Afterlife

by Julia Alvarez

poverty years have to be more aging than affluent ones.

At a recent reading at the college, a guest lecturer spoke about the origins of Black English. This rich folk language is what occurred when African people with an intensely musical and oral culture came up against the King James Bible and the sweet-talking American South, under conditions that denied them all outlets for their visions and gifts except the transformation of the English language into song.

Maritza recalls the name of the town where the arts center is to be located. It sounds like asshole, Maritza says, spelling out the name, A-t-h-o-l. They Google the town, and there it is, in Worcester county.

As if poetry can’t survive in such impoverished conditions. In fact, poetry (and honor) might be all you do have.

But even the beauties of language, of words rightly chosen, are riddled with who we are, class and race, and whatever else will keep us—so we think—safe on the narrow path.

And behind these untimely losses, the timely ones, the whole flank of buffering elders, parents, tías, tíos, who have died in the natural progression of things, but still, natural or not, they leave behind holes in the heart, places of leakage where Antonia feels the depletion of spirit, the slow bleed of chronic grieving.

Language used to be good at stanching the flow, the intense—call it desperate—need to get the words just right. But more and more words are inadequate .

Death does not wound us without, at the same time, lifting us toward a more perfect understanding of this being and of ourselves.

Even in Kyoto— / hearing the cuckoo’s cry— / I long for Kyoto, one of Antonia’s favorite haikus and one she loves to quote to her sisters.

We all have to make peace with that longing, learn to live with the holes in our hearts.

narrative bumps the writer puts in so the reader has to slow down and pay attention.

Can such empathy be a pathology?