His award-winning book, “Cenzontle: Poems” ($17 in paperback from BOA Editions Ltd.; also for Amazon Kindle) is a kind of ever-changing song: “The song becoming the bird becoming the song.” “Cenzontle,” we are told, “means mockingbird in Spanish and comes from the Nahuatl word centzuntli, which refers to one who holds 400 voices or songs.” The voices are many in these poems, the meanings elusive.
The young poet grasps for meaning as well. In the title poem, the mockingbird echoes something beyond words even as the poet is trying to find just those words. “Can you wash me without my body/ coming apart in your hands?/ Call it wound--/ call it beginning--/ The bird’s beak twisted/ into a small circle of awe.// You called it cutting apart,/ I called it song.”
Behind many of the poems is Hernandez Castillo’s own story and the story of undocumented family members, deportations, a severe life in the home country and uncertainty in the States.
And a father who beat him with a white belt he called Daisy. “And after it’s over, we know we have both become men./ Him for the beating,/ and me for taking his beating.” Yet somehow it’s an act of love: “I love you Daisy.// My father’s hands will love a man/ at the first sign of weakness./ I am weak/ therefore, I gather that he loves me.” It is a complicated relationship.
They all are: “We made love then argued,/ or, argued then made love.// It didn’t matter either way,/ everything had the aftertaste of gasoline….” Then: “I only wanted to look far enough back/ to see where I split in half.// How dumb we were/ endlessly searching/ for a definite shape/ our longing would take.// I leaned into you,/ all of you,/ as if in chorus.”
The song lives.
