Guillermo Filice Castro

Guillermo Filice Castro
 
In the Future When We Return to the Woods
 
You’ve gone ahead to the point of invisibility
 
Past a bend in this sloppy trail
 
And through the Longfellow pines
 
Comes the looping resonance of the waterfall
 
Wrong shoes I hear myself think
 
When I slip on wet mulch & rocks
 
I laugh too loudly still tickled
 
By our tribe & how some of us manage
 
To be so goddam implacable
 
Ask the weeping European beeches
 
Numbered & tagged by developers
 
Ask the tick but it cannot hear a thing
 
Not with its head buried in the salty hinge
 
Behind my right knee
 
I’d say ask the rough black bear that reached
 
Into our bird feeder on its haunches
 
He ran away without an encore
 
After a standing ovation involving pots & an old iron
 
The hummers buzzed their answers early
 
This morning when our phones went dumb
 
While someone whose brain went dark
 
 
Jumped off a factory roof as night fell in China
 
In this future when we return to the woods
 
With a nascent ability to brood less I hope
 
I’ve caught up with you & pleasure
 
Drawing me under the cold water
 
Breaking over our heads with such brawn
 
As if to render us naked once & for all
 
 
 
Guillermo Filice Castro is a poet and photographer. He’s the author of Agua, Fuego
(Finishing Line Press, 2015) and a 2013 recipient of an Emerge-Be-Surface fellowship from the Poetry Project. His work is featured in Assaracus, Barrow Street, The Brooklyn Rail, Court Green, The Bellevue Literary Review, Hinchas de Poesía, LaFovea, Quarterly West, Sunday Salon Zine, and more; as well as the anthologies Rabbit Ears, Flicker & Spark, Divining Divas, My Diva, Saints of Hysteria, and others. His translations of Olga Orozco, in collaboration with Ron Drummond, appear in Guernica, Terra Incognita, U.S. Latino Review, and Visions. Some of his images appear in Sunday Salon Zine and Canopic Jar. In 2012 his work was a finalist for the Andrés Montoya prize. Castro lives in New York City.