All poems
A poem
A Man and a Woman Touched
at night under stairs,
pinball machines ringing, and,
Sundays, he drove her to
the springs of Coamo, the chapel of
San Germán. Had she ever known
happiness? The road
littered with mangos seemed
to go on
forever. She thought,
The people can't eat
them fast enough,
as if she were not
one of those people.
First appeared in The New York Times Magazine (2018) ↗.
Selected by Rita Dove for The New York Times Magazine, December 2018.
On this poem
“Like the run-on title of Blas Falconer's spare yet luminous poem, the couple driving through the Puerto Rican countryside are suspended in time. Who they are and where they'll end up is a mystery; we never see the man, and the woman has set her thoughts adrift as memories swirl, unspoken, between them. Inside their traveling capsule, history and fate are immaterial, hovering outside where the road scrolls past — until, in one brilliant stroke, the membrane is pierced, and the interminably vast sorrows of an entire island rush in.”
— Rita Dove, on selecting the poem for The New York Times Magazine