Alberto Ríos > Quotes

“These are immigrant times
And the lines are long,

The signs for jobs few,
The songs sadder, the air meaner.

Everyone is hungry.
Everyone is willing.

Jobs are not jobs but lives lived
Hard at the work of being human.

These are immigrant times,
And the lines are long again.”
― Alberto Ríos, Not Go Away Is My Name

“Perfect for Any Occasion

Pies have a reputation.
And it’s immediate—no talk of potential

Regarding a pie. It’s good
Or it isn’t, but mostly it is—sweet, very sweet

Right then, right there, blue and red.
It can’t go to junior college,

Work hard for the grades,
Work two jobs on the side.

It can’t slowly build a reputation
And a growing client base.

A pie gets one chance
And knows it, wearing as makeup

Those sparkling granules of sugar,
As a collar those diamond cutouts

Bespeaking Fair Day, felicity, contentment.
I tell you everything is great, says a pie,

Great, and fun, and fine.
And you smell nice, too, someone says.

A full pound of round sound, all ahh, all good.
Pies live a life of applause.



2.

But then there are the other pies.
The leftover pies. The ones

Nobody chooses at Thanksgiving.
Mincemeat? What the hell is that? people ask,

Pointing instead at a double helping of Mr.
“I-can-do-no-wrong” pecan pie.

But the unchosen pies have a long history, too.
They have plenty of good stories, places they’ve been—

They were once fun, too—
But nobody wants to listen to them anymore.

Oh sure, everybody used to love lard,
But things have changed, brother—things have changed.

That’s never the end of the story, of course.
Some pies make a break for it—

Live underground for a while,
Doing what they can, talking fast,

Trying to be sweet pizzas, if they’re lucky.
But no good comes of it. Nobody is fooled.

A pie is a pie for one great day. Last week,
It was Jell-O. Tomorrow, it’ll be cake.”
― Alberto Ríos

“We could not swim, but now we are swimming—
We have to swim.

It is not fair. It is never fair.
We have no chance to be part of the decision

That changes us.
We were, and then we are. Regrettably,

We are not alone. If it is one of us,
It is all of us, so many of us.”
― Alberto Ríos, Not Go Away Is My Name

“We look up
Pulled into the immensity,

Lifted into the limitless—
As if it were a hole

We are falling into,
Up instead of down.

We stand on the earth,
Breathe in the night.

It is all too big.
We go back inside.”
― Alberto Ríos

“I grew up liking the border and its great scar,
Its drama always good for a story the way scars always are.

A scar is the place where the hurting used to be.
A scar the heroic signature of the healed.

The border is not a scar. Instead, it is something we keep picking at,
Something that has no name.”
― Alberto Ríos, Not Go Away Is My Name

“Sometimes,

Nothing warns us. It cannot be thought by us.
It is done to us. A gun,

An earthquake, a flood—any of the muscular
Horrors of this world.

In those instances, we don't ask for it,
We don't get to take a deep breath,

It is simply the end of the chapter
And page 1 of the next.”
― Alberto Ríos, Not Go Away Is My Name

“Giver of gifts for those who will see them:
You and I, cactus, we are clear on the quiet exchanges

The desert makes with its creature citizens.
In passing by, and every time, I never fail to wave.

As every time I see you, you are invariably--invariably--
Waving your arms in delight in seeing me.”
― Alberto Ríos, Not Go Away Is My Name

“Together, we are a tribe of eyes that look upward,
Even as we stand on uncertain ground.

The earth beneath us moves, quiet and wild,
Its boundaries shifting, its muscles wavering.

The dream of sky is indifferent to all this,
Impervious to borders, fences, reservations.

The sky is our common home, the place we all live.
There we are in the world together.”
― Alberto Ríos, Not Go Away Is My Name

“I grew up on the border and though I left
I have brought it with me wherever I've gone.”
― Alberto Ríos, Not Go Away Is My Name

“Coffee is drinking a little bit of ourselves when we were younger.
Tea makes round what at first was square.

Tea hums its way through the otherwise quiet world.
Coffee is brewed from all the black notes on a sheet of fast music.

Coffee is made of old pianos.
Tea is made of Parisian watercolors.

Tea is the palm of the hand.
Coffee always raises its hand in answer to a question.

Coffee is the expansive night sky.
Tea is the quiet turned-earth in the makings of a new garden.

Tea is the audience that has come to watch the actors.
Coffee is the actor who is the undeniable star of the evening.

Coffee shouts; tea whispers.
I drink coffee, but I remember tea.”
― Alberto Ríos, Not Go Away Is My Name

“What we bring, finally, into the new day, every day,

Is ourselves. And that’s all we need
To start. That’s everything we require to keep going.

Look back only for as long as you must,
Then go forward into the history you will make.”
― Alberto Ríos, Not Go Away Is My Name

“Through it all, the mourning doves say
There, there--which is to say, everything is all right.

I believe them. They have said this to me ever since childhood.
I hear them. I hear them and I get up.”
― Alberto Ríos, Not Go Away Is My Name

“When dusk falls on us, as it will,
To dim the light of lives outlived,

When night is next, when sleep is sure,
When nothing’s left to lift—

I will be glad. The work of a day
Well done, this rest its good reward,

The best we’ve earned and what
We’ve won, this doorway opening.

Our lives are like this: years moved on
Beyond the words that started them.”
― Alberto Ríos, Not Go Away Is My Name

“The bad do not win—not finally,
No matter how loud they are.

We simply would not be here
If that were so.

You are made, fundamentally, from the good.
With this knowledge, you never march alone.”
― Alberto Ríos, Not Go Away Is My Name

“You win. You have always won.
All I can do is not go away.

Not go away is my name.”
― Alberto Ríos, Not Go Away Is My Name

“You have terror and I have tears.
In this cruel way, we are for each other.

We are at war. You always win.
But I do not go away.

You shoot me again. Again, I do not go away.
You shoot with bullets, but you have nothing else.”
― Alberto Ríos, Not Go Away Is My Name

“In the place between scorpions and manners,
Between scream and please pass the salt,

Somewhere between John Kennedy’s November
And my next-door neighbor’s blue flowerbeds,

We live our lives.”
― Alberto Ríos, Not Go Away Is My Name

“At funerals, things are different. Everything is there—shrimp and red sauce both,
Lemons, too, all these things being very thoughtful, even the big, blue cloth napkins.

Fancy tongue sandwiches and family-recipe cilantro salsas and olives and pecans,
And everybody there is personally concerned that you should have it all,

Even though you are just a visitor. Eat up, son, they say. They say it repeatedly.
It is curious how you seem to be everybody’s son on these occasions.

They don’t want you to just eat a little, either--Look at that ham.
Have some more, they say. There’s plenty. And they mean it.

That’s what’s left to do at a funeral—make sure people get their fill.
There’s nothing else left, once all the food is there and the people have arrived.

That’s the business of it all. Anything else comes later. Missing a person,
That takes a while. It’s not something you have to worry about now.

Nobody else is hungry, so I come prepared. It never fails. People can be counted on
At times like these. I tell you, it always turns out to be my lucky day.”
― Alberto Ríos, Not Go Away Is My Name

“We plant seeds in the ground
And dreams in the sky,

Hoping that, someday, the roots of one
Will meet the upstretched limbs of the other.

It has not happened yet.”
― Alberto Ríos, Not Go Away Is My Name

“Like it or not, we are all subscribers to the world’s newspaper

Written big in the frame of the window in front of us.”
― Alberto Ríos, Not Go Away Is My Name

“We give because someone gave to us.
We give because nobody gave to us.
We give because giving has changed us.
We give because giving could have changed us.”
― Alberto Rios