Poetry Sunday: The Walls by Ray Gonzalez

Walls are very much in the news these days. In 2005, Ray Gonzalez imagined some walls. Some of them were real; others were a product of magical realism. 

Gonzalez was born and raised in El Paso on the Mexico/Texas border and walls feature in many of his poems. Perhaps there is a connection there. 

What do these walls represent? That depends on your perspective, I suppose. 

The Walls

by Ray Gonzalez

Julius Caesar’s head was cut off

and fed to the barbarians waiting

outside the walls of Rome.

Salvador Dali wore one orange

sock and a white one on days

he went to eat breakfast in cafes.

On days he stared at the wall,

he did not wear socks.

Yukio Mishima sheathed his knives

in wall of whale oil, claiming such

creatures were the only ones that

understood the art of sacrifice.

The last thing John Lennon saw

before he was gunned down was

the brick wall of his apartment house.

Sitting Bull had fourteen wives

he lined up against the cliff walls.

He would close his eyes and walk

blindly to them with an erection,

promising he would take the first

one his erection touched.

Crazy Horse watched silently

from the cliff walls above.

J. D. Salinger scribbled on his bedroom

walls as a boy, promising his mother

to whitewash the figures the first

time he was caught.

Joan of Arc climbed over the walls

and fell on top of a castle guard,

the commotion bringing soldiers

who swore the wall opened and

she escaped by stepping through.

Nikita Khrushchev stared at the wall

of nuclear buttons and knew

it was a green one they told him to push,

but the triggers were every color except green.

Hernán Cortés’ men met a wall

of arrows, then turned and ran.

Montezuma’s men met a wall of armor,

wept, then stoned their chief off the wall

for helping the conquistadores.

Carl Jung opened his eyes to find himself

sleeping against a wall of flowers,

the beautiful smell giving him the answer

he had been looking for.

Charlie Chaplin ordered his crew to remove

the hidden mirror from the wall, footage

of his latest lover overflowing

onto the studio floor.

Sor Juana de la Cruz hid her new poem

in a hole in the wall, but when a fellow nun

went to retrieve it after Sor Juana’s death,

it was gone.

The Dalai Lama stopped in the snow

and bowed his head to pray before the wall

of dead monks killed by the Chinese.

Virginia Woolf’s last memory before drowning

was the wall of family portraits, the photographs

of her father and brothers so radiant in the river fog.

Billy the Kid simply dug a hole in the adobe wall

of the jail with his bare hands and walked away.

Janis Joplin was found dead of an overdose

in her Los Angeles hotel, her face facing the wall.

Federico García Lorca did not face any walls

when he was shot under the trees.

No one knows how Tu Fu encased himself

in a wall of bamboo, staying inside the tube

for ten years, never saying a word, his feet

becoming the roots of bamboo within

the first few months of his silence.

Al Capone stared at the walls of his cell

in Alcatraz and added the bank figures again,

trying to get them right.

Babe Ruth heard a thud against the wall

of his hotel suite, the baseball rolling down

the hallways as a signal his tryst with the team

owner’s wife about to be revealed.

William Shakespeare stared at the empty walls

of the theatre, stood there without saying

a word, and stared at the empty walls of the theatre.

Geronimo extended his arms over the walls

of rock, the approaching sound of the cavalry

troops echoing down the canyon, the pictograph

Geronimo carved high on the wall, years ago,

lifting him to safety.

Two days before Salvador Allende was assassinated,

Pablo Neruda, dying of cancer, woke at Isla Negra

to find the walls of the room where he lay

were covered in hundreds of clinging starfish.