Alberto Alvaro Ríos > Quotes

“Adults have
the benefit of experience and know the trick will work as long as the technique is correct.
When we “grow up” we gain this experience and knowledge, but we lose our innocence and
sense of wonder. In other words, the price we pay for growing up is a permanent sense of
loss.”
― Alberto Alvaro Ríos, The Iguana Killer: Twelve Stories of the Heart

“We live in secret cities
And we travel unmapped roads.

We speak words between us that we recognize
But which cannot be looked up.

They are our words.
They come from very far inside our mouths.

You and I, we are the secret citizens of the city
Inside us, and inside us

There go all the cars we have driven
And seen, there are all the people

We know and have known, there
Are all the places that are

But which used to be as well. This is where
They went. They did not disappear.

We each take a piece
Through the eye and through the ear.

It's loud inside us, in there, and when we speak
In the outside world

We have to hope that some of that sound
Does not come out, that an arm

Not reach out
In place of the tongue.”
― Alberto Alvaro Ríos

“The library is dangerous—
Don’t go in. If you do

You know what will happen.
It’s like a pet store or a bakery—

Every single time you’ll come out of there
Holding something in your arms.

Those novels with their big eyes.
And those no-nonsense, all muscle

Greyhounds and Dobermans,
All non-fiction and business,

Cuddly when they’re young,
But then the first page is turned.

The doughnut scent of it all, knowledge,
The aroma of coffee being made

In all those books, something for everyone,
The deli offerings of civilization itself.

The library is the book of books,
Its concrete and wood and glass covers

Keeping within them the very big,
Very long story of everything.

The library is dangerous, full
Of answers. If you go inside,

You may not come out
The same person who went in.”
― Alberto Ríos, Not Go Away Is My Name

“Crossing over from Mexico to the United States was a big step, but that part was easy. Big things are like that--easy to identify, and, with a deep breath, done all at once. As life turned out, it was the small that was difficult. The small things--which is all the opposite of what one might think.”
― Alberto Alvaro Ríos, Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir

“Look back only for as long as you must,
Then go forward into the history you will make.

Be good, then better.”
― Alberto Alvaro Ríos

“He had a ponytail. But this was not a regular ponytail from the Sixties, not a ponytail for show or for fashion. It was more. It was a personal ponytail, something more defining and lasting. A personal thing is different, and all the books and all the magazines in the world can't tell you what that is.”
― Alberto Alvaro Ríos, Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir

“The curious measure, of course, is that we fail to recognize the most obvious notion in all of this: that we ourselves are the best magicians we know. What our bodies do, what our minds accomplish, and the context we can give to things, how we make it all fit together, this is something.”
― Alberto Alvaro Ríos, Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir

“Citizens of a Great Country

We are made of them, finally, as we try to sleep, to reach
The place that night with all its stars has shown us,
All its stars as all of us, and all our cities, and all our countries,
All our histories and all our families, every one.
The country of us is large.
We ourselves are its border
Wherever we are, whoever we are, safe as we try and want to be.”
― Alberto Alvaro Ríos, A Small Story about the Sky

“These are the maps we make of ourselves,
The foods and mountains, the world,
The stars, the air we are for each other—
These are the measure. We are ourselves,
Every inch a mile for each other.

My friend, that’s all.
And it is everything.
We used to be somebody else,
One here, one there, but now together
We are today, and will be tomorrow.”
― Alberto Alvaro Ríos, A Small Story about the Sky

“Dry Water

We have rain, but it’s a dry rain, a skinny rain,
A thin water coming down in a covert action,
Rain that comes down already thirsty.
No good for making soup,
Its wet is gone by the time it reaches the ground.
Maybe that’s smart.
Maybe this place is hiding something,
Taking care of us. Maybe there’s a great reserve of rain
Kept in a secret, carefully guarded, underground
Aquifer treasure chest,
Like all the gold we’ve heard about at Fort Knox
But which we’ve never actually seen,
Even though they say there is so much of it.
Our rivers are that way, too—invisible,
Sandy acts of faith. This is exaggeration, of course:
Water in this place is not uncommon.
But to see it, you must spend years training the eye.
And to taste it, to taste it at all,
You must dream it into the glass you think you hold.”
― Alberto Alvaro Ríos, A Small Story about the Sky

“The Border: A Double Sonnet

The border is a line that birds cannot see.
The border is a beautiful piece of paper folded carelessly in half.
The border is where flint first met steel, starting a century of fires.

The border is a belt that is too tight, holding things up
but making it hard to breathe.
The border is a rusted hinge
that does not bend.
The border is the blood clot in the river’s vein.
The border says
Stop to the wind, but the wind speaks another language,
and keeps going.

The border is a brand, the “Double-X” of barbed wire
scarred into the skin of so many. The border has always been
a welcome stopping place but is now a Stop sign,
always red. The border is a jump rope still there
even after the game is finished. The border is a
real crack in an imaginary dam.

The border used to be an actual place but now
it is the act of a thousand imaginations.
The border, the word border, sounds like order,
but in this place they do not rhyme.

The border is a handshake that becomes a squeezing contest.

The border smells like cars at noon and woodsmoke in the evening.

The border is the place between the two pages in a book where the spine is bent too far.

The border is two men in love with the same woman.

The border is an equation in search of an equals sign.

The border is the location of the factory where lightning and thunder are made.
The border is “NoNo” the Clown, who can’t make anyone laugh.

The border is a locked door that has been promoted. The border is a moat but without a castle on either side.

The border has become Checkpoint Chale. The border is a place of plans constantly broken and repaired and broken.

The border is mighty, but even the parting of the seas created a path, not a barrier. The border is a big, neat, clean, clear black line on a map that does not exist.

The border is the line in new bifocals: below, small things get bigger; above, nothing changes. The border is a skunk with a white line down its back.”
― Alberto Alvaro Ríos, A Small Story about the Sky

“But it was not just my grandmother there waiting for her husband to come home happy or dead. The side stories of revolution were there in Tapachula, a whole town of displaced people put on hold, taken out of time, not so different from the Nogales in which I was raised . . . . they were towns next to countries, but inside countries as well.”
― Alberto Alvaro Ríos, Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir

“Hands on the Wall of a Church

I am full where I was empty—
My arms can hold no more.
I have found what I was looking for
Though what it is I cannot see.
What is invisible fills me
But it is not what you think,
Not God, not the saints, not angels.
I feel my mother’s hand
Touching this same wall.
I feel my grandmother’s hand
In the story my mother told
Of the summer day when her mother
Brought her to this church,
How they stood together and put their hands
To its wall, which was so big.
How my grandmother told my mother
That her own mother had done the same
So many years ago
All those years suddenly in this moment.
All those hands in mine
As I touch the wall of a church,
This church, here, hard, now.”
― Alberto Alvaro Ríos, A Small Story about the Sky

“The Day of the Dead is, in fact, a day of sadness. But it is not a day of regret. I think we're all at work sorting our calendars out. What it is, is that sometimes as human beings we just simply feel something. That feeling has value. That's what holidays are. That's what this day and others like it are about.”
― Alberto Alvaro Ríos, Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir

“Seven o'clock and you watched it and then you turned it off. The Fifties. It's like that in movies and television programs, but its plot there. The characters get some information from the newscaster and then they turn it off so they can speak. But we were the characters then. We still are, I guess, so it's only a matter of time before we start seeing television shows where the people turn on the news to get some information and then, instead of turning it off so they can speak, they leave it on, and we get swept into some endless video vortex, some film loop, which has us by the eyes and won't let us go.”
― Alberto Alvaro Ríos, Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir

“His bread incident was just like my own story of getting run over. I didn't get hurt, exactly, though I did get to see the underside of something I thought I knew but I didn't. My father and I, in our turn, got to see something new in the middle of what was absolutely familiar, which is the hardest place to see it. Neither of us ever forgot.”
― Alberto Alvaro Ríos, Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir

“It was just spooky . . . . The Bird-man, the War-man, those guys, and that day we tried to find out something. I don't know if we did, though. Maybe that was the point. Maybe it was something about what's personal. I don't know, but it's lasted a long time.”
― Alberto Alvaro Ríos, Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir

“Words in the Woods

All the words that have been spoken here
Over time, over centuries: they stay.
We hear occasional echoes, think
A bird has chirped or a cricket,
But it was a moment of laughter
Happy enough to be here still
Even as the years themselves are gone.
A glint in someone’s eye, a quality of light—
Something, something made one say words
To another, and they laughed.
Words spoken have some slight weight:
As they go forward from the mouth, they fall
In a slow arc over time.
But they do not go—
In falling they are in the humus that feeds the trees,
And in their time they enter the trees
And are the trees, so that the limbs
And the leaves of these trees, this shade
Is that conversation, so pleasant, so long ago.”
― Alberto Alvaro Ríos, A Small Story about the Sky

“Epithalamium: Breathlessness

The night stars make a shore of sand in the summer sky,
A brilliant beach of The Impossible.
You have found this place in each other,
Not far away but up close,
Found it in the stopped moment in which you now live:
A hand inside a hand, a look that sees
What the other sees, ears that hear one song,
A love alive inside heartbeat and deep breath and dark hair.
This place is yours now, the broad shore of a new world.
It is your abiding gift to each other to know
That when together you close your eyes
It is the closed eye that sees farthest,
To know how, in the stopped moment, it is breathlessness—
Not breathing—that defines you.
As you stand in this imagined, now real, place of yourselves,
You are for each other—
More alive, more present, no greater adventure
Than each other.”
― Alberto Alvaro Ríos, A Small Story about the Sky

“Epithalamium: Next to Me

I was full not of bones but of feeling,
I was full not of bones but of you.
Your hands became my ribs, my ribs
Your fingers, and they held me—
They hold me now.
I began to feel I had clouds, rivers, stars for bones—
I felt them move inside, enough to let you in.
When I first saw you, when you stood next to me
You stood next to me and a little inside,
The way you stand next to me now.
Your arm inside mine, your left hip in my right,
Your hip a little in the middle of my walk.
I let you into the bones inside me and did not let you out.
I see you in front of me now but I can close my eyes
And see you too. I didn’t understand this,
I didn’t know this would happen
I didn’t know you would stand at—and be—my side
Until now.”
― Alberto Alvaro Ríos, A Small Story about the Sky

“I remember one woman making paper flowers to sell, with different herbs . . . She made them so fast, and so many . . . that as I watched, her first few zinnias became quickly enough a few hundred, and grew in their happiness to the size of sunflowers. The sunflowers themselves grew to the size of pumpkins, the snapdragons grew ominous, and the rosemary fragrant.”
― Alberto Alvaro Ríos, Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir

“In this place that we live--my West, my father's North, and my mother's new hemisphere--rabbits in a burning field of grass can catch on fire. They run to a clear place where there is no fire, but, in doing so, light it up because their fur is burning. That way, in trying to save themselves, they spread the fire more. . . . And it speeds to everyone.”
― Alberto Alvaro Ríos, Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir

“But I was in this bowling league with a good number of friends who came from across the line. We got the phone call that the border had been closed, and that absolutely nobody was being allowed to cross--not parents, not children, not anybody. Who knew what disguise the assassin had used.”
― Alberto Alvaro Ríos, Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir

“The Circus in the Desert

In the great Sonoran desert of the Southwest,
He found room enough for time itself...
In this vastness he found the world of the living
Waiting their turn to move on
Standing next to the generations that had already passed
But had not yet left this world,
Not yet finished with their grand and stark moment,
Not yet done with their tea and amusements.
In the emptiness of the desert, he saw the crowd.
He did not invent—he saw what faced him
And spoke back to it in its language.
Hello to the band, he said, hello and farewell.
In this darkness, in this desert,
With a wave good-bye of his own hand,
He bid his monsters and men
March in parade against the coming of the quiet.”
― Alberto Alvaro Ríos, A Small Story about the Sky