I. Mesilla, 1985
See the river, mud toned and placid. It bends at the bosque where grandpa teaches me to fish. We are casting push button reels. Leafy shadows pass our faces. His skin dark as water. Skimmers flit across the surface as evening winds sweep through cottonwoods. Ancient trees quake.
II. Albuquerque, 2021
They called it the Rio Bravo when it crested and roiled. That was hundreds of years ago, when its torrents could sweep you away. Before the Spanish took it with their christening, older cultures hunted its shores for game—black bear, wolf, turkey, beaver, deer. The valley brimmed with apex predators until they built the dams up north, siphoning away the rage.
III. Chihuahua, 1983
They say we’re seventy percent water. Maybe that’s why we gravitate towards it. Maybe it calls to us, and we hear its voice because we have its nature within. I can’t be certain. What I do know is that memory begins in a swimming pool in Mexico with my dad. I was too young to know what death was.
He woke early and carried me down from our hotel room to the pool and placed me in a plastic raft. I bobbed as he swam laps. Gentle ripples, rising sun, long shadows. Then a guttural scream. Footsteps on the patio. People gathered on balconies covering their mouths while Dad floated face down. Men rescued his body and Mom ran down from the room and pumped at his chest, pressing her lips into his. I’d never seen them kiss that way before. Men in white uniforms covered him with a sheet and slid him into an ambulance. It drove away—sirenless.
IV. Clovis, 1983
Hear the train. Its distant horn, the rumbling earth. It wakes us every morning at the homestead where I spend my first fatherless Christmas. The whole extended family is there, crammed into a two-room house. Grandma rises early to make breakfast while barefoot children form a line at the comal, taking butter slathered tortillas, faces and fingers shining with grease. I knew then that he wasn’t coming back. The tíos and tías talked and said that at the funeral, I wore a small, boxy sportscoat and stood in front of the casket. On Christmas morning, we sat under the tree and unwrapped gifts, and at night, trains passed through the darkness, pulsing our beds. Engines that woke us. Engines that rocked us to sleep.
V. Albuquerque, 2021
River and rail intersect like lattice work. Or like braids. They are connected. That’s what I’m trying to say. The world is a tapestry of metal and water. Or maybe I’m projecting pattern onto loss.
VI. Manchester-by-the-Sea, 2006
I met her on my way out of town. That first month, we stayed up manic with the moon, collapsing into the relief of finding oneself in another. After we married, we moved to the New England coast by a commuter rail station. If trains play music, the commuter rang the triangle—ding, ding, ding—as it carried passengers from Boston to Rockport. On weekends, we took the train to Singing Beach. We laid in the sand. We listened to waves.
VII. Brooklyn, 2011
After she got a job in the city, we moved into a prewar building where the subway emerged beneath our windows. That train played the snare—clack-clack, clack-clack, clack-clack—and it stole our sleep. Maybe that’s why we fought. We needed to slow down, so we moved back to New Mexico to fix a house, which happened to be near a freight yard.
VIII. Las Cruces, 2013
Freights play the timpani. Their tonnage shakes the earth. Cracks web across our freshly painted walls. We fill them with spackling but worry about the foundation. We work too much to talk enough. Eventually, we sleep in separate rooms.
In the mornings I wake early to water plants. Money tree, ficus, gardenia. I grow them in a corner window above the basin of an indoor fountain. The water ripples, and the plants hang over the dish like scale model cottonwoods. I give them feasts of water and light, but their leaves still wither.
IX. Las Cruces, 2018
The morning after she left, I sat on the tera cotta floor—our dogs curled around me—staring into the walls we’d painted the year before. They were vast and white, like some abstract study of the infinitude of the sky. It feels good to be surrounded by nothingness, I lied to the dogs, the ether. Later that month, a realtor stopped by and walked through the house taking pictures. The dogs followed her, tails wagging expectantly. I put everything into a car and drove north, back to the city where I was born.
X. Albuquerque, 2019
The Sandia Mountains are vast enough to make their own weather. Clouds in fleets gather at their summits, and some mornings, when the barometric pressure is low enough, strati fall from the heights to cover the metropolis below. On those days, there is something in the air that feels like anticipation.
XI. Albuquerque, 2023
The nights are quieter now. I sleep with a noise machine—a sonic estuary of sorts. It blends every upstream sound until the sharper edges of memory are smoothed, until sleep fits flush in the palm. It whirs a sound that sounds like nothing, which is another way of saying it sounds like everything. River song, silty shores, breaking waves. Wind blasting through thickets, dirge of falling leaves. Or the instruments of trains. Some nights, I dream of them.
Engines idle at a station while crowds embrace passengers. The platform brims and churns. Everybody moves through each other. They weave in a dance of holding on and letting go. Lovers, family, friends, and the passengers with their suitcases. They swirl like pilgrims at a shrine. But I can never tell who’s coming or going. Every embrace looks the same, the arrival just like the departure, the first like the last. And maybe direction doesn’t matter. Maybe all that matters is embrace. The machine whirs, the platform swirls.
Marcos Reyna is an emergency room triage therapist in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He has an academic background in philosophy, theology, and psychology. After moving to Boston’s north shore for graduate school, he stumbled upon GrubStreet where he started taking workshops. He has been writing ever since. Most recently he won the Lena Todd award for best fiction (2020) and nonfiction (2021) at the University of New Mexico. Outside of the hospital, he explores the high deserts and forests with his pit lab mix, Sriracha.
I have been waiting for fresh, reimagined prose for too long. This is it. Thank you, Hippocampus, for bringing this forward. What a gift.
In the abstract, this piece is a carmen figuratem. It has taken the shape of grief, the movement of it, the back and forth from present to past, the swirl of it. What a brilliant piece of writing.
*figuratum.