foxes. Their spontaneous magnetic alignment is hypothesized to be almost synesthetic— a mix between seeing the earth’s field & the asymmetry of their attuned ears twitching this way & that. Mice are found under snow through aligned apparitions of color, light, & triangulated listening. Maybe this is what Saint-Exupéry’s fox in the Little Prince was getting at when he said, Here is my secret. It’s quite simple: One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.

Instead of a road, the language of water. Instead of a map, an invisible cartography; a receptivity.

*

(Keep lists of small bones things, dear heart. They’re anchors in a wider witness:

Jut of tiny cat jaw while she snores; little feral-lover who, after two years, is just starting to trust enough to talk & drool & not maul me in my sleep/ My spine is a river of fire, but with words/ The man at the grocery store handles winter oranges like traumatized wrens. Tucking in each quivering sphere without rustling so much as a feather. Ordinary miracles: To handle food like its something another might eat. To taste a kind of listening, not just look.

Because look: Senator Slotkin says the DOJ is making other lists that might carry your name).

*

San Juan, September 2017 Irma & Maria

Beach prayer, shoulder to shoulder, but there’s no ocean. No waves on the horizon— just a clamoring, reflective dark & a sea sucking in it’s tail. The next morning, it spit it back like a whip; howled like an alive thing. Water pushed under glass five stories up & threw plummeting birds into taped windows. A red coqui the size of my fingernail ended up in a potted plant & lived long enough to sing about it.

My friend was singing, too: Los Lobo’s Sabor a Mí, making coffee. Rations were tight, but not vocal chords. When I look back, this is what I hold to: Savor, song, candle light in a bathtub (the only room without windows) & throated, lavender laughter—nuestras almas se acercaron tanto asi/ Que yo guardo tu sabor/ Pero tú llevas tambien/ Sabor a mí. Her wake is iridescent, but you can’t see all of it at once.