U n d e s i r a b l e By Robert René Galván

Fresh from the sea-sick flight,
The blitz still ringing in his ears,
He had been a shadow in the pale streets of London,
His dark grace and typist’s fingers kept him away from the front
And he survived for his Retorno al Barrio, * [*My father’s famous essay]
Back to the white house on Rehmann Street,
A walk along the crooked tracks,
A visit to Wong’s Grocery for lime Jaritos
And a swim in the Natatorium:
The joy of children laughing in the pool,
He would find elusive, despite his service in their stead.
His companions could enter, but not the little Sargent,
His wiry hair and mocha flesh made him, in the eyes
Of the gate keeper,
Undesirable
Still, he persisted, swam against complex eddies,
Climbed forbidding weirs to arrive at fresh waters:
He, the denizen of chalkboards
And lonely carrels, of bibliographies
And a house built of books – in the end:
Undesirable.

•

The boy sat next to him in the stifling car,
A truck pulled up next to the wagon,
A shirtless, sweaty man looked us up and down,
Spat between his gapped teeth,
The chaw sizzled like a fried egg
On the road: “Hot, ain’t it, Pân – chō?”
Papá once sat next to President Johnson
At a banquet, in the Great Society,
A lull in the eye of the shit-storm,
And for a time, our world appeared to change,

But fifty years later, the boy stands in line
To buy bread and milk, happy in his own musings,
But met with a hateful glare
On an island that was once
The world’s refuge,
Undesirable.