Gary Soto

Speak to Me

Go ahead, talk to that pile of gravel.
They have a language. The dead bird
In the road? Those wrecked feathers can speak up too.
The wind whistles in the oak,
And the oak shrugs its mighty shoulders.
I could put an ear to the ground
And listen to rumbling complaints below.

It’s come to this. My few friends are dead
Or others ready to set sail into the flames
Of two-for-one crematorium. Family? They’re quiet
As my landline. My cat hasn’t much to say. Like me,
It repeats itself with a meow to my mild bark.
My wife, a seamstress, speaks to me
Through the snips of her scissors in cloth—
Look, a new shirt for me!

Is laughter a kind of speech? If so,
I spoke my mind when a neighbor’s little girl said,
Mr. Soto, you have a lot of hair on your ears.
I stick my nose into a novel
To hear others speak. The spinster,
The widower, the do-gooder priest,
The amateur sleuth, the banker
Cleaning his palate with a breath mint.
Hemingway? Two drifters
Around a campfire eating trout.
One says to the other,
You ever try moose?

A pause in my literary speculations.
The mail carrier named Kelly approaches,
A song on her lips, her cloth satchel bumping against her hip.
She waves, shouts, “Nothing, nothing today, Mr. Soto.”

Are those the lyrics from a lost musical,
A boy-meets-girl revival?
No, just the flat truth,
The deepest conversation I’m going to have all day.

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Gary Soto is the author of thirteen poetry collections for adults, most notably his New and Selected Poems, a 1995 finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Award and the National Book Award. He has received the Discovery-The Nation Prize and the California Library Association’s John and Patricia Award (twice), in addition to fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (twice) and the Guggenheim Foundation. For ITVS, he produced the film “The Pool Party,” which received the 1993 Andrew Carnegie Medal. In all, his books have sold more than five million copies, with eight titles translated into French, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. He lives in Berkeley, California.