ALSO BY RICHARD BLANCO

POETRY

City of a Hundred Fires

Directions to the Beach of the Dead

Looking for The Gulf Motel

One Today:

A Poem for Barack Obama’s

Presidential Inauguration

How to Love a Country

NONFICTION

For All of Us, One Today:

An Inaugural Poet’s Journey

The Prince of Los Cocuyos:

A Miami Childhood

For Mark Neveu:

my first friend,

my first & only husband,

my first family,

my first reader,

my first and last

everything.

RADIANT BEINGS

New Poems
Part 1

THE SPLINTERING

As a boy I was all body, my body part of all

that was. My ears were the wind my cheeks

heard. My mouth the thunder that roared in

my chest. My face in the face of rain puddles

cupped in my palms. My lips the wet petals

my nose kissed. And I blindly saw the stars

as my eyes luring me that night to climb up

our backyard mango tree. Its trunk the will

of my spine, my arms every branch’s arms

coddling the wind. Its bark the thick flesh of

my hands needled with splinters when I fell

into my mother’s terrorful cries: ¡Ay, Dios mio!

I couldn’t grasp her urgency: why she had to

tenderly soak my hands, as if I was some hurt

animal she had to heal, why she spent hours

pulling out every splinter with her tweezers,

a surgeon operating on me in her housecoat

and terrycloth slippers. Why her teary words:

It’s okay. Just a few more, mijo. You could’ve died.

Die? I knew nothing of dying. Then she kissed

the last bead of blood on my finger, and said:

I love you. Meaning what she’d love forever

was more than my body, which suddenly split

from me into abstract breaths in the mouth

of my mind, for the first time saying to itself:

Death. Joy. Loss. Saying: I love you too, Mamá.

— playing god —

those days of my being—a naïve little god—who believed his imagination infinite in his small hands—that they could shape whatever he desired from his jumble of Lego blocks—like colorful ruins of a shattered rainbow strewn across hours of play alone in his bedroom—a lonely little god— appealing for love through what he created—who snapped together a mini-Cadillac for his father to park in the driveway of his unaffordable dreams—who clicked together a replica of the Cuban farmhouse his

mother lost—its windows and doors in perfect proportion to her longing—a forgiving little god—who pieced together a square rose for his grandmother—though she demanded he play like real boys he’d never be—a playful little god—who rolled rectangular cigars made in Cuba to light up his grandfather’s memories of homeland—who forged a plastic pocketknife for his brother to stab anything he hated, even him—a mortal little god—with an immortal yearning for home—block by block he

built his perfect house scaled to his yearning, in a town he named Richardson, where he’d thrive someday—a frustrated little god— who tore it down back into a heap of broken rainbows he then shaped into a rocket—and blasted away toward a perfect planet he knew didn’t exist—a dejected little god—who grew up brooding over his existence—who now snaps together blocks of his melancholy words into poems—a fragile little god—still needing to be loved for what he makes, and gives of himself.

WHY I NEEDED TO

because I faithfully reply to every email from the absurd

gods of urgency who punish my good deeds by leaving me

empty when I empty my inbox … because I praise hating

myself, broken into my calendar’s time-slotted tasks, slicing

me thin with the thick duty of being everything yet nothing

to anyone, not even to me … because I remember birthdays

but forget my own and my mother’s … because she is bitter

sweet as the Cuban coffee she brews after Sunday dinners …

because she only loves me in the language of her cooking

my favorite dish: carne con papas … because of my bland

father sunk in his armchair without me on his lap … because

he never told me the life story I only read finally in the half

moons of his eyes the morning he gazed into mine then

died … because my brother and I need to drink to share

our shared hurt at happy hour, so unhappily grateful for

love’s wreckage … because my husband, who’s still scared

of his adoration for me as we embrace sleep, still doubts

how long I’ll nest my dreams in his arms … because I have

never quite told him: always … because I’m just as afraid of

needing him more than myself … because I’m not the one

I’ve curated on Instagram: oh so humbled by, so grateful for …

so many posted blessings with my posed selves … because

tonight I again remember I’m nothing more than a mirage

slowly disappearing on my porch, sitting with half the life

I have left, still trying to piece how I fit into the puzzle of

the constellations … because I’ve drunk their shots of light

and too many martinis … because I’m cheering mindlessly

to the moon, to my wish for immortality amid the clouds

of my own cigarette smoke … because I should finally quit

doubting my life will be more than these anonymous bones

… because I need to believe in something else, truer than

me … because that’s why today I had to take myself away

to the beach … because I needed to imagine my father as

that father at the shore, handing a bouquet of seashells to

his son … because I needed to taste that love can be simple

as a mother remembering to pack sodas and sandwiches …

because I needed the seagulls tending the horizon to teach

me again to be as still as them, peer calmly into the void

of the skies I face … because I needed to hear the waves

break and break me into the lines of this poem … because

I needed to burn, to see myself shine just as beautifully

as the rosy glow of the sunlight bathing my closed eyes.

UNTIL THIS: AN EKPHRASTIC ARS POETICA

after Jacques-Louis David’s

painting The Death of Marat

Until this poem, it was a tattoo inked with

revere on the skin of my soul. Never had I

questioned the brushed rain of silken light

falling on Marat’s pallid skin. Didn’t know

it was meant to illuminate a godless man

as a holy martyr faithful to the aftermath

of the French Revolution, all the textbook

pages of its horrors forgotten, dark and

muddled as the oily black layers saturating

the background, Marat bathed in his death,

slumped in his tub, an open coffin. Until

this poem, I honored the dabs of rebel red

blood oozing from his slit chest, never saw

it as a stab in rebuke for words he’d stabbed

self-righteously into all those he sentenced

to the guillotine. Until this poem, I thought

it was cordial letters he had been signing, not

death warrants, ink fresh as his blood, fingers

stiff as his quill, in his murderous hand a note

from his murderer, not a loved one. Until

this poem, I hadn’t quite seen the entire canvas

of history’s most constant conceit: that to love

a country justifies killing everyone who does

not love it exactly as we wish. Until this poem,

I hadn’t quite believed the pen might indeed be

mightier than the sword, that the only thing

worth slaying is the end of this line, for the life

of this next one, to tell you I still want to die,

not like the Marat I now know, but the Marat

I knew when I was twelve and he opened up

to me, a glossy apparition in a coffee-table book,

when I first felt the romance of this yearning

for my last breath to be my last scribble from

a pen clutched in my hand, dying to finish one

last poem, dying for right words, dying so that

others’ lives might be lived better than my own.

QUESTIONING VILLA VIZCAYA MUSEUM AND GARDENS

Miami, Florida

To laud the spared lives of live oaks, or mourn the mangroves murdered for the sake of a tycoon’s rapacious dreams of paradise?

To praise the blueprint of his vision, or curse the stone and marble of his palace crushing the native bones of the forgotten Tequesta?

To marvel through the Italian gardens, or object to the marshes he ordered dredged to stroll amid queen orchids like a Renaissance king?

To revere the regal stairs and archways, or pity the coral rock they were carved from, cut from the earth’s gut, stolen for his pleasure?

To enjoy the adagio of the fountains, or dismiss their trickles as echoes of his bon vivant babble about the art he collected as chattel?

To admire his starry chandeliers, or dismiss them as dull ostentation, overwrought as his ego, as vain as his marble floors’ veins?

To indulge in rooms of gilded mirrors, or crack them to see past my reflection, to see him in me, to ask him what I’ve asked all my life:

To create beauty, must we destroy something already beautiful? Does our lust for beauty absolve us, or does it damn us endlessly?

RADIANT BEINGS: PHOTOS BY JOYCE TENNESON

The leathery mouths of calla lilies you kiss with

your lens until their mute tongues tell me:

we’re all just as thirsty for the love of rain.

How your eye focuses a gerbera’s eye, sees it as

the center of some sun, petals flaring with

my wish to color all my days pink and amber.

The perfectly crinkled faces of dahlias you blur

to refocus me on the letting go of beauty

as the truest expression of what’s beautiful.

The giant heads of allium you capture teetering,

a lesson on how to balance the heavy weight

of the mind atop the stiff stem of my body.

The night you lit up with Chinese lantern flowers

on your dinner table, gazed at the impossible

glow of their orange hearts, and asked me:

Aren’t they just gorgeous? As if I could say anything

else but Yes! But now I want to answer you

by asking: What is it between us and flowers?

Flowers everywhere: in the trembling hands of

brides, of widows, laid at granite headstones,

or strewn as confetti over newlyweds’ beds.

Life’s centerpiece at dinner parties, bouquets to

endear unforgiving mothers, supermarket roses

bought to buy back the love of angered lovers.

Orchid corsages perfuming wrists, daisy garlands

on fairy heads, boutonnieres for the debonair,

petunias peeking at us from window boxes.

Flowers we cut, compose as half-living sculptures

that we place in our living rooms and praise

every day, pining for more than our everyday.

They wilt, bow to death, and we let go, remembering

our own fleeting flesh, hoping something of us

might remain, radiant as the beings blooming alive

again in your photos, in you, in me, in all of us.

— anatomy of light —

for Rafael Soriano

—across your canvases, my bones’ mortal ache

is soothed by your glimmers of the immortal—

—worries wrinkled across my forehead dissolve

into the gossamer sheen of your sapphire hues—

—I inhale the language of your gusty colors,

exhale peaceful breaths that heal me—

—you redraw my ribs as a divine staircase I climb back

toward the brilliant heavens you brushed for me—

—my eyes peer within your eyes into the shadows

of all time before and after my earthly time—

—the losses of my rock-heavy heart float amid

the translucence of your sienna-blood clouds—

—in your soulful colors I see myself as more

than merely flesh, for I am the light of—

—your light that renders the infinite, that lets me stare

at my god in the glow of your god in all humanity—

TO THE ARTIST OF THE INVISIBLE

You, whose canvas is air, who drew for me the smiles of sweet violet water, sweet as my mother’s smile, dabbing, parting my hair each morning for school, her collection of perfume bottles like a miniature sculpture garden on her dresser, playing with light and time, as still as gold, patient as love waiting to be loved.

You, who sketched forever the cologne of my father’s handkerchief in his suit pocket, leaving orange-blossom kisses through the house before work, only to return home, kisses of tobacco on his lips, musk around his collar.

You, with your palette of whiffs that never let my childhood end. The waxy smell of crayons still lifting off my coloring books. Sweet sniffs of pink cotton-candy clouds still floating though carnival air still smelling of roasted kettle corn. The first steamy raindrops still falling on the sidewalk the summer I learned to ride my bike. The seashell scent of my wet sandcastles still standing.

You, tracing in my mind the honeysuckle vine stitched round our kitchen window, tangled with the aromas of cumin and bay leaves circling my grandmother’s stove. You, capturing that island my grandfather had to leave forever with the scents of his paradise each time he’d split open a coconut, slice into a ripe mango, hold the gold flesh to his nose and remember.

You, who draw me back into the leather of my first convertible: top-down to the night blooms of jasmine white as stars on the night my first kiss was born. Or the base notes of plumeria candles and jazz paired with top notes of merlot and sandalwood smoke the first time I knew love. Or every love that’s ever left me, replaced by a portrait of scents left behind on a pillow or scarf—scents that let me forgive them.

You, the angel-wing petals of white roses and heavenly lilies praying with me at my father’s wake. You keep giving me his last breath, and my first breath of Paris, my first breeze of Barcelona, my first taste of Rome, sitting alone by a fountain romancing me with the scent of wet marble.

You: magician, alchemist, artist of the invisible, who’s been beside me always. Who can do what no painter or poet can do. You, who make sense of my life through scents: let me inhale it, dab it on my wrist and neck, lay it on my lapel. You, who give me all of me—for me and all to capture in a breath, like the surprise of a hummingbird that hovers midair for an instant, forever.

BIG WOOD RIVER

at Ernest Hemingway’s home, Ketchum, Idaho

Me as you, you as me, uneasy on this same terrace

where you once sat, witnessing the same sun

you also saw rise, brushed by the same wind

you last breathed. Now I breathe your spirit,

my knowing you knew this river is a life,

a story that begins with tears

of rain, or the shattered beauty of snowflakes,

fallen from faraway clouds we somehow know

as well as ourselves, shedding the gray weight

of our souls in whispers to the mountain peaks,

perked-up like ears needing to hear the skies,

to feel they aren’t trapped in their lovely towers,

alone. And neither are we. In the creases

and folds of our earthen palms we collect

our watershed into a river’s voice, into a life,

into a story, letting it flow through us, urged

ever down hills we carve with our imagination,

each freshet a sentence extending

the story of our lives. At times clear-minded

and tranquil, no eddies of adjective. At times

stirred, murky, stalled by declaratives of pain.

At times the giggling of sunlight over stones,

commas that suggest a pause to listen to

ripplings of joy. And then the rage

of whitewater rapids we fear we might not

survive. Or worse, the damming of our souls, dams

we must break to let our stories keep

flowing downstream, new chapters

at every bend, twisting our way through

unknown fields. At last we reach the end of

ourselves, our stories spill as willing

into the sea, as you did.

WHAT YOU DIDN‘T LET US LOSE

for Andy Sweet

All we’ve lost, yet haven’t, still here: in the aperture of your eyes in sync with your shutter opening/closing, opening/closing like heartbeats, letting us love what you did, see what you knew we’d never see again. Here: out of the darkroom of your death, the youth of your South Beach soul still aglow with the vintage sun of the 70’s glinting over the ocean like some Morse code message of the past.

Here: the rays your film caught like a copper rain, still showering down on flowery swim caps and bathing suits before they wilted into today’s glamour of mojitos and Maseratis along Ocean Drive. Here: your panorama of scattered footprints forever ingrained in chiseled sand, forever the same tone of tan I remember, along a shore that will never erode from my memory of gathering seashells I can still cup to my ear to hear the clicks of your camera.

Here: the pendulum of palms still swaying, keeping lost time, their fronds waving hello into your camera’s eye, or goodbye against the backdrop of waves still breaking. Here: the crisp hues of perky-pinks, pearly-blues, and precious-mauves your lens preserved, still decorating Art Deco hotels frosted like birthday cakes, celebrating a golden age of lives your sharp focus kept from fading away.

Click: the kaleidoscopic mish-mash of lawn chairs colorful as the lives seated in them, the faces you zoomed in on, letting me hear their silent stories, epic as the horizon, wise as the wind, melancholy as a seagull’s cry. Click: a widow still dolled up in a chiffon sundress and silk headscarf, still flirting with her husband’s lost gaze. Click: a couple’s leathery hands still woven together, alive in the laughter of each other’s crinkled eyes.

Click: a grandfather still wearing his dapper golf cap, toking a cigar while dancing a polka poolside with the ladies. Click: old girlfriends kvetching, still posing like pageant contestants, though wrinkled as the ocean beyond them vanishing into its teal eternity. Click: all the Holocaust survivors who managed a smile for you, healing by forgetting—for a close-up second—what they could never forget. How you captured time, let lives live beyond their lives, shuttered immortal.

MUSIC IN OUR HANDS

after Paul Cordes’s photo The Musician

Melodies heard are sweet, just as I heard them

in the rhythm of Keats, who thought unheard

melodies were sweeter. And so they are here, in

the silences of this musician’s still hands, as if

clenched in prayer, ecstasy, or forgiveness that

his fingers, solid as pillars, can’t yet release into

music, not yet strumming a guitar whispering

stars across my ears, or pounding piano keys

into my heart, not yet blowing sax smoke for

my soul, or stroking a bow across a violin like

a lover resting on his shoulder as if on mine.

His mute and empty hands are by themselves

the instrument that plays his life in tune with

mine. I imagine the thorns as well as the scents

of the faces we’ve held like roses in our hands,

the doughy cheeks of children we’ve pinched,

the cigarettes we’ve lit, the tears we’ve dabbed

from others’ eyes, or from our own grieving

into the mirror, the cups of coffee we’ve held

beholding the sunrise, the cup of tea steeping

with the moon, the doors we’ve opened into

our homes, and those we’ve closed behind us,

forever, the days we’ve paused, needing to see

ourselves in the creases of our palms, to hear

all the music of our lives played out in silence.

VISITING ELIZABETH: A GLOSA

Is it lack of imagination that makes us come to imagined places, not just stay at home?

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too?

—ELIZABETH BISHOP, Questions of Travel

—Key West | 624 White Street | 1938–1946—

I want to knock, as if the ghost of your smile, tender and restrained as your poems, awaits to greet me. I peer through the dingy windows into my reflection of you in me, imagine us sitting at your kitchen table sipping tea—no, a shot of whiskey. And I’d ask you, why you chose the blinding heat and colors of this island that I too have adored? Did you also want to dissolve into the same eternity I’ve seen in the sea’s gaze? Did the sway of the palm trees say, as they do now: stay, stay, stay. And why did you leave, then? What’s this glorious longing I share with you for some home we’ve never known, or are afraid to find? I look for answers in the questions of your poem, read it aloud at your front door as if they were our words: Is it lack of imagination that makes us come / to imagined places, not just stay at home?

—Petrópolis | Rio de Janeiro | 1951–1966—

1996: I seduced a Brazilian man into seducing me, into taking me, and taking me back to his homeland, as happened with you and your Lota decades before me. Vitorino’s eyes as alluring as hers—shiny black moons in the cinnamon sky of his face. We spent that summer winding through the countryside rendered by your poems: the clouds dissipating into the samba of rain, into the dancing eddies of rivers, into the gushing roar of waterfalls, into me, wondering if you wondered: Is it the foreign that makes us feel in love, or is it love that makes us feel drawn to the foreign? After he and I made love like gods atop a mountain, I knew I could too easily let myself blur in the landscapes of his land and his life. Is that why I had to leave him? Why you couldn’t leave Lota? Is that why you wrote the question I still live by: Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

—North Haven Island, Maine | Summers | 1970’s—

The ferry’s wake cuts the bay waters that heal behind me, leaving no scar of my journey. Once docked on the island, I’ll sink into the same weathered couch where you sat at the village library, caress your handwriting across the wrinkled poems you left there, brushing across your words, braille of your soul. I’ll ask for directions to your house and drive, windows open, to better gaze across meadows that your eyes grazed, breathe in buttercups that perfumed your life, listen to the poetry you heard in goldfinches’ chirps. I’ll stand at another front door of yours, think of our lives as islands that never shift despite all we weather. But for now, what I know is the ferry’s clumsy churn, the mainland shrinking into a miniature of itself until it disappears. North Haven nowhere in sight. Days later, the same will happen in reverse as I cross the bay back home. Is this why I love the sea, Elizabeth? Because it knows home is relative, something always appearing or disappearing? Because it knows the answer to paradise is the question we’ve both asked all our lives: Oh, must we dream our dreams / and have them, too?

WHAT GOVERNS US

The congress of our mountains in which I trust, upholding eons of nature’s unwritten laws enacted across my eyes every dawn.

The council of our clouds that advise me on how to reshape myself, yet remain myself.

The committees of our valleys’ wildflowers whose colors advise my sometimes colorless life.

I never tire of listening to the incessant debate of our waves crashing against the granite rebuttal of our coasts, neither ever wins, neither needs to, teaching me the balance of power.

The presidential stance of our pine trees that keep me loyal to our statutes of beauty reaching for the sky.

The seagulls and hawks I caucus with, who show me how to harness the shifting winds so that I can see everything, everything, even through the fog of difficult times.

At times, I think of myself afloat alone like our lone islands, yet complete and self-reliant.

Every dusk, our sovereign sun bestows across my heart its golden medal, honoring the light that beats through us all.

At night, I stare at the blank page of our moon, reminding me to never stop signing my dreams’ petitions for a more just world.

I cast my vote among the twinkling senate of our stars that assemble to pass on to us our need to love as one.

We, the native who thrived here long before the foreign who sailed here. We, from away and those who have yet to arrive. We, our past, our present, our future.

We, meaning all of us who understand that what governs us is more than just ourselves.

MAINE YET MIAMI

The soft harp of snowfall plucking through

my pine trees lulls me to peace, and yet I still

hear the bongo of thunderstorms rapping on

the rooftop of my queer childhood, dancing

to the rage of clouds raining away my sorrow.

Soon the snow will melt silently into the gurgles

of my creek, even as my grandmother’s voice

remains frozen in my ears, each time she’d call

me a sissy, yet also praise me as her best friend.

I marvel over spring’s abracadabra every time

the lilac blooms appear, only to disappear back

into my grandfather’s tabaco smoke, exhaling

nostalgic stories about his lost Cuba, inhaling

the scent of his jasmine tree flowering the night

with its tiny, perfumed stars. Despite the stars

peeking through the lavender clouds swaddling

mountain peaks in my window at sunset, I rise

to the sun of my youth rising over the sea, after

a night’s sleep on a bed of the sand, dreaming or

dreading who I’d become, or wouldn’t. Though

I grew courageous enough to marry a man who

only loves me in English: darling, sweetheart, honey,

I love him in my Spanish whispered in his ear

as he sleeps: amorcito, tesoro, mi cielo. After all

the meat loaves and blueberry pies we’ve baked

in our kitchen, I still sit down to the memories

of my mother’s table, savor my loss of her

garlicy fricasé de pollo and coconut flan. No matter

how tastefully my throw pillows perfectly match

my knickknacks and art on my walls, it all falls

apart sometimes, just as I do, until I remember

to be the boy I was, should always be, playing

alone with his Legos in the family room, still

enchanted by the joy of his sheer self and his

creations, mortal as the life I’ve made here.

UPON A TIME: SURFSIDE, MIAMI

Once and once again I am as I remember

myself. Thirty years later, I can still savor

the sway of these palms fanning this same

wind into syllables whispering good morning

in my eyes, saving these todays when I can

no longer hear how to live out this passion

for breaking myself into poems like this, like

these waves that once upon a time are again

my loyal loves still kissing my feet as I stroll

this shore and glance back at my footprints

again washed away. The salty salve of these

breezes I breathe, living once again with all

my joyous regrets for all I’ve done right or

wrong, for all I am now, that is enough yet

not enough, for who I wanted to be once,

still searching this sea, still facing this same

mute horizon, I ask again: Who am I? What

should I do? The answer, as always: Everything.

FROM

City of a Hundred Fires

AMÉRICA

I.

Although Tía Miriam boasted she discovered

at least half-a-dozen uses for peanut butter—

topping for guava shells in syrup,

butter substitute for Cuban toast,

hair conditioner and relaxer—

Mamá never knew what to make

of the monthly five-pound jars

handed out by the immigration department

until my friend, Jeff, mentioned jelly.

II.

There was always pork though,

for every birthday and wedding,

whole ones on Christmas and New Year’s Eve,

even on Thanksgiving Day—pork,

fried, broiled or crispy skin roasted—

as well as cauldrons of black beans,

fried plantain chips and yuca con mojito.

These items required a special visit

to Antonio’s mercado on the corner of 8th Street

where men in guayaberas stood in senate

blaming Kennedy for everything—“¡Ese hijo de puta!”

the bile of Cuban coffee and cigar residue

filling the creases of their wrinkled lips;

clinging to one another’s lies of lost wealth,

ashamed and empty as hollow trees.

III.

By seven I had grown suspicious—we were still here.

Overheard conversations about returning

to Cuba had grown wistful and less frequent.

I spoke English; my parents didn’t.

We didn’t live in a two-story house

with a maid or a wood-panel station wagon

nor vacation camping in Colorado.

None of the girls in our family had hair of gold;

none of my brothers or cousins

were named Greg, Peter, or Marcia;

we were not the Brady Bunch.

None of the black and white characters

on Donna Reed or on the Dick Van Dyke Show

were named Guadalupe, Lázaro, or Mercedes.

Patty Duke’s family wasn’t like us either—

they didn’t have pork on Thanksgiving,

they ate turkey with cranberry sauce;

they didn’t have yuca, they had yams

like the dittos of Pilgrims I colored in class.

IV.

A week before Thanksgiving

I explained to my abuelita

about the Indians and the Mayflower,

how Lincoln set the slaves free;

I explained to my parents about

the purple mountain’s majesty,

“one if by land, two if by sea”

the cherry tree, the tea party,

the amber waves of grain,

the “masses yearning to be free”

liberty and justice for all, until

finally they agreed:

this Thanksgiving we would have turkey,

as well as pork.

V.

Abuelita prepared the poor fowl

as if committing an act of treason,

faking her enthusiasm for my sake.

Mamá set a frozen pumpkin pie in the oven

and prepared candied yams following instructions

I translated from the marshmallow bag.

The table was arrayed with gladiolus,

the plattered turkey loomed at the center

on plastic silver from Woolworths.

Everyone sat in green velvet chairs

we had upholstered with clear vinyl,

except Tío Carlos and Toti, seated

in the folding chairs from the Salvation Army.

I uttered a bilingual blessing

and the turkey was passed around

like a game of Russian roulette.

“DRY,” Tío Berto complained, and proceeded

to drown the lean slices with pork fat drippings

and cranberry jelly—“esa mierda roja,” he called it.

Faces fell when Mamá presented her ochre pie—

pumpkin was a home remedy for ulcers, not a dessert.

Tía María made three rounds of Cuban coffee

then abuelo and Pepe cleared the living room furniture,

put on a Celia Cruz LP and the entire family

began to merengue over the linoleum of our apartment,

sweating rum and coffee until they remembered—

it was 1976 and 46 degrees—

in América.

LA REVOLUCIÓN AT ANTONIO‘S MERCADO

Para la santera, Esperanza, who makes me open new boxes of candles so she can pick out the red ones, the color of Changó, her protector spirit, and tutors me in the ways of all the spirits: Eleguá, Ochún, Yemayá,

Para Josie on welfare, who sells me her food stamps for cash because she can’t buy cocoa butter soaps, Coca-Cola, or disposable diapers with them,

Para la Señora Vidal and her husband who came early in the 50’s before la revolución, own the famous Matador Grille on 8th Street, helped those who came later, who give me two-dollar tips when I double bag,

Para Elena who makes me sort through cartfuls of avocados to find the best one, her nostalgia-coated tongue complains that the fruit here can’t compare to the fruit back home—where the sugar was sweeter, the salt saltier,

Para Juan Galdo who remains unsatisfied with the flavor of los tabacos de Honduras,

Para Mrs. Benitez the only regular who buys broccoli, who takes English night class and asks me to check her homework,

Para Pepe who asks me to translate his insurance statements, immigration papers, and junk mail offers for “free” vacations in Mexico,

Para the cashier, Consuelo, who wants me to teach her daughter María, English and love, and wants me to escort María to her quinces debutante,

Para Migdalia Sanchez who forgets some labels are now bilingual and comes to me confused when she mistakenly tries to read the English side of the can,

Para la vieja Gomez who I help sort through dimes, quarters and nickels—American change she has never learned to count,

Para los americanos who are scared of us, especially when we talk real loud and all at the same time, who come in only for change or to call a tow truck,

Para los haitianos who like us because at least we are Caribbean neighbors,

Para Pablito who likes his boiled ham sliced paper-thin like the after-school snacks his mother prepared for him before she was accused and sentenced,

Para Juanita who had to leave Enrique, her only son, in ’61, who carries in her sequined coin purse a scratchy photo of herself at fifteen to remind herself she is still alive, and shows it to me so I can acknowledge her lost beauty,

Para Carlos who comes in mid-mornings, leans against the cafeteria counter drunk with delusion, takes a swig of espresso like a shot of whiskey and tells me la revolución will die before the end of the year, who hopes to host Noche Buena at his house near Havana, next year,

Para la revolución, todos sus grandes triunfos, toda su gloria,

Para Vicente my best friend, who sneaked beers with me behind the green dumpster, who taught me how to say really gross things in Spanish, who couldn’t get his family out, who had only me in the States, who put a bullet through his neck on the day of his anniversary, who left a note addressed to me in Spanish—“Para mi amigo.”

MANGO, NUMBER 61

Pescado grande was number 14, while pescado chico was number 12; dinero, money, was number 10. This was la charada, the sacred and obsessive numerology my abuela used to predict lottery numbers or winning trifectas at the dog track. The grocery stores and pawn shops on Flagler Street handed out complimentary wallet-size cards printed with the entire charada, numbers 1 through 100: number 70 was coco, number 89 was melón and number 61 was mango. Mango was Mrs. Pike, the last americana on the block with the best mango tree in the neighborhood. Mamá would coerce her in granting us picking rights—after all, los americanos don’t eat mango, she’d reason. Mango was fruit wrapped in brown paper bags, hidden like ripening secrets in the kitchen oven. Mango was the perfect housewarming gift and a marmalade dessert with thick slices of cream cheese at birthday dinners and Thanksgiving. Mangos, watching like amber cat’s eyes. Mangos, perfectly still in their speckled maroon shells like giant unhatched eggs. Number 48 was cucaracha, number 36 was bodega, but mango was my uncle’s bodega, where everyone spoke only loud Spanish, the precious gold fruit towering in tres-por-un-peso pyramids. Mango was mango shakes made with milk, sugar and a pinch of salt—my grandfather’s treat at the 8th Street market after baseball practice. Number 60 was sol, number 18 was palma, but mango was my father and I under the largest shade tree at the edges of Tamiami Park. Mango was Abuela and I hunched over the counter covered with the Spanish newspaper, devouring the dissected flesh of the fruit slithering like molten gold through our fingers, the nectar cascading from our binging chins, Abuela consumed in her rapture and convinced that I absolutely loved mangos. Those messy mangos. Number 79 was cubano—us, and number 93 was revolución, though I always thought it should be 58, the actual year of the revolution—the reason why, I’m told, we live so obsessively and nostalgically eating number 61’s, mangos, here in number 87, América.

SHAVING

I am not shaving, I’m writing about it.

And I conjure the most elaborate idea—

how my beard is a creation of silent labor

like ocean steam rising to form clouds,

or the bloom of spider webs each morning;

the discrete mystery of how whiskers grow,

like the drink roses take from the vase,

or the fall of fresh rain, becoming

a river, and then rain again, so silently.

I think of all these slow and silent forces

and how quietly my father’s life passed us by.

I think of those mornings, when I am shaving,

and remember him in a masquerade of foam,

then, as if it was his beard I took the blade to,

the memory of him in tiny snips of black whiskers

swirling in the drain—dead pieces of the self

from the face that never taught me how to shave.

His legacy of whiskers that grow like black seeds

sown over my cheek and chin, my own flesh.

I am not shaving, but I will tell you about the mornings

with a full beard and the blade in my hand,

when my eyes don’t recognize themselves

in a mirror echoed with a hundred faces

I have washed and shaved—it is in that split second,

when perhaps the roses drink and the clouds form,

when perhaps the spider spins and rain transforms,

that I most understand the invisibility of life

and the intensity of vanishing, like steam

at the slick edges of the mirror, without a trace.

MOTHER PICKING PRODUCE

She scratches the oranges then smells the peel,

presses an avocado just enough to judge its ripeness,

polishes the McIntoshes searching for bruises.

She selects with hands that have thickened, fingers

that have swollen with history around the white gold

of a wedding ring she now wears as a widow.

Unlike the archived photos of young, slender digits

captive around black and white orange blossoms,

her spotted hands now reaching into the colors.

I see all the folklore of her childhood, the fields,

the fruit she once picked from the very tree,

the wiry roots she pulled out of the very ground.

And now, among the collapsed boxes of yucca,

through crumbling pyramids of golden mangos,

she moves with the same instinct and skill.

This is how she survives death and her son,

on these humble duties that will never change,

on those habits of living which keep a life a life.

She holds up red grapes to ask me what I think,

and what I think is this, a new poem about her—

the grapes look like dusty rubies in her hands,

what I say is this: they look sweet, very sweet.

THE SILVER SANDS

Before the revival of quartz pinks and icy blues

on this neon beach of Art Deco hotels and boutiques,

there were the twilight verandas lined with retirees,

the cataract eyes of Mrs. Stein who would take us

for mezzanine bingo and pancakes at Wolfie’s;

I remember her beautiful orthopedic wobble.

Before sequined starlets popping out of limousine doors

and booze on the breath of every glitter-paved street,

there were the five-year-old summers of flamingo towels,

transistor radios blaring something in Spanish we ignored,

only curious of driftwood, washed-up starfish and jellyfish,

the beauty of broken conchs and our moated sandcastles.

Before the widened sidewalks and pretentious cafés

where I take my cappuccino sprinkled with cinnamon,

our mothers were peacocks in flowered bathing caps

posing for sandy Polaroids like pageant contestants;

there were fifteen-cent Cokes to their ruby lips

and there was nothing their beauty couldn’t conquer.

Before the demolition of the Silver Sands Hotel,

our fathers spun dominos under the thatch-palm gazebos,

drank then insulted the scenery: Nada like our Varadero,

there the sand was powder; the water truly aquamarine.

I remember the poor magic of those voices—

how beautifully they remembered beauty.

324 MENDOZA AVENUE, #6

The last time I drank vodka, I drank it straight, in that chair.

You played Streisand from her famous concert in Central Park,

in ’72, you said, and handed me the album cover which folded out.

I read the gloss and statistics, “largest public concert ever,”

fuzzy aerial photographs of the mob and the aftermath, beer cans,

wine bottles, wrappers, while you sang, eyes closed, to her music.

If it wasn’t Streisand, you played Wonder or El Combo—always music.

The Broadway classics you reenacted from your director’s chair:

West Side Story, Godspell, JC Superstar, with half a can

of root beer and a joint in the same hand, a lit Newport parked

in a garage-sale ashtray, and calla lilies that seemed to last forever

in candlelight umbra; the incense stick in the planter, almost out.

If there wasn’t vodka there was usually dark rum. If not, we’d run out

to the Liquorvenient, talk small talk about clubs & Latin music

to the cashier. I’d flirt with her and get a 10% discount every time,

promising I’d pick her up later, and leave her bouncing in her chair

knowing I wouldn’t be back, not for her, maybe for another six-pack

or bottle if we went dry—about 1:00 am, Enrique tapping empty cans

to a butter-knife salsa-beat and everyone waiting to use the can.

El Flaco bongoing, Maria maracaing, Roberto usually passed out

in the air-conditioned back room—something like the Central Park

album scene—and you, one-two-threeing on clave, controlling the music,

orchestrating the mad dancing and singing from your usual chair,

in your Chinese-red slippers, the Ghetto-Rican in you, easy as ever,

with dubbed tapes, the 45’s, the vinyl jewels you’ve kept forever

at arms’ reach. Nothing seemed to matter, not the spills or the cans,

the late rent, Kenita’s health, the divorce, nor the broken dining chairs;

always a voice at 324, Elton or Puente, pop or Latin, blocking out

the off-key howls as you wrote the soundtrack, the background music

of our lives—merengued worries; sung blues with Holiday in the dark.

Late night, we’d pack into one car to La Palma on la ocho, park

at the to-go window: “seis Cuban sandwiches.” It took forever,

but the food was our kind, the place had a native charm, its own music:

the giant neon palm, the only place to get Materva in ice-cold cans

at that hour; the insomniac waitress, Nilda, her bouffant all puffed-out,

and riff-raff inside the restaurant tequila’d-out and numb in their chairs.

I still stop at La Palma when I can, at a sticky table with three chairs,

I drink espresso but remember the vodka, the music, Streisand singing out

in the middle of the park and our lives, as littered as they may be, forever.

HAVANASIS

In the beginning, before God created Cuba, the earth was chaos, empty of form and without music. The spirit of God stirred over the dark tropical waters and God said, “Let there be music.” And a soft conga began a one-two beat in the background of the chaos.

Then God called up Yemayà and said, “Let the waters under heaven amass together and let dry land appear.” It was done. God called the fertile red earth Cuba and the massed waters the Caribbean. And God saw this was good, tapping his foot to the conga beat.

Then God said, “Let the earth sprout papaya and coco and white coco flesh; malanga roots and mangos in all shades of gold and amber; let there be tabaco and café and sugar for the café; let there be rum; let there be waving plantains and guayabas and everything tropical-like.” God saw this was good, then fashioned palm trees—his pièce de résistance.

Then God said, “Let there be a moon and stars to light the nights over the Club Tropicana, and a sun for the 365 days of the year.” God saw that this was good, he called the night nightlife, the day he called paradise.

Then God said, “Let there be fish and fowl of every kind.” And there was spicy shrimp enchilado, chicken fricasé, cod fish bacalao and fritters. But he wanted something more exciting and said, “Enough. Let there be pork.” And there was pork—deep fried, whole roasted, pork rinds and sausage. He fashioned goats, used their skins for bongos and batús; he made claves and maracas and every kind of percussion instrument known to man.

Then out of a red lump of clay, God made a Taino and set him in a city he called Habana. Then he said, “It is not good that Taino be alone. Let me make him helpmates.” And so God created the mulata to dance guaguancó and son with Taino; the guajiro to cultivate his land and his folklore, Cachita the sorceress to strike the rhythm of his music, and a poet to work the verses of their paradise.

God gave them dominion over all the creatures and musical instruments and said unto them, “Be fruitful and multiply, eat pork, drink rum, make music and dance.” On the seventh day, God rested from the labors of his creation. He smiled upon the celebration and listened to their music.

VARADERO EN ALBA

i. ven

tus olas roncas murmuran entre ellas

las luciérnagas se han cansado

las gaviotas esperan como ansiosas reinas

We gypsy through the island’s north ridge

ripe with villages cradled in cane and palms,

the raw harmony of fireflies circling about

amber faces like dewed fruit in the dawn;

the sun belongs here, it returns like a soldier

loyal to the land, the leaves turn to its victory,

a palomino rustles its mane in blooming light.

I have no other vision of this tapestry.

ii. ven

tus palmas viudas quieren su danzón

y las nubes se mueven inquietas como gitanas,

adivina la magia encerrada del caracol

The morning pallor blurs these lines:

horizon with shore, mountain with road;

the shells conceal their chalky magic,

the dunes’ shadows lengthen and grow;

I too belong here, sun, and my father

who always spoke paradise of the same sand

I now impress barefoot on a shore I’ve known

only as a voice held like water in my hands.

iii. ven

las estrellas parpadeantes tienen sueño

en la arena, he grabado tu nombre,

en la orilla, he clavado mi remo

There are names chiseled in the ivory sand,

striped fish that slip through my fingers

like wet and cool ghosts among the coral,

a warm rising light, a vertigo that lingers;

I wade in the salt and time waves,

facing the losses I must understand,

staked oars crucifixed on the shore.

Why are we nothing without this land?

EL JAGUA RESORT

Cienfuegos Bay encroaches on the city,

its cankerous seawall carves out the shape

of an unlucky horseshoe fastened

with the remains of colonial viviendas

still standing like scoured sandcastles,

conquered faces peering from behind

famished columns, stucco revealing

a cryptic history in decades of chipped

cyan blue and Spanish red layers.

The special buses from Havana

arrive at Cienfuegos every Tuesday.

Smoked in black diesel, they deliver

batches of pale tourists in white linen

to El Jagua, a preserved 1950’s resort,

where Canadians and Italians step out

drunk congas from megaphone instructions—

side-to-side, kick-then-kick, hand-to-hip;

caught in spells of tabaco, dark rum,

brown sugar and the young mulatas

who tempt the married men not like

bitches or feathered whores but like

a sea wind singing through wind chimes.

Scents of dólares and dolores around

the cracked plaster of the pool bar.

Iliana is sixteen with expired papers,

hungry and documented as “uncooperative.”

Tangoed in a crepe of borrowed silk,

she dances with the ricochets of her dark curls,

promotes her canela flesh and crescent lips.

Iliana scatters like cinnamon powder in

the revolving eclipses over the fanned bar;

evaporates like a brush of perfume

into the inelegant lap of a French canadiense

whose elegant name she cannot nasal.

As Alejandro serves Habana Club & Coke—

Cuba Libre—for quarter tips, Iliana decides

on how many bars of laundry soap

or black-market trinkets to charge, hoping

he will want to pay her in cash.

Nightfalls are abrupt at El Jagua, not

the adagio witchcraft of harvest moonrises

but a quick drum slap in tandem with

the iron door slam of oceanview #634—

the tempest of Iliana naked and recanting

her faith in the lamp-light gods of her bedside;

and the opaque gods glowing from within

the strung flesh of gaping snapper mouths;

and the barefoot gods that dine on sugarwater

and sell silver pompoms of stitched fish;

and the capsized mouths of sea gods

bobbing in a poisoned bay without antidote;

and the gods hidden inside the splintered hulls

of moonlit dinghies and withered coconuts;

the gods that pull voices out of the harbor,

the gods that brew the rain and cut the cane,

the green gods that possess the palm trees;

the blaze of all the gods burning here

in this great city of a hundred fires.

FOUND LETTERS FROM 1965: EL AÑO DE LA AGRICULTURA

I. Received by my mother from her sister,

December 1, 1965, Cienfuegos, Cuba

“A brief letter which perhaps may be the last, now that we have each chosen different paths. I understand you are definitely leaving.”

The glorious seventh year of la Revolución,

unanimously declared the year of AGRICULTURA,

the State decrees the harvests must double.

Whichever generous goddess may be,

el espíritu—the one deity in the rock

of this island who chose the guajiro,

and listens to machete prayers, listened:

out of red earth rose the canes, rose the corn;

thousands of coffee-bean eyes—the mountains saw,

the valleys yawned mouthfuls of mangos.

“Why, what else do you need, food? Not even. You have arroz and frijoles criollos; true, they were expensive, but …”

tons of sweetening azúcar

tons of enlivening café

tons of tempting mangos—

exports for the foreign palate,

while they let you eat arróz y frijoles

“I never thought you would make such a decision, since you have never been endangered by la Revolución.”

The same glorious year, the visas arrive

with the brand of a contra-revolucionaria.

Like the harvest, now you begin to double

into one who leaves, and one who remains.

The hands that want to leave are tired

of soaking beans, stealing sugar from the mill,

boiling vats of rice pudding for tired mouths

forced to greet friends with “hola compañero,”

forced to swallow the vinegar of citizen patrols.

The ears leave the whispers and speeches,

the hammer of machine guns and promises.

The eyes that want to close and run, sleep open,

against the required glossy of El Comandante,

his neo-classical hand lifted above you.

Bendito Hermes, Mercurio, Eleguá—

all gods of los caminos—guide you,

the hands, the ears, the eyes that leave.

“and now you so easily leave all your possessions to your enemy—el Gobierno.”

The State allows one suitcase, take anything except:

your quinces pin, diamond chips set in plated gold—

PROPERTY OF THE STATE

the wedding rings and Catholic saint charms,

an azabache pendant to protect against evil spirits—

PROPIEDAD DEL ESTADO

your pesos cubanos and your child’s toys, gracias—

DONATIONS TO THE STATE

nudes of your son on the dresser splashing violet water,

you, posed coyly in chin-high pants mated against a palm,

black and white images of your husband in uniform peeling

from the black pages of construction paper photo albums—

MEMORIES OF THE STATE

But you search for a way to smuggle the perfume—

one part smoke of sugarcane cuttings smoldering,

two parts spray of citrus split open with incisive fingers,

one part rainfall evaporating and cane juice boiling;

three parts the rum décimas of guajiro guitars

four parts fields of mild winter skies seeded with stars—

an eau de toilette for pulses at the wrists and temples

on foreign days when you will have no language,

only the intimacy of memory’s scents.

“in a strange country, you may have all you need … at the price of being separated from your family which you know you will never see again.”

Primo Felipe, Tía Delia, Claudia Pérez your neighbor,

your sisters: Gloria, Tania, Alina; Rodríguez the baker;

Tío José, your brother Sergio, and your Mamá—

FAMILY OF THE STATE

II. My mother’s reply to her sister,

December 10, 1965, Cienfuegos, Cuba

“I have chosen no path, I am simply fulfilling the destiny my life affords me.”

At the end of the glorious año you take

the road curling away from your town,

the sugarcane fields transform into a farewell of mirrors

reflecting all the images you will never see again:

the mill clock, the reservoir, raw sugar in your hands,

your clouds, your moon, moving over your land

of polished fruits ripening on the branch,

of palm tree rustle and shadows on the ground

of coconuts hatching in a splash of splinters.

You remember you mother’s eye gestures,

powdering your cheeks, penciling your eyebrows;

your father at a bowl of hot corn meal,

eating in the dignity and good silence of your home.

“The ideas and concepts which bind family should reign above all other concepts, religious or political.”

You reach Havana for the last time,

the mirrors recede—el fín of your life’s reel,

a sea of still tarmac spread before you,

and a set of stairs leading into the airplane’s belly.

Everything coalesces to a point, the projection

of all the gods of la Revolución, all the harvests,

all the years add up to the moment you cross

the platform and look back one last time

to face the retreating template of the island,

and scribble relatives’ names, birth dates,

addresses, your favorite poems and flowers—

convinced that you will forget these things.

The propeller blades hum suicidally, you pause

to scan lines of the letter you’ve written,

the same letter I will find thirty years later,

for lies:

“At no time have political concepts influenced my decision to leave my country …”

for fears:

“In a strange country the future is unknowable … will I lose those I leave behind… .”

for courage:

“I hurt at the thought of separating from all of you and Mamá, but I have chosen a husband, I have united my life, together, our destiny leads us to another country …”

repeat it:

“Together, our destiny leads us to another country. I am not the first nor the last woman to do such a thing.”

EL CUCUBANO

Lucía enjoyed the mystery, the emerald light

captive in the bright belly of los cucubanos

she wore clipped to her home-sewn dress

parading like a peacock at the town socials

around the reservoir and sugar mill clock.

All the señoritas flashed their cucubanos—

live pendants adorning breasts and hearts

to compete with the swirl of guajiro stars

for the attention of prime young caballeros

in linen guayaberas and straw hats;

the clock chiming every hour of courting,

denying every second of lustful thought

in the smolders of raped sugarcane fields.

Lucía knew nothing of the nerve stimulations,

the reactions that produced the bound light

of balanced chemicals in glowing abdomens.

What she knew was how the male cucubanos

tracked females by following their flashes;

how to trap them in Mamá’s glass jars

in the mating hours of the early evening before

the moon rises strong and snuffs their glow;

how to pinch them so they cling to the dress,

near the heart, calling attention to the breasts,

the green fire silhouetting the spell of nipples.

Lucía never questioned the cool light nor Alberto

when he took her, removed her cucubano,

said she wouldn’t be needing fireflies anymore

now that she’d belong to him and his promises.

Lucía knows how el cucubano swirled away

from Alberto’s fingers into infinite green spirals

through palm trees and mountains, how soon after

the harvest Alberto also disappeared.

Lucía stares at stars she swears are green,

traps cucubanos between her cupped hands,

jade oozing between the seams of her fingers,

the phenomenon of luminescence in her palms—

light without heat, love without love.

DÉCIMA GUAJIRA

I

Veo la tierra amada

los pasos de mis padres

en estos ojos muertos

baila y canta ahora

el azúcar, la décima.

The guajiro arias of la décima drift

in the lifted dust of brackish shadows

over dancing sugarcane that follows

the meter, the rhyme, the ten-line craft

of my grandfather’s melancholy gift.

II

Bajo tu manta de polvo

aquí encuentro y guardo

mi alma tallada en mármol

como un talismán de caracol

que guardo en la mano.

It is this mantle of dust that keeps

the marble music, the drifting sand

of footprints blown over this loved land;

the talismans in the hands of my sleep

that sing so slow and so very deep.

PALMITA MÍA

Así eres:

la palma libre

de mi reposo,

la lluvia inquieta

de tus ramas

el río que reúno

en mis manos

y llevo a este labio

seco e inútil,

tú, mi sed y mi agua

mi sombra tranquila.

Así eres:

isla larga y espigada

contigo me estiro,

mi espalda se rompe

contra tus costas,

eres el exilio

de mi exilio,

eres la montaña roja,

el valle cálido

es mi boca abierta

esperando tu cosecha.

Así eres:

la cuna verde

el pulso

disuelto en la mano,

un corazón de colibrí

y el centinela de estrellas,

atenta fe

entre palmas rezando

un credo a la brisa:

vino de coco, pan de arena

palmita mía.

PALMITA MÍA

You are this:

the free palm

of my rest,

the impatient rain

from your fronds

a river I collect

in my open hands

and bring to my dry

useless lip,

you, my thirst, my water

my tranquil shade.

You are this:

the drawn island lean

I stretch with you,

my back breaks

against your coast,

you are the exile

of my exile

you are the red mountain,

the temperate valley

is my mouth open

waiting for your harvest

You are this:

the green crib

the pulse

loose in open hand,

a hummingbird heart

and the sentinel of still stars,

attentive faith

among the praying palms,

a creed of breezes:

coconut wine, loaves of sand,

palmita mía.

FROM

Directions to the Beach of the Dead

TIME AS ART IN THE ETERNAL CITY

The first shadows appear like cells slowly dividing

from every tree and lamppost while my first words

divide from me onto my journal, trying to capture

how dawn light melts over the city’s blank windows

and its ancient doors, opened a thousand-thousand

mornings to the sun with questions, and closed

on the moon’s face without answers. All the days

that have fallen through these courtyards and alleys,

the lives that have worn these cobblestones gray,

all the gray doves that have been cast into flight

by how many church bells? After all the centuries

that have been tolled, hour by hour, and disappeared

above these domes, can it matter that I’m here now:

watching the bougainvillea blaze over the terraces,

counting on the morning to dive into the fountains,

flicker over coins, light the water up with my wishes?

Today, a temple will lose yet another stone that will

continue being a stone, and the Colosseum will move

again through its own shadow. Today, the murdered

and murderers will be remembered and forgotten,

and an empire pardoned for the sake of its beauty

in this city where time is an art. Today, a tourist

once again sits at a café with an espresso, a pen,

waiting to enter the Pantheon, waiting to gaze up

into its oculus, opening like a moonful of sunlight

in its dome, ready to stand in that beam of light,

to feel something radiant, and write it down.

A POET IN VENICE

Memory’s images, once they are fixed

in words, are erased, Polo said.

Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice

all at once, if I speak of it.

—ITALO CALVINO, Invisible Cities

Unlike others, he arrives feeling the train whistling

through him, aware of every step on the platform

and the clatter of trailing his suitcase and his lust

for beauty across the station’s rusting shadows

to the laps of water, which he imagines as kisses.

He strolls across footbridges, feels the pageantry

of the cherubs and marble scrolls under his feet.

Above him, the laundry lines turn into rainbows

strung between bare windows laced with violets,

he compares their petals to tears of Murano glass.

On postcards he begins his poems: Everything

speaks to me here, even the brass eyes of the lions

on the door knockers. In my window, the palazzi

rise like cliffs, enduring the tug of the sea’s memory,

the pull of the moon. Today at the Ducale I will …

At the Ducale he imagines himself as a prisoner

crossing the Bridge of Sighs into the dungeons,

carving his name in a wall before dying, believes

this is just as beautiful as the rows of market fruit,

the blood plums he takes pictures of, and devours.

He tastes the Adriatic, craves his warm loneliness

and abandons the map he’s carried like a prayer

book, loses himself among the names of saints

until every street ends with his reflection running

into the watercolors of the city over the canals.

Lost in a campo, sitting on a granite bench under

the iron swirls of gas lamps and glow of pink glass

blushing the night, he notices the flames flicker

with stray giggles, whispers carried on the wind.

He follows the ricochet of footsteps with his ears,

leading him to the groan of empty gondola hulls,

to the creak of shutters, imagines them closing

like eyelids, and Venice a lover he can’t possess

asleep at his side dreaming without him, his eyes

wading alone through the wide-open darkness.

WE’RE NOT GOING TO MALTA …

because the winds are too strong, our Captain announces, his voice like an oracle coming through the loudspeakers of every lounge and hall, as if the ship itself were speaking. We’re not going to Malta—an enchanting island country fifty miles from Sicily, according to the brochure of the tour we’re not taking. But what if we did go to Malta? What if, as we are escorted on foot through the walled “Silent City” of Mdina, the walls begin speaking to me; and after we stop a few minutes to admire the impressive architecture, I feel Malta could be the place for me. What if, as we stroll the bastions to admire the panoramic harbor and stunning countryside, I dream of buying a little Maltese farm, raising Maltese horses in the green Maltese hills. What if, after we see the cathedral in Mosta saved by a miracle, I believe that Malta itself is a miracle; and before I’m transported back to the pier with a complimentary beverage, I’m struck with Malta fever, discover I am very Maltese indeed, and decide I must return to Malta, learn to speak Maltese with an English (or Spanish) accent, work as a Maltese professor of English at the University of Malta, and teach a course on The Maltese Falcon. Or, what if when we stop at a factory to shop for famous Malteseware, I discover that making Maltese crosses is my true passion. Yes, I’d get a Maltese cat and a Maltese dog, make Maltese friends, drink Malted milk, join the Knights of Malta, and be happy for the rest of my Maltesian life. But we’re not going to Malta. Malta is drifting past us, or we are drifting past it—an amorphous hump of green and brown bobbing in the portholes with the horizon as the ship heaves over whitecaps wisping into rainbows for a moment, then dissolving back into the sea.

SOMEWHERE TO PARIS

The sole cause of a man’s unhappiness is that

he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.

—PASCAL, Pensées

The vias of Italy turn to memory with each turn

and clack of the train’s wheels, with every stitch

of track we leave behind, the duomos return again

to my imagination, already imagining Paris—

a fantasy of lights and marble that may end

when the train stops at Gare de l’Est and I step

into the daylight. In this space between cities,

between the dreamed and the dreaming, there is

no map—no legend, no ancient street names

or arrows to follow, no red dot assuring me:

you are here—and no place else. If I don’t know

where I am, then I am only these heartbeats,

my breaths, the mountains rising and falling

like a wave scrolling across the train’s window.

I am alone with the moon on its path, staring

like a blank page, shear and white as the snow

on the peaks echoing back its light. I am this

solitude, never more beautiful, the arc of space

I travel through for a few hours, touching

nothing and keeping nothing, with nothing

to deny the night, the dark pines pointing

to the stars, this life, always moving and still.

TORSOS AT THE LOUVRE

after Rilke

These are your clavicles balancing what’s left

of your shoulders, jutting into the ghostly air

like the persistent nubs of broken-off wings.

This is the face of your chest facing the world,

seeing and speaking for you now, in a language

of forms that have nothing to do with words.

This is your back: accurate, precise, and loyal,

refusing to let its posture go, holding you up

in place, as if you were still completely whole.

These marble veins are your veins flowing

from a heart of stone, the last part that will

crumble, once every part of you has failed

you, unarmed warrior, blind hunter, or lover

without hands or lips—this is you, after you

and all you were meant to be, life beyond

a face, name, or history—no longer struggling

to change what we cannot change, almost free

of the greed of the mind and deeds of the body.

AFTER BARCELONA, IN BARCELONA

After hearing nothing through seven centuries

rising from candles into sooty eyes of santos

fixed in the weeping stone of cathedral walls,

after my obsession over the wrinkled hands

of gray couples walking in ascots and pearls

up Passeig Gracia every night into oblivion,

after taking down three days of notes, I take

el metro down to La Arena on la Gran Via,

don’t ask if it’s gay or straight at the door,

just pay my Euros, get stamped, don’t care

if it’s techno or trance, or that it’s teen night

and I’m thirty-four. I bracket my elbows back

on the bar, not dancing, just watching, thinking

if there’s a poem in this city, it’s not hanging

in the galleries of Miró’s colors, but right here

in the ecstasy of these kids dancing in the rain

of red, green, and blue lights over their tattoos.

Not in the rows of Picasso portraits, but here:

these post-modern faces with pierced eyebrows

and bodies grooving in three dimensions at once,

their egos hanging at the end of their cigarettes,

their bell-bottoms dragging the floor in defiance

of their youth that will outlive me, and this city

that will outlive us both. After turning every alley

into a sentence, after hunting through the market

for a kilo of similes, after stirring metaphors over

espressos, waiting for the city to speak, tonight

I stand in a poem that isn’t mine, but theirs.

DIRECTIONS TO THE BEACH OF THE DEAD

Go to Europe, go to Spain, in Barcelona, walk

under centuries hanging from the iron lamps

of the Gothic Quarter. Touch the mossy walls

down a Venetian-width street until you reach

La Rambla, move with the drove to the Mercat,

but don’t touch the plums stacked in pyramids

nor the apples layered like red bricks, don’t stare

at the eyes of lamb heads on ice. Buy a cheap map

vanish into Plaça Catalunya and study the anatomy

of the subway lines flowing under the city’s skin.

Take the red one to Sants, count out three Euros

in your palm, buy a RENFE ticket south and wait.

Get on. Ride past the fringe of factories, past

the dusky windows, the laundry on the balconies

of the Catalans who make and serve the chorizos,

paellas, and pimientos—all the tapas you’ve tasted.

At km-per-hour, listen to piped-in Ravel and Bach

above the clack of tracks through tunnels of rock.

You’ll emerge riding the edge of cliffs cantilevered

over the Mediterranean. Pull out your map, follow

the towns’ names lettered straight out into the sea

like their piers in Catalán: Castelldefels, Gavá, Prat de

Llobregat where Dalí pictured a Madonna protecting

the port, blessing the trade of goods, watching evil.

Minutes before Sitges, recite Lorca who lived there:

verde que te quiero verde / verde que te quiero verde / verde …

though it’s not very green at all, you’ll ask yourself:

Should I live here? Could I live here? Don’t answer—

just get off at Sitges, trickle south from the station

through the capillary of boutique streets, tempting

you with nothing you need. Go on: buy perfumes,

silks, silver rings, sandals you’ll wear to walk up

to the city’s catedral like a fort against the beach.

Wait for the bells and gulls, light a candle, then go—

follow the promenade, past El Hotel Terramar,

past empty stone benches like old men facing

the sea, thinking of places they may never see.

After the promenade, listen for the steel rails

vibrating like a tuning fork still humming from

the pass of the last train. Walk on the tracks until

you reach a small mountain. Smell the names

of flowers you’ve never known, take pictures

against the wind as you climb up, then down into

a crescent-shaped cove. Take your sandals off,

knead your soles over moon-white stones until

you can’t walk anymore, take off your clothes,

lie down between the sun and earth, fall asleep—

past Sitges and Barcelona, past Europe, yourself.

Let the breeze wake you, feel the waves push, pull

at your feet, then take a stone, weigh it in your hand,

bring it to your lips—throw it in, throw another and

another, try to fill the sea with stones, and you will

understand why, la Platjes del Mort, la Playa del Muerto,

the beach where you stand, is named for the dead.

WINTER OF THE VOLCANOES: GUATEMALA

Because rain clouds shade the valley all summer,

they call this their winter, and I’m here, witness

to the rains of August, surrounded by volcanoes.

Volcanoes everywhere, like cathedrals at the end

of every stretch of cobblestone I wobble through.

Volcanoes, triangulating the view in every window,

reading over my shoulders on the terrace at night,

funneling stars between their peaks, threatening

to grumble and leave la Antigua to rise a third time

out of ruin. Volcanoes, keeping watch like a council

of four unforgiving gods: Acatenango, Fuego, Agua,

and Pacaya—the one I climbed, step by step through

rows of corn groomed like manes by Mayan hands,

through the quilt work of terrace farmers’ patches,

through clouds veiling through pinewood forests,

until I walked in pumice fields, barren as the moon,

if the moon were black, spelled out my name with

freshly minted stones I laid down to claim: I was here

on this newly kilned rock that in a few eons will be

the soil of the valley, the earth I savor in my coffee,

the dust settling over windowsills and counter tops.

I scaled the peak, reached the crater’s lip, stood silent

over the cauldron of molten, blood-orange petals,

the pearlescent fire, an open wound weeping smoke,

terrified I might fall, terrified that, for a moment,

I’d let myself be seduced by the pure, living heart

of the raw earth, saying: here, let me take you back.

BARGAINING WITH A GODDESS

(AT THE CHICHI MARKET, GUATEMALA)

after Rigoberta Menchú

The diversity of materials, techniques, and designs

of these Guatemalan products enables the nation’s

artisans to satisfy the most discerning tastes.

—VISITE GUATEMALA 2001

Jade rosaries and letter openers, little jaguars on key rings, paperback copies of the ancient Popol Vuh, shelves lined with plastic temples, wooden saints, rows of black Christs with hand-painted eyes looking toward heaven, and a woman the color of a dry rose, fanning her skirt, showing me a frenzy of hummingbirds and mountain flowers embroidered in colors truer than my life. Algo para your wife? she asks, leading me to her table where she riffles through her pile of skirts like a flipbook of flora and fauna. But I’m not married. O, then algo for your casa she orders, shuffling through her placemats, stacking them like tortillas, insisting I examine the threads of her exquisite stitching—Mira, mira—only 20 quetzales for you. I pay what she asks, knowing there is more to her, more than I can know or bargain for: silver bangles and crucifixes, wooden saints staring into the air, streams of copal incense drifting into faces, bags of fresh rose petals laid out like candy, and hollow piñatas swaying in the shadows of the market. But how much for the reds, greens, and yellows of her valley, for her ancient rows of corn, for her Christian sins, her bleeding knees and promesas? How much for her gods that commanded her flesh out of corn, for her thoughts in Quiché, her forgotten astrology and eons of history? How much for her cloud forests, her rain, for her ruins and her village, for her candlelit home and raw wool blankets? How much for the magic of her needles blossoming flowers somewhere inside the folds of these mountains no one can own, under a breadth of priceless stars even my imagination cannot buy?

RETURN FROM EL CERRADO

for V.C.L.

Two days ago, I was below the equator and you

were driving, holding the wheel with one hand, and

my hand with the other. It was summer on the road,

iron-red dust lifting like a ghost, and I was hoping

this: that I belonged wherever I was going with you,

north into the Amazon or south toward São Paulo—

I couldn’t tell, it was all green to me, it was all acres

of sky-filled lakes, all waterfalls and streams tearing

through the mountains, it was all mountains, it was

about you and me and the possibility, the odds of

disappearing into you, into your country, into one

of its villages with gables and bell towers peeking

through the landscape. I’d get used to the blooms

bursting through October, frost glazing over July,

you’d teach me Portuguese, I’d teach you Spanish:

mão is mano, pan is pão, amanhã is mañana, but today

I’m at the woodgrain of my desk again with nothing

changed: the same bouquet of pen-n-pencil stems,

the furniture unmoved, the same color on the walls,

the same books on sagging shelves, and winter here,

a season away from you, a continent against me.

SILENT FAMILY CLIPS

The projector whirls like a tiny, black time machine

on the coffee table, a cone of light shoots the dark,

opens a hole in the living room wall like a portal

into lives I never knew, years I don’t remember living.

1970 is about ten seconds long featuring a version

of my brother I never loved, content with hitting

a ball against the graffiti on a city wall, twenty years

before we’d learn to be brothers | the wall breaks

to Miami Beach waves dissolving at my abuela’s feet,

sauntering down the shore with beauty pageant steps,

her bathing cap flowers fresh as the Art Deco facades

shimmering behind her | fading away to my abuelo

standing on the boardwalk at orthodox attention,

his hair once as black as the black of his oxfords,

the circles from his tabaco like tree rings dating him

and filling the frame with smoke | the smoke clears

to a mist floating above Niagara Falls, the deluge

a backdrop to a woman who must be my mother,

donning a magenta blouse scribbled with paisleys,

a string of plastic teal beads like a candy necklace

competing against the golden mums and the clock

in a knot garden where she’s never been a widow

standing next to Papá | he speaks into the camera,

but the film is silent, cloud shadows darken over

his dark lips, a voice I can’t hear forever | forever

there is a room strung with banners and balloons,

a birthday cake circled by faces like stained glass

lit by dim candlelight, faces not yet loved or lost

by a boy who is me | I watch myself close my eyes,

take a breath, make a wish I will never remember.

PAPÁ‘S BRIDGE

Morning, driving west again, away from the sun

rising in the slit of the rearview mirror, as I climb

on slabs of concrete and steel bent into a bridge

arcing with all its parabolic y-squared splendor.

I rise to meet the shimmering faces of buildings

above treetops meshed into a calico of greens,

forgetting the river below runs, insists on running

and scouring the earth, moving it grain by grain.

And for a few inclined seconds every morning

I am twelve years old with my father standing

at the tenth-floor window of his hospital room,

gazing at this same bridge like a mammoth bone

aching with the gravity of its own dense weight.

The glass dosed by a tepid light reviving the city

as I watched and read his sleeping, wondering

if he could even dream in such dreamless white:

Was he falling? Was he flying? Who was he, who

was I underneath his eyes, flitting like the birds

across the rooftops and early stars wasting away,

the rush-hour cars pushing through the avenues

like the tiny blood cells through his vein, the I.V.

spiraling down like a string of clear licorice feeding

his forearm, bruised pearl and lavender, colors

of the morning haze and the pills on his tongue.

The stitches healed, while the room kept sterile

with the usual silence between us. For three days

I served him water or juice in wilting paper cups,

flipped through muted soap operas and game shows,

and filled out the menu cards stamped Bland Diet.

For three nights I wedged flat and strange pillows

around his bed, his body shaped like a fallen S

and mortared in place by layers of stiff percale.

When he was ordered to walk, I took his hand,

together we stepped to the window and he spoke

—You’ll know how to build bridges like that someday—

today, I cross this city, this bridge, still spanning

the silent distance between us with the memory

of a father and son holding hands, secretly in love.

WHAT‘S LOVE GOT TO DO?

All summer Papá holds a cigarette out the window of his laser-green Buick, points his lips left to blow the smoke into the mirage of exhaust between rush hour cars. All summer he listens to La Cubanisima on AM radio exploding with accounts of how Castro took everything we had, how we’d get it back someday. All summer he wears polyester ties and his over-polished loafers. All summer I float my arm like a wing out the window as we glide down Coral Way, past storefronts and memories: the 7-11 stops for Blow-Pops and Slurpees, the square pizzas at Frankie’s, the birthday dinners at Canton Rose. All summer I want to ask if he remembers what I remember, but I don’t, so he just drives, all summer, keeping a safe distance in the right lane, from our Miami suburb to my uncle’s bodega, where all summer I price and rotate, mop and bag and save for my own car. All summer I don’t want to be me. I don’t want to be my father either, eleven years in his windowless office adding and subtracting, wishing and forgetting he could be more. All summer he picks me up at 6:00 and we drive back on the same road, the same mix of cigarettes and Piña Colada air freshener, the same visors eclipsing our faces, the same silence. All summer I wait for him to say something—anything, like: I hate grapefruit juice, or I can’t stand the Navarros, or I’ve cheated on your mother, or I hate this life. What he does say is: I love Tina Turner, every time I took control of the radio and tuned in to her #1 hit on FM. All summer he sings along in his thick Cuban accent (waus love gotta do / gotta do wis it) and whistles through the words he didn’t know. Then he smiles saying something about Mamá and him in the 60’s dancing to Ike and Tina in Cuba, and picks up the refrain again (waus love but a secon’ hand emoshun). All summer, embarrasses me with his singing, that summer, before his throat swells, before his weekly visits to Dr. Morad, before the Mitomycin and Hail Marys fail, before I never hear him sing again. That summer, when all I manage to mutter back at him is: Yeah, I love Tina, too.

VISITING METAPHORS AT SOUTH POINT

Light has begun to taper toward the sun, the day

drawn out of the sky, hooded over the pier planks

reaching into the horizon like a wooden keyboard

veneered with dead fish scales glinting in silver leaf.

I stand like the piles, tending my shadow, which is

twice as long as it was twenty-five years ago when

I stood here with no metaphors for these images

of light that was just light, your face only itself—

a wordless profile beside me, but enough for a son:

to have his father’s hand curled around his finger,

to creak down the pier together, not looking for

philosophy in the eyes of fishermen gutting fish,

nor trying to read the smears of blood like graffiti.

Enough to be just a boy on a Saturday, belonging

to my father, to reach the end of the pier, meet

the simple thrill of wanting to jump in the water,

before it became the sea talking back in similes,

before silence itself became a figure of speech for you.

Enough to brave the jetty with you holding me

as I leaned over jagged rocks, watching jellyfish

fade in-and-out of the water’s lens, years before

I would compare their weak and deliberate pulses

to your final breaths, their vanishing to your death.

TRANSLATION FOR MAMÁ

What I’ve written for you, I have always written

in English, my language of silent vowel endings

never translated into your language of silent h’s.

Lo que he escrito para ti, siempre lo he escrito

en inglés, en mi lengua llena de vocales mudas

nunca traducidas a tu idioma de haches mudas.

I’ve transcribed all your old letters into poems

that reconcile your exile from Cuba, but always

in English. I’ve given you back the guajiro roads

you left behind, stretched them into sentences

punctuated with palms, but only in English.

He transcrito todas tus cartas viejas en poemas

que reconcilian tu exilio de Cuba, pero siempre

en inglés. Te he devuelto los caminos guajiros

que dejaste atrás, transformados en oraciones

puntuadas por palmas, pero solamente en inglés.

I have recreated the pueblecito you had to forget,

forced your green mountains up again, grown

valleys of sugarcane, stars for you in English.

He reconstruido el pueblecito que tuviste que olvidar,

he levantado de nuevo tus montañas verdes, cultivado

la caña, las estrellas de tus valles, para ti, en inglés.

In English I have told you how I love you cutting

gladiolas, crushing ajo, setting cups of dulce de leche

on the counter to cool, or hanging up the laundry

at night under our suburban moon. In English,

En inglés te he dicho cómo te amo cuando cortas

gladiolas, machacas ajo, enfrías tacitas de dulce de leche

encima del mostrador, o cuando tiendes la ropa

de noche bajo nuestra luna suburbana. En inglés

I have imagined you surviving by transforming

yards of taffeta into dresses you never wear,

keeping Papá’s photo hinged in your mirror,

and leaving the porch light on, all night long.

He imaginado cómo sobrevives transformando

yardas de tafetán en vestidos que nunca estrenas,

la foto de Papá que guardas en el espejo de tu cómoda,

la luz del portal que dejas encendida, toda la noche.

Te he captado en inglés en la mesa de la cocina

esperando que cuele el café, que hierva la leche

y que tu vida se acostumbre a tu vida. En inglés

has aprendido a adorar tus pérdidas igual que yo.

I have captured you in English at the kitchen table

waiting for the café to brew, the milk to froth,

and your life to adjust to your life. In English

you’ve learned to adore your losses the way I do.

THE PERFECT CITY CODE

for M.C.

1(a)
Streets shall be designed Euro–Style with 300-ft right-of-ways, benches, and flowered traffic circles, to provide a distinct sense of beauty, regardless of cost.

1(b)
There shall be a canopy of trees; these shall be your favorite: Giant Royal Palms, 25-ft high, whereas their fronds shall meet in cathedral-like arches with a continuous breeze that shall slip in our sleeves and flutter against our bodies so as to produce angel-like sensations of eternity.

1(c)
There shall be bushes; these shall also be your favorite: Tea Roses @ 2-ft o.c. to provide enough blooms for casual picking; whereas said blooms shall spy on us from crystal glasses set next to the stove, over coffee-table books, or in front of mirrors.

2(a)
Sidewalks shall be crack-proof and 15-ft wide for continuous, side-by-side conversations; painted either a) Sunflower Brown, b) Mango Blush, or c) Rosemont Henna; whereas such colors shall evoke, respectively: the color of your eyelashes, of your palms, the shadows on your skin.

3(a)
There shall be an average of one (1) Parisian–style café per city block, where I shall meet your eyes, dark as espresso, above the rim of your demitasse, and hold your hand like a music box underneath the table; where we shall exercise all those romantic, cliché gestures we were always too smart for.

3(b)
There shall also be one (1) open-air market per city block to facilitate the purchase of tulips, raspberries, white chocolate baci, and other gourmet items to lavish our lives; whereas every night I shall watch you through a glass of brandy as you dice fresh cilantro and dill, disappearing into the scent steaming around you.

4(a)
Utility poles or structures that obstruct our view shall not be permitted. At all times we shall have one of the following vistas: birds messaging across the sky, a profile of mountains asleep on their backs, or a needlepoint of stars.

5(a)
There shall be an Arts District and we shall float through gallery rooms on Saturday afternoons perplexed by the pain or conflict we can’t feel in a line or a splatter of color; works that glorify or romanticize tragedy shall not be allowed.

5(b)
There shall also be a Historic District to provide residents with a distinct sense of another time. We shall live there, in a loft with oak floors, a rose-marble mantle where our photos will gather; our years together will compete with the age of the brick walls and cobblestones below our vine-threaded balcony.

(*)
Without exception, there shall be a central square with a water fountain where we shall sit every evening by the pageantry of cherubs; where we shall listen to the trickle of their coral mouths; where I shall trust the unspoken; where you shall never again tell me there’s nothing here for you, nothing to keep you, nothing to change your mind.

WHEN I WAS A LITTLE CUBAN BOY

O José can you see … that’s how I sang it, when I was

a cubanito in Miami, and América was some country

in the glossy pages of my history book, someplace

way north, everyone white, cold, perfect. This Land

Is My Land, so why didn’t I live there, in a brick house

with a fireplace, a chimney with curlicues of smoke.

I wanted to wear breeches and stockings to my chins,

those black pilgrim shoes with shiny gold buckles.

I wanted to eat yams with the Indians, shake hands

with los negros, and dash through snow I’d never seen

in a one-horse hope-n-say? I wanted to speak in British,

say really smart stuff like fours core and seven years ago

or one country under God, in the visible. I wanted to see

that land with no palm trees, only the strange sounds

of flowers like petunias, peonies, impatiens, waiting

to walk through a door someday, somewhere in God

Bless America, and say, Lucy, I’m home, honey. I’m home.

LOOKING FOR BLACKBIRDS, HARTFORD

Your postcard from Varadero Beach is on my dresser at home,

where the surf of it rolls day and night making mild Cuban sounds.

—WALLACE STEVENS in a letter to José Rodriguez Feo

8/16

Ladies in charcoal and pink Chanel suits

sip hot chai from glass mugs at Michael’s.

They mind the afternoon with eyes fixed

on the side of their faces, like blackbirds.

10/14

The rose-thatched gazebo at Elizabeth Park

has bared itself into a cloud of thorny vines

where even blackbirds do not perch.

11/1

Along a row of Perfect-Six townhomes,

a woman matted by a field of red brick

caws out from a third story window like

a blackbird wanting other blackbirds.

12/19

Near the end of fall the black leaves

look like feathers strewn over lawns.

12/21

After the first snowfall nothing remains

black, not even the night. Nothing breaks

the white reverence, not even a blackbird.

1/5

The reservoir has hardened into a bed of ice

expanding, groaning. It’s the only sound I hear

complaining of winter through the mountain.

1/28

Airplanes pass, their shadows like blackbirds

landing on the snowy fields before the runway.

2/3

The buildings downtown stand like chess pieces

in a stalemate against the frozen riverfront

that will not break until a blackbird flies.

2/24

The Portuguese men in heavy black coats

gather like blackbirds at La Estrella heckling

over Old World days and the World Cup.

3/18

All the bakery cases along Franklin Avenue

in Little Italy, glitter with sprinkled cannoli,

anise candies, and iced cookies. But no pies.

4/2

At the bus stop on Park and Main, I catch

hummingbirds hovering in the rainforest eyes

of puertorriqueños. Where are my pájaros negros?

4/13

On the telephone lines dripping with snow

in my window, there ought to be blackbirds,

they ought to be slitting the sky wide open.

HOW CAN YOU LOVE NEW YORK?

Do you buy white chrysanthemums and tangelos

at your favorite Korean corner every Thursday,

leave them in an alley you’ve ignored too long

and say: surprise my little apple pie, I love you?

Or cab it to Chinatown on a Saturday morning

and ask the woman with marquise-shaped eyes

behind the Pearl River counter adding your bill

in Cantonese, to come spend the night with you?

Do you kiss the Chelsea boys on the lips, grab

their bulging Diesel jeans and say goddamn it,

I love this town. Is New York a gorgeous man,

or a stunning woman you take uptown to dinner

and compliment the way her long, silky black

avenues fall across her streets? After how many

brie and San Pellegrino picnics in Central Park,

and shows at the MOMA, do you decide it’s love,

but it’s just not going to work, without therapy?

How many times will you have to raise your eyes

from garbage, flyers, and gum blotches to the sky

scrapers, and scream, I forgive you NY, NY for

cussing at me and shoving me, for trying to take

over my life, for not listening or calling me back?

How many nights will you spend thinking it over

with the rain sheer as the vodka in your martini,

looking out a bar window at the mélange of lights

floating over the wet pavement with possibilities?

What makes you believe this is it, this is the one

you can lose yourself to forever and never want

to leave? How do you know the city isn’t lying?

NO MORE THAN THIS, PROVINCETOWN

Today, home is a cottage with morning

in the yawn of an open window. I watch

the crescent moon, like a wind-blown sail,

vanish. Blue slowly fills the sky and light

regains the trust of wildflowers blooming

with fresh spiderwebs spun stem to stem.

The room rises with the toasting of bread,

a stick of butter puddling in a dish, a knife

at rest, burgundy apples ready to be halved,

a pint of blueberries bleeding on the counter,

and little more than this. A nail in the wall

with a pair of disembodied jeans, a red jersey,

and shoes embossed by the bones of my feet

and years of walking. I sit down to breakfast

over the nicks of a pinewood table and I am,

for a moment, not afraid of being no more

than what I hear and see, no more than this:

the echo of bird songs filling an empty vase,

the shadow of a sparrow moving through

the shadow of a tree, disturbing nothing.

CROSSING BOSTON HARBOR

The horn blares—once—twice—sounding like

iron, a dull and heavy slap across the wind’s face.

And if the wind could have a face, it would resemble

these strangers, blank as paper dolls propped up

against the railing as the propeller torque vibrates

through the vessel, slowly peeling the hull away

from the barnacled dock, the limp ropes coiled

like dry roses on the metal deck, the anchor up

like a rusty bow hung on the bow, and we move

all together, at the same speed, to the same point.

The ferry’s chine makes an incision across the bay,

its churned waters bleed a wake of lustrous blue

behind us as we head west, scanning the coastline

nested with gables and fringed with flocked sails,

their peaks waning out of sight into memory, until

there’s nothing left to measure our distance against.

So much of my life spent like this—suspended,

moving toward unknown places and names or

returning to those I know, corresponding with

the paradox of crossing, being nowhere yet here,

leaning into the wind and light, uncertain of what

I might answer the woman to my right, anchored

in a flutter of cottons and leaning over the stern,

should she lift her eyes from the sea toward me

and ask: So, where are you from?

MEXICAN ALMUERZO IN NEW ENGLAND

for M.G.

Word is praise for Marina, up past 3:00 a.m. the night before her flight, preparing and packing the platos tradicionales she’s now heating up in the oven while the tortillas steam like full moons on the stove top. Dish by dish she tries to recreate Mexico in her son’s New England kitchen, taste-testing el mole from the pot, stirring everything: el chorizo-con-papas, el picadillo, el guacamole. The spirals of her stirs match the spirals in her eyes, the scented steam coils around her like incense, suffusing the air with her folklore. She loves Alfredo, as she loves all her sons, as she loves all things: seashells, cacti, plumes, artichokes. Her hand calls us to circle around the kitchen island, where she demonstrates how to fold tacos for the gringo guests, explaining what is hot and what is not, trying to describe tastes with English words she cannot savor. As we eat, she apologizes: not as good as at home, pero bueno … It is the best she can do in this strange kitchen which Sele has tried to disguise with papel picado banners of colored tissue paper displaying our names in piñata pink, maíz yellow, and Guadalupe green—strung across the lintels of the patio filled with talk of an early spring and do you remembers that leave an aftertaste even the flan and café negro don’t cleanse. Marina has finished. She sleeps in the guest room while Alfredo’s paintings confess in the living room, while the papier-mâché skeletons giggle on the shelves, and shadows lean on the porch with rain about to fall. Tomorrow our names will be taken down and Marina will leave with her empty clay pots, feeling as she feels all things: velvet, branches, honey, stones. Feeling what we all feel: home is a forgotten recipe, a spice we can find nowhere, a taste we can never reproduce, exactly.

WHERE IT BEGINS—WHERE IT ENDS

somewhere | somehow
the wind blows and | the dust sweeps in
a mountain is pared down | through a cracked window
a cliff’s chin is shaved | underneath the front door
a dune is stolen from a desert | and comes to rest on my desk
a parched field is raped | over the edge of a frame
ripe stones are ground | on blocks of consumed books
weathered into souls | over an array of aging photos
and dead things burn alive | gingerly settling out of beams
into ghosts of gray ash | in the morning light, floating
almost invisible, arriving | in the quite air of my room
from places I’ve never been | until the wind blows again

FROM

Looking for
The Gulf Motel

LOOKING FOR THE GULF MOTEL

Marco Island, Florida

There should be nothing here I don’t remember …

The Gulf Motel with mermaid lampposts

and ship’s wheel in the lobby should still be

rising out of the sand like a cake decoration.

My brother and I should still be pretending

we don’t know our parents, embarrassing us

as they roll the luggage cart past the front desk

loaded with our scruffy suitcases, two-dozen

loaves of Cuban bread, brown bags bulging

with enough mangos to last the entire week,

our espresso pot, the pressure cooker—and

a pork roast reeking garlic through the lobby.

All because we can’t afford to eat out, not even

on vacation? Only two hours from our home

in Miami, but far enough away to be thrilled

by whiter sands on the west coast of Florida,

where I should still be for the first time watching

the sun set instead of rise over the ocean.

There should be nothing here I don’t remember …

My mother should still be in the kitchenette

of The Gulf Motel, her daisy sandals from Kmart

still squeaking across the linoleum, still gorgeous

in her teal swimsuit and amber earrings

stirring a pot of arroz con pollo, adding sprinkles

of onion powder and dollops of tomato sauce.

My father should still be in a terrycloth jacket

smoking, clinking a glass of amber whiskey

in the sunset at The Gulf Motel, watching us

dive into the pool, two sons he’ll never see

grow into men who will be proud of him.

There should be nothing here I don’t remember …

My brother and I should still be playing Parcheesi,

my father should still be alive, slow dancing

with my mother on the sliding-glass balcony

of The Gulf Motel. No music, only the waves

keeping time, a song only their minds hear

ten thousand nights back to their life in Cuba.

My mother’s face should still be resting against

his bare chest like the moon resting on the sea,

the stars should still be turning around them.

There should be nothing here I don’t remember …

My brother should still be thirteen, sneaking

rum in the bathroom, sculpting naked women

from sand. I should still be eight years old

dazzled by seashells and how many seconds

I hold my breath underwater—but I’m not—

I am thirty-eight, driving up Collier Boulevard,

looking for The Gulf Motel, for everything

that should still be, but isn’t. I want to blame

the condos, their shadows, for ruining the beach,

and my past, I want to chase the snowbirds away

with their tacky mansions and yachts, I want

to turn the golf courses back into mangroves.

I want to find The Gulf Motel exactly as it was

and pretend for a moment, nothing lost is lost.

BETTING ON AMERICA

My grandmother was the bookie, set up

at the kitchen table that night, her hair

in curlers, pencil and pad jotting down

two-dollar bets, paying five-to-one

on which Miss would take the crown.

Abuelo put his money on Miss Wyoming—

She’s got great teeth, he pronounced as if

complimenting a horse, not her smile

filling the camera before she wisped away

like a cloud in her creamy chiffon dress.

I dug up enough change from the sofa

and car seats to bet on Miss Wisconsin,

thinking I was as American as she because

I was as blond as she was. And I knew

that’s where all the cheese came from.

That wasn’t all: chocolate was from Miss

Pennsylvania, the capital of Miss Montana

was Helena, Mount Rushmore was in

Miss South Dakota, and I knew how to say

Miss Con-nec-ti-cut, unlike my Tía Gloria

who just pointed at the TV: Esa—that one,

claiming she had her same figure before

leaving Cuba. It’s true … I have pictures,

she declared before cramming another

bocadito sandwich into her mouth.

Papá refused to bet on any of the Misses

because Americanas all have skinny butts,

he complained. There’s nothing like a big

culo cubano. Everyone agreed—es verdad—

except for me and my little cousin Julito,

who apparently was a breast man at five,

reaching for Miss Alabama’s bosom

on the screen, the leggy mulata sashaying

in pumps, swimsuit, seducing Tío Pedro

into picking her as the sure winner.

She’s the one! She looks Cubana, he swore,

and she did, but she cost him five bucks.

¡Cojones! he exploded as confetti rained,

Bert Parks leading Miss Ohio, the new

Miss America, by the hand to the runway.

Gloves up to her elbows, velvet down

to her feet, crying diamonds into her bouquet,

the queen of our country, our land of the free,

amid the purple mountains of her majesty

floating across the stage, our living room,

though no one bet on her, and none of us

—not even me—could answer Mamá

when she asked: ¿Dónde está Ohio?

TAKING MY COUSIN‘S PHOTO AT THE STATUE OF LIBERTY

for Roxana

May she never miss the sun or the rain in the valley

trickling from Royal palms, or the plush red earth,

or the flutter of sugarcane fields and poincianas, or

the endless hem of turquoise sea around the island,

may she never remember the sea or her life again

in Cuba selling glossy postcards of the revolution

and El Che to sweaty Germans, may she never forget

the broken toilet and peeling stucco of her room

in a government-partitioned mansion dissolving

like a sandcastle back into the Bay of Cienfuegos,

may she never have to count the dollars we’d send

for her wedding dress, or save egg rations for a cake,

may she be as American as I wanted to be once, in love

with its rosy-cheeked men in breeches and white wigs,

with the calligraphy of our Liberty and Justice for All,

our We the People, may she memorize all fifty states,

our rivers and mountains, sing “God Bless America”

like she means it, like she’s never lived anywhere

else but here, may she admire our wars and our men

on the moon, may she believe our infomercials, buy

designer perfumes and underwear, drink Starbucks,

drive a Humvee, and have a dream, may she never

doubt America, may this be her country more than

it is mine when she lifts her Diet Coke like a torch

into the June sky and clutches her faux Chanel purse

to her chest, may she look into New York Harbor

for the rest of her life and hold still when I say, Smile.

THE ISLAND WITHIN

for Ruth Behar

I’m still thinking about your porch light

like a full moon casting a foggy halo

in the frigid air last night, the bare oaks

branching into the sky like nerve endings

inches away from the frozen stars,

the pink gables of your Victorian home

protesting yet another winter for you

captive in Ann Arbor as you practice

mambo by the fireplace. I’m following

your red-velvet shoes to conga beats

and bongo taps taking your body, but

not your life, from the snow mantling

your windows outside, 1,600 miles

away from Cuba. I’m tasting the cafecito

you made, the slice of homemade flan

floating in burnt sugar like the stories

you told me you can’t finish writing,

no matter how many times you travel

through time back to Havana to steal

every memory ever stolen from you.

You’re a thief anyone would forgive,

wanting only to imagine faces for names

chiseled on the graves of your family

at Guanabacoa, walk on Calle Aguacate

and pretend to meet the grandfather

you never met at his lace shop for lunch,

or pray the Kaddish like your mother

at the synagogue in El Vedado, stand

on the steps there like you once did

in a photo you can’t remember taking.

I confess I pitied you, still trying to reach

that unreachable island within the island

you still call home. I thought I was done

with Cuba, tired of filling in the blanks,

but now I’m not sure. Maybe if I return

just once more, walk the sugarcane fields

my father once cut, drive down the road

where my mother once peddled guavas

to pay for textbooks, sit on the porch

of my grandmother’s house, imagine her

still in the kitchen making arroz con leche—

maybe then I’ll have an answer for you

last night when you asked me: Would you

move to Cuba? Would you die there?

PRACTICE PROBLEM

If I leave home at 12:48 pm, drive

8 miles, catch a plane accelerating

at 3 m/s² against the earth spinning

900 mph clockwise, and count

76 Royal palms from the sky before

I land in Havana at exactly 3:28 pm,

if I take a bus through rain falling

at 15° and cross a 1,500-foot bridge

between two mountains where

my mother was born at 6:52 am,

if I get off the bus, head south

at 36 mph in a ’57 Buick with a tail

wind blowing off the sugarcane

south by southeast at 18 ft/s

to my grandfather’s town where

I see the same 4,701 stars he saw

above his house, if I suddenly

decelerate at 2 m/s² to follow

a man in a straw hat for a mile

because he looks like my father,

if I turn around, walk 3,200 steps

per day, how long will it take me

to get back home knowing I have

1.2 billion seconds left to live?

EL FLORIDA ROOM

Not a study or a den, but El Florida

as my mother called it, a pretty name

for the room with the prettiest view

of the lipstick-red hibiscus puckered up

against the windows, the tepid breeze

laden with the brown-sugar scent

of loquats drifting in from the yard.

Not a sunroom, but where the sun

both rose and set, all day the shadows

of banana trees fan-dancing across

the floor, and if it rained, it rained

the loudest, like marbles plunking

across the roof under constant threat

of coconuts ready to fall from the sky.

Not a sitting room, but El Florida, where

I sat alone for hours with butterflies

frozen on the polyester curtains

and faces of Lladró figurines: sad angels,

clowns, and princesses with eyes glazed

blue and gray, gazing from behind

the glass doors of the wall cabinet.

Not a TV room, but where I watched

Creature Feature as a boy, clinging

to my brother, safe from vampires

in the same sofa where I fell in love

with Clint Eastwood and my abuelo

watching westerns, or pitying women

crying in telenovelas with my abuela.

Not a family room, but the room where

my father twirled his hair while listening

to eight-tracks of Elvis, read Nietzsche

and Kant a few months before he died,

where my mother learned to dance alone

as she swept, and I learned salsa pressed

against my Tía Julia’s enormous hips.

At the edge of the city, in the company

of crickets, beside the empty clothesline,

telephone wires, and the moon, tonight

my life sits with me like an old friend

not in the living room, but in the light

of El Florida, as quiet and necessary

as any star shining above it.

AFTERNOONS AS ENDORA

I’m a boy who hates being a boy who loves cats and paint-by-number sets. She’s a witch who loves being a witch who hates mortals. Every afternoon she pops in on channel six on top of a lampshade or a banister, and I disappear behind the locked door of my bedroom. I paint my fingernails crayon-red, wrap a towel around my head like her bouffant, tie my sheets around my chest into a chiffon muumuu just like hers, the bedspread draped over my shoulders like her mauve cape. We give Derwood cat-eye scowls and scoff at Samantha’s patience with mortal fools. In our raspy voices we cast spells turning Mrs. Kravitz into a Chihuahua and the boys at recess into ants I can squish. With a flick of our wrists we puncture the milkman’s truck tires and conjure up thunderstorms to rain out baseball practice. With a wave of our billowy sleeves we give Larry Tate amnesia and trick my mother into signing me up for art classes. We brew bat’s wings with eyes of newt into potions to make me like girls and my father a little more. We turn my grandmother into a mute so she can’t scream at me: Go play outside! Don’t be such a sissy! Talk like a man, will you? For thirty minutes we sit on clouds, drink bubbly brews from cognac glasses, gaze into a crystal ball at my wonderful future until—poof—she disappears in a cloud of smoke, leaving me alone in my room again, the boy afraid of being a boy, dressed like a witch, wanting to vanish too.

QUEER THEORY: ACCORDING TO MY GRANDMOTHER

Never drink soda with a straw—

los machos shouldn’t use straws—

(for milk shakes, maybe).

Stop eyeing your mother’s Avon catalog,

and the men’s underwear in those Sears flyers.

I’ve seen you …

Stay out of her Tupperware parties,

and perfume bottles—don’t let her kiss you,

she kisses you much too much.

Avoid hugging men, but if you must,

pat them real hard

on the back, even

if it’s your father.

Must you keep that cat? Don’t pet him so much.

Mijo, why don’t you like dogs?

Never play house, even if you’re the husband.

Quit hanging with that Henry kid, he’s too pale,

and I don’t care what you call them—

those GI Joes of his

are dolls.

Don’t draw rainbows or flowers or sunsets.

I’ve seen you …

Don’t draw at all—no coloring books either.

Put away your crayons, your Play-Doh, your Legos.

Where are your Hot Wheels,

your laser gun and handcuffs,

those knives I gave you

for Christmas?

Never fly a kite or roller skate, but light

all the firecrackers you want,

kill all the lizards you can, cut up worms—

feed them to that damn cat of yours.

Don’t sit Indian style with your legs crossed—

you’re no indio.

Stop click-clacking your sandals—

you’re no Tropicana chorus girl.

And for God’s sake, never pee sitting down.

I’ve seen you …

Never take a bubble bath or wash your hair

with shampoo—el champú is for women.

So is conditioner.

So is el mousse.

So is hand lotion.

Never file your nails or blow-dry your hair—

go to the barber shop with your abuelo—

you’re not unisex, are you?

Stay out of the kitchen. Los hombres don’t cook—

they eat. Eat anything you want, except:

deviled eggs

Blow-Pops

croissants (bagels, maybe)

cucumber sandwiches

and those girly petit-fours

Don’t watch Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie.

Don’t stare at The Six-Million Dollar Man.

I’ve seen you …

Never dance alone in your room:

Donna Summer, Barry Manilow, The Captain

and Tennille, Bette Midler—all musicals—

forbidden.

Posters of kittens, Star Wars, or the Eiffel Tower—

forbidden.

Those fancy books on architecture and art—

I threw them in the trash.

You can’t wear cologne or puka shells

and I better not catch you in clogs.

If you grow a ponytail—I’ll cut it off.

¡Qué! No way, you can’t pierce your ear,

left or right side—

I don’t care—

you will not look like some god-damn queer—

I’ve seen you …

even though I know

you are one.

MAYBE

for Craig

Maybe it was the billboards promising

paradise, maybe those fifty-nine miles

with your hand in mine, maybe my sexy

roadster, top down, the wind fingering

your hair, the sunlight on your thighs

and bare chest, maybe it was just the ride

over the sea split in two by the highway

to Key Largo, or the idea of Key Largo.

Maybe I was finally in the right place

at the right time with the right person.

Maybe there’d finally be a house, a dog

named Chu, a lawn to mow, neighbors,

dinner parties, and you, forever obsessed

with crossword puzzles and Carl Jung,

reading in the dark by the moonlight,

at my bedside every night. Maybe. Maybe

it was the clouds paused at the horizon,

the blinding fields of golden sawgrass,

the mangrove islands tangled, inseparable

as we might be. Maybe I should’ve said

something, promised you something,

asked you to stay a while. Maybe.

THICKER THAN COUNTRY

A Cuban like me living in Maine? Well,

what the hell, Mark loves his native snow

and I don’t mind it, really. I even love

icicles, though I still decorate the house

with seashells and starfish. Sometimes

I want to raise chickens and pigs, wonder

if I could grow even a small mango tree

in my three-season porch. But mostly,

I’m happy with hemlocks and birches

towering over the house, their shadows

like sundials, the cool breeze blowing

even in the summer. Sometimes I miss

the melody of Spanish, a little, and I play

Celia Cruz, dance alone in the basement.

Sometimes I miss the taste of white rice

with picadillo—so I cook, but it’s never

as good as my mother’s. Why don’t I miss

her or the smell of Cuban bread as much

as I should, I wonder? But when Mark

comes home like an astronaut dressed

in his ski clothes, or when I spy on him

planting petunias in the spring, his face

smudged with this earth, or barbequing

in the summer when he asks me if I want

a hamberg or a cheezeberg as he calls them—

still making me laugh after twelve years—

I understand why the mountains here

are enough, white with snow or green

with palms, mountains are mountains,

but love is thicker than any country.

KILLING MARK

His plane went down over Los Angeles

last week (again), or was it Long Island?

Boxer shorts, hair gel, his toothbrush

washed up on the shore at New Haven,

but his body never recovered, I feared.

Monday, he cut off his leg chain sawing—

bled to death slowly while I was shopping

for a new lamp, never heard my messages

on his cell phone: Where are you? Call me!

I told him to be careful. He never listens.

Tonight, fifteen minutes late, I’m sure

he’s hit a moose on Route 26, but maybe

he survived, someone from the hospital

will call me, give me his room number.

I’ll bring his pajamas, some magazines.

5:25: still no phone call, voice mail full.

I turn on the news, wait for the report:

flashes of moose blood, his car mangled,

as I buzz around the bedroom dusting

the furniture, sorting the sock drawer.

Did someone knock? I’m expecting

the sheriff by six o’clock. Mr. Blanco,

I’m afraid … he’ll say, hand me a Ziploc

with his wallet, sunglasses, wristwatch.

I’ll invite him in, make some coffee.

6:25: I’ll have to call his mom, explain,

arrange to fly the body back. Do I have

enough garbage bags for his clothes?

I should keep his ties—but his shoes?

Order flowers—roses—white or red?

By seven-thirty I’m taking mental notes

for his eulogy, suddenly adorning all

I’ve hated, ten years’ worth of nose hairs

in the sink, of lost car keys, of chewing

too loud and hogging the bedsheets,

when Joey yowls, ears to the sound

of footsteps up the drive, and darts

to the doorway. I follow with a scowl:

Where the hell were you? Couldn’t call?

Translation: I die each time I kill you.

COOKING WITH MAMÁ IN MAINE

Two years since trading mangos

for these maples, the white dunes

of the beach for the White Mountains

etched in my living room window,

I ask my mother to teach me how

to make my favorite Cuban dish.

She arrives from Miami in May

with a parka and a suitcase packed

with plantains, chorizos, vino seco,

but also onions, garlic, olive oil

as if we couldn’t pick these up at

the Oxford County Hannaford’s.

She brings with her all the spices

of my childhood: laurel, pimentón,

dashes of memories she sprinkles

into a black pot of black beans

starting to simmer when I wake up

and meet her busy in the kitchen.

With my pad and pencil, eager

to take notes, I ask her how many

teaspoons of cumin she’s adding,

how many cups of oil and vino seco

but I can’t get a straight answer:

I don’t know, she says, I just know.

Afraid to stay in the guest cottage,

by herself, but not of the blood

on her hands, she stabs holes

in the raw meat, stuffs in garlic:

Six or seven mas ó menos, maybe

seven cloves, she says, it all depends.

She dices about one bell pepper,

tells me how much my father loved

her cooking too, as she cries over

about two onions she chops, tosses

into a pan sizzling with olive oil

making sofrito to brown the roast.

She insists I just watch her hands

stirring, folding, whisking me back

to the kitchen I grew up in, dinner

for six of us on the table, six sharp

every day of her life for thirty years

until she had no one left to cook for.

I don’t ask how she survived her exilio:

ten years without her mother, twenty

as a widow. Did she grow to love snow

those years in New York before Miami,

and how will I survive winters here with

out her cooking? Will I ever learn?

I savor answers to my questions when

she raises a spoon to my mouth saying,

Taste it, mijo, there’s no recipe, just taste.

MY FATHER IN MY HANDS

My father gave me these hands, fingers

inch-wide and muscular like his, the same

folds of skin like squinted eyes looking

back at me whenever I scrub them

in the kitchen sink and remember him

washing garden dirt off his, or helping

my mother dry the dishes every night.

These are his fingernails—square, flat—

ten small mirrors I look into and see him

signing my report card, or mixing batter

for our pancakes on Sunday mornings.

His same whorls of hair near my wrists,

magnetic lines that pull me back to him

tying my shoelaces, pointing at words

as I learned to read, and years later:

greasy hands teaching me to change

the oil in my car, immaculate hands

showing me how to tie my necktie.

These are his knuckles—rising, falling

like hills between my veins—his veins,

his pulse at my wrist under the watch

he left for me, ticking after his death,

alive whenever I hold a man’s hand and

remember mine around my father’s thumb

all through the carnival at Tamiami Park,

how he lifted me up on his shoulders,

his hands wrapped around my ankles

keeping me steady above the world, still.

SINCE UNFINISHED

I’ve been writing this since

the summer my grandfather

taught me how to hold a blade

of grass between my thumbs

and make it whistle, since

I first learned to make green

from blue and yellow, turned

paper into snowflakes, believed

a seashell echoed the sea,

and the sea had no end.

I’ve been writing this since

a sparrow flew into my class

and crashed into the window,

laid to rest on a bed of tissue

in a shoebox by the swings, since

the morning I first stood up

on the bathroom sink to watch

my father shave, since our eyes

met in that foggy mirror, since

the splinter my mother pulled

from my thumb, kissed my blood.

I’ve been writing this since

the woman I slept with the night

of my father’s wake, since

my grandmother first called me

a faggot and I said nothing, since

I forgave her and my body

pressed hard against Michael

on the dance floor at Twist, since

the years spent with a martini

and men I knew couldn’t love.

I’ve been writing this since

the night I pulled off the road

at Big Sur and my eyes caught

the insanity of the stars, since

the months by the kitchen window

watching the snow come down

like fallout from a despair I had

no word for, since I stopped

searching for a name and found

myself tick-tock in a hammock

asking nothing of the sky.

I’ve been writing this since

spring, studying the tiny leaves

on the oaks dithering like moths,

contrast to the eon-old fieldstones

unveiled of snow, but forever

works-in-progress, since tonight

with the battled moon behind

the branches spying on the world—

same as it ever was—perfectly

unfinished, my glasses and pen

at rest again on the night table.

I’ve been writing this since

my eyes started seeing less,

my knees aching more, since

I began picking up twigs, feathers,

and pretty rocks for no reason

collecting on the porch where

I sit to read and watch the sunset

like my grandfather did every day,

remembering him and how

to make a blade of grass whistle.

FROM

How to Love a Country

COMO TÚ / LIKE YOU / LIKE ME

for the D.A.C.A. DREAMers and all our nation’s immigrants

… my veins don’t end in me … mis venas no terminan en mí

but in the unanimous blood sino en la sange unánime

of those who struggle for life … de los que luchan por la vida …

—ROQUE DALTON, Como tú

Como tú, I question history’s blur in my eyes

each time I face a mirror. Like a mirror, I gaze

into my palm a wrinkled map I still can’t read,

my lifeline an unnamed road I can’t find, can’t

trace back to the fork in my parents’ trek

that cradled me here. Como tú, I woke up to

this dream of a country I didn’t choose, that

didn’t choose me—trapped in the nightmare

of its hateful glares. Como tú, I’m also from

the lakes and farms, waterfalls and prairies

of another country I can’t fully claim either.

Como tú, I am either a mirage living among

these faces and streets that raised me here,

or I’m nothing, a memory forgotten by all

I was taken from and can’t return to again.

Like memory, at times I wish I could erase

the music of my name in Spanish, at times

I cherish it, and despise my other syllables

clashing in English. Como tú, I want to speak

of myself in two languages at once. Despite

my tongues, no word defines me. Like words,

I read my footprints like my past, erased by

waves of circumstance, my future uncertain

as wind. Like the wind, como tú, I carry songs,

howls, whispers, thunder’s growl. Like thunder,

I’m a foreign-borne cloud that’s drifted here,

I’m lightning, and the balm of rain. Como tú,

our blood rains for the dirty thirst of this land.

Like thirst, like hunger, we ache with the need

to save ourselves, and our country from itself.

COMPLAINT OF EL RÍO GRANDE

for Aylin Barbieri

I was meant for all things to meet:

to make the clouds pause in the mirror

of my waters, to be home to fallen rain

that finds its way to me, to turn eons

of loveless rock into lovesick pebbles

and carry them as humble gifts back

to the sea which brings life back to me.

I felt the sun flare, praised each star

flocked about the moon long before

you did. I’ve breathed air you’ll never

breathe, listened to songbirds before

you could speak their names, before

you dug your oars in me, before you

created the gods that created you.

Then countries—your invention—maps

jigsawing the world into colored shapes

caged in bold lines to say: you’re here,

not there, you’re this, not that, to say:

yellow isn’t red, red isn’t black, black is

not white, to say: mine, not ours, to say

war, and believe life’s worth is relative.

You named me big river, drew me—blue,

thick to divide, to say: spic and Yankee,

to say: wetback and gringo. You split me

in two—half of me us, the rest them. But

I wasn’t meant to drown children, hear

mothers’ cries, never meant to be your

geography: a line, a border, or murderer.

I was meant for all things to meet:

the mirrored clouds and sun’s tingle,

birdsongs and the quiet moon, the wind

and its dust, the rush of mountain rain—

and us. Blood that runs in you is water

flowing in me, both life, the truth we

know we know as one in one another.

LEAVING IN THE RAIN: LIMERICK, IRELAND

for Caroline

I have no exact reason to miss you, your city, nor

this island of yours—like everything, like nothing

I had imagined: the plentiful wisdom of so much

silver rain softening rock, spreading across pillows

of green hills rolling past the train’s window leaving

Limerick after only a few days of knowing you, and

my life with your kin, teaching myself by teaching

them to trust a poem’s imagery, hear it as music

enough to mend what we ourselves rend apart.

I smiled your smile, answering me: No, lad, limericks

didn’t come from here. Yet I felt poetry everywhere:

in the brooding walls of King John’s Castle against

your grey sky, in the daring of a few rays of sunlight

each day striking the steel and glass of my hotel,

in the granite sparkle of sidewalks solid under foot

on our daily lunchtime strolls to Dunnes for bacon

and pears, also bread to court the seagulls gathered

every afternoon by the River Shannon, its tidal ebb

and flow a recurring dream, you noticed, reminding

me to remember and forget myself twice each day.

Why should your home be home to me? My eyes

belong to another sea, my feet to another island—

Cuba, where rain falls differently. Yet the stranger

on the train across the aisle could be my mother

pulling turquoise yarn from a tote bag on the floor

like a faithful dog sitting beside her swollen ankles.

Her long needles, a soft, rhythmic whetting of steel

against steel, could be a cello in her spotted hands

that don’t remember or need her anymore to make

what: socks for her granddaughter, another sweater

for her faraway son, a vest for her dead husband?

Only she knows what she misses, what is, was, or will

be home to her, knows the sorrow in her every stitch

as much as the joy pulled from each loop she purls.

Beside her, a bearded man sleeps, his furrowed brow

and bony hands tell a story like the broken spine

of the book facedown on his lap, parted to words

he couldn’t finish—too droll or terrifying for him,

perhaps. I wonder if his eyes are green as ferns

or brown as dirt, if they’re dreaming of tigers, or

moonlight echoes, or the timbre of his father’s voice.

I wonder if he’s leaving home or returning. Maybe

he’s a stranger like me, among strangers between

points on the earth to which these tracks are nailed.

Where am I? Where am I going? It doesn’t matter.

What matters is the poem in the window: a blurred

watercolor where tree is chimney, chimney is cloud,

cloud is brick, brick is puddle, puddle is rain, and rain

is me, refracted in each luscious bead. How free and

impossible to be everything inside everything I see.

How terribly beautiful never having to say I’m from

here or there, never recalling my childhood home

where I played checkers alone, or the royal palms

lining the street where I learned to ride my bike,

or my mango-scented backyard catching fireflies

like stars in glass jars, or my bedroom where I first

heard my voice say, Richard, my name breaking

me from the world, the world suddenly broken

into geography, history, weather, language, war.

I would like to die twice, Caroline: once to feel

that last breath flood my body, then come back

to tell of life not pulled apart, not dimensioned—

a seamless mass at light-speed before the dead

stop of the train at 3:05. Before the man wakes up,

closes his book, forgets or vows to live his dream.

Before the woman stuffs her needles into her bag,

stands up, sighs into the ache of her feet. Before

everything becomes itself again: brick into brick,

tree into tree, cloud into cloud, puddle into puddle,

me into me, standing on the platform knowing

Pavese was right: You need a village, if only for

the pleasure of leaving it … and someday returning

to it, to your city, to you, and the rain we shared.

ISLAND BODY

Forced to leave home, but home

never leaves us. Wherever exile

takes us, we remain this body made

from the red earth of our island—

our ribs taken from its montes—

its breeze our breaths. We stand

with its palmeras. Our eyes hold

its blue-green sea. Waterfalls

echo in our ears. On our wrists,

jasmine. Our palms open, close

like its hibiscus to love, be loved.

We thrive wherever we remain

true to our lucha—the hustle

of our feet walking to work

as we must, our oily hands

fixing all the broken beauty

we must fix, our soiled hands

growing what we must grow,

or cutting what must be cut,

our backs carrying the weight

of our island’s sands, our pulse

its waves, our sweat the gossamer

dew and dust of its sunrises,

our voice the song of its sinsontes

and its son nested in our souls.

Wherever the world spins us,

home remains the island that

remains in us. Its sun still sets

in our eyes, its clouds stay still

above us, our hands still hold

its tepid rain. We’re still caught

under its net of stars, still listen to

its moon crooning above its dirt

roads. We’re its rivers, the hem

of its coast and lace of its sierras,

its valley windsongs, its vast seas

of green sugarcane fields. We’re

our island’s sweetness as bitter

as the taste of having to leave it.

MATTERS OF THE SEA

US Embassy Reopening Ceremony,

Havana, Cuba, August 14, 2015

The sea doesn’t matter, what matters is this:

we all belong to the sea between us, all of us

once and still the same child who marvels over

starfish, listens to hollow shells, sculpts dreams

into impossible castles. We’ve all been lovers,

holding hands, strolling either of our shores—

our footprints like a mirage of selves vanished

in waves that don’t know their birth or care

on which country they break. They break, bless

us, return to the sea, home to our silent wishes.

No one is other, to the other, to the sea, whether

on hemmed island or vast continent, remember:

our grandfathers, their hands dug deep into red

or brown earth, planting maple or mango trees

that outlived them; our grandmothers counting

years while dusting photos of their weddings—

brittle family faces still alive on our dressers now.

Our mothers teaching us how to read in Spanish

or English, how to tie our shoes, how to gather

fall’s colors, or bite into guavas. Our fathers worn

by the weight of clouds, clocking-in at factories,

or cutting sugarcane to earn a new life for us.

My cousins and I now scouting the same stars

above skyscrapers or palms, waiting for time

to stop and begin again when rain falls, washes

its way through river or street, back to the sea.

No matter what anthem we sing, we’ve all walked

barefoot and bare-souled among the soar and dive

of seagull cries. We’ve offered our sorrows, hopes

up to the sea, our lips anointed by the same spray

of salt-laden wind. We’ve fingered our memories

and regrets like stones in our hands we can’t toss.

Yet we’ve all cupped seashells to our ears. Listen

again to the echo—the sea still telling us the end

to our doubts and fears is to gaze into the lucid blues

of our shared horizon, breathe together, heal together.

MOTHER COUNTRY

To love a country as if you’ve lost one: 1968,

my mother leaves Cuba for America, a scene

I imagine as if standing in her place—one foot

inside a plane destined for a country she knew

only as a name, a color on a map, or glossy photos

from drugstore magazines, her other foot anchored

to the platform of her patria, her hand clutched

around one suitcase, taking only what she needs

most: hand-colored photographs of her family,

her wedding veil, the doorknob of her house,

a jar of dirt from her backyard, goodbye letters

she won’t open for years. The sorrowful drone

of engines, one last, deep breath of familiar air

she’ll take with her, one last glimpse at all

she’d ever known: the palm trees wave goodbye

as she steps onto the plane, the mountains shrink

from her eyes as she lifts off into another life.

To love a country as if you’ve lost one: I hear her

—once upon a time—reading picture books

over my shoulder at bedtime, both of us learning

English, sounding out words as strange as the talking

animals and fair-haired princesses in their pages.

I taste her first attempts at macaroni-n-cheese

(but with chorizo and peppers), and her shame

over Thanksgiving turkeys always dry, but countered

by her perfect pork pernil and garlic yuca. I smell

the rain of those mornings huddled as one under

one umbrella waiting for the bus to her ten-hour days

at the cash register. At night, the zzz-zzz of her sewing

her own blouses, quinceañera dresses for her nieces

still in Cuba, guessing at their sizes, and the gowns

she’d sell to neighbors to save for a rusty white sedan—

no hubcaps, no air conditioning, sweating all the way

through our first vacation to Florida theme parks.

To love a country as if you’ve lost one: as if

it were you on a plane departing from America

forever, clouds closing like curtains on your country,

the last scene in which you’re a madman scribbling

the names of your favorite flowers, trees, and birds

you’d never see again, your address and phone number

you’d never use again, the color of your father’s eyes,

your mother’s hair, terrified you could forget these.

To love a country as if I was my mother last spring

hobbling, insisting I help her climb all the way up

to the US Capitol, as if she were here before you today

instead of me, explaining her tears, her cheeks pink

as the cherry blossoms coloring the air that day when

she stopped, turned to me, and said: You know, mijo,

it isn’t where you’re born that matters, it’s where

you choose to die—that—that’s your country.

MY FATHER IN ENGLISH

First half of his life lived in Spanish: the long syntax

of las montañas that lined his village, the rhyme

of sol with his soul—a Cuban alma—that swayed

with las palmas, the sharp rhythm of his machete

cutting through caña, the syllables of his canarios

that sung into la brisa of the island home he left

to spell out the second half of his life in English—

the vernacular of New York City sleet, neon, glass—

and the brick factory where he learned to polish

steel twelve hours a day. Enough to save enough

to buy a used Spanish-English dictionary he kept

bedside like a bible—studied fifteen new words

after his prayers each night, then practiced them

on us the next day: Buenos días, indeed, my family.

Indeed más coffee. Have a good day today, indeed—

and again in the evening: Gracias to my bella wife,

indeed, for dinner. Hiciste tu homework, indeed?

La vida is indeed difícil. Indeed did indeed become

his favorite word which, like the rest of his new life,

he never quite grasped: overused and misused often

to my embarrassment. Yet the word I most learned

to love and know him through: indeed, the exile who

tried to master the language he chose to master him,

indeed, the husband who refused to say I love you

in English to my mother, the man who died without

true translation. Indeed, meaning: in fact/en efecto,

meaning: in reality/de hecho, meaning to say now

what I always meant to tell him in both languages:

thank you/gracias for surrendering the past tense

of your life so that I might conjugate myself here

in the present of this country, in truth/así es, indeed.

EL AMERICANO IN THE MIRROR

Maybe you don’t remember, or don’t want to, or

maybe, like me, you’ve never been able to forget:

May 1979, fifth-grade recess, I grabbed your collar,

shoved you up against the wall behind the chapel,

called you a sissy-ass americano to your face, then

punched you—hard as I could. Maybe you still live,

as I do, with the awful crack of my knuckles’ slam

on your jaw, and the grim memory of your lip split.

Why didn’t you punch me back? That would’ve hurt

less than the jab of your blue eyes dulled with pain—

how you let your body wilt, lean into me, and we

walked arm in arm to the boys’ room, washed off

the blood and dirt. Is that how you remember it?

What you can’t remember is what I thought when

our gazes locked in the mirror and I wanted to say:

I’m sorry, maybe I love you. Perhaps even kiss you.

Did you feel it, too? At that instant did we both

somehow understand what I’m only now capable

of putting into these words: that I didn’t hate you,

but envied you—the americano sissy I wanted to be

with sheer skin, dainty freckles, the bold consonants

of your English name, your perfectly starched shirts,

pleated pants, that showy Happy Days lunchbox,

your A-plus spelling quizzes that I barely passed.

Why didn’t you snitch on me? I don’t remember now

who told Sister Magdalene, but I’ll never forget how

she wrung my ears until I cried for you, dragged me

to the back of the room, made me stand for the rest

of that day, praying the rosary to think hard about

my sins. And I did, I have for thirty-two years, Derek.

Whether you don’t remember, don’t want to, or never

forgot: forgive me, though I may never forgive myself.

USING COUNTRY IN A SENTENCE

My chair is country to my desk. The empty page

is country to my lifelong question of country

turning like a grain of sand irritating my mind, still

hoping for some pearly answer. My question

is country to my imagination, reimagining country,

not as our stoic eagle, but as wind, the country

its feathers and bones must muster to soar, eye

its kill of mice. The wind’s country as the clouds

it chisels into hieroglyphs to write its voice across

blank skies. A mountain as country to the clouds

that crown and hail its peak, then drift, betray it

for some other majesty. No matter how tall

mountains may rise, they’re bound to the country

that raises them and grinds them back into

earth, a borderless country to its rooted armies

of trees standing as sentinel, their branches

country to every leaf, each one a tiny country

to every drop of rain it holds like a breath

for a moment, then must let go. Rain’s country,

the sea from which it’s exiled into the sky

as vapor. The sky an infinite, universal country,

its citizens the tumultuous stars turning

like a kaleidoscope above my rooftop and me

tonight. My glass as country to the wine I sip,

my lips country to my thoughts on the half moon

—a country of light against shadow, like ink

against paper, my hand as country to my fingers,

to my words asking if my home is the only

country I need to have, or if my country is the only

home I have to need. And I write: country—

end it with a question mark. Lay my pen to rest.

AMERICAN WANDERSONG

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

—WALT WHITMAN,

Song of Myself

Yo vengo de todas partes,

Y hacia todas partes voy:

Arte soy entre las artes,

En los montes, monte soy.

—JOSÉ MARTÍ,

Versos Sencillos

For my parents’ exile from their blood-warm rain of Cuba to Madrid’s frozen drizzle pinging rooftops the February afternoon I was born. A tiny brown and wrinkled blessing counter to such poverty that my first crib was an open drawer cushioned with towels in an apartment shared by four families. Such as my mother told me for years, kindling my imagination still burning to understand that slipping into being when my longing to belong first began.

And continued: swaddled in the cloud of her arms above the clouds of the Atlantic to America, birthed again at forty-five days old as an immigrant, my newborn photo taken for my green card. Destined to live with two first languages, two countries, two selves, and in the space between them all.

My name is and isn’t Ricardo De Jesús Blanco-Valdés—christened for the sunlit and sea-song past of my parents’ island, carrying withered memories of their homeland like dry rose petals pressed in a book that someday I’d need to crack open, read into the middle of a story I’d need to reclaim, finish, and call my own.

My name is and isn’t Richard, a translation I began to call myself by, yearning to write myself into my other story, my other role, my other fictional character as a straight white boy of color in an American drama I didn’t quite understand, either.

For the terra-cotta roof and tattered lawn chair patio of the home that raised me in Miami, soothed by the mango tree shadows of our backyard. Their tangy-ripe scent stirring in with the incense of comino and laurel rising from Mamá’s pots of frijoles negros, the taste of my birthright at dinner every night.

My father listening to 8-tracks of Cuban danzones, slumped in the family room sofa alone with a glass full of rum and empty eyes. My abuelo’s front-porch stories of all we lost to la revolución: our farmhouse, our jasmine trees, our dog, Pancho. My abuela steadying me down the driveway, insisting I learn how to ride my bike and be el hombre she knew I’d never be.

The papery curtains of my bedroom fluttering with the speechless moon that spoke to me about loneliness, distance, journey, echoed by the palm tree sways against my window rustling a lullaby every night while I mumbled my prayers in English, then Spanish: glory be to all the light and the shadow, the wonder and noise, the confusion and calm of my childhood—as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

For the end of that sinless child when I began to question why god was love—everywhere and in everything—yet I belonged nowhere and to no one, unable to love even myself or let myself be loved. Even after I dared love men instead of women, and my youth burst like the dusk-red blooms of the poincianas, their beauty surrendered all at once. I withered like their petals strewn over the same city streets I wore down driving to nightclubs where I needed to feel at home under dancefloor lights and against the stubble of men with phone numbers I knew not to call, inked on cocktail napkins or my forearm.

Those lovesick nights that dead-ended with a sunrise on the beach, wading through my ache in every wave dying at my feet. My mind hovering with the seagulls screeching questions into the wind, terrified I’d never belong to anything but anonymous sky. The skyline’s trove of ruby and diamond lights waning over the bay like sinking treasure, my city the fortune I knew someday I’d have to abandon and lose to memory.

For the day I had to drive away: nine hundred miles for seventeen hours straight to New Orleans in my convertible: top down, wind tousling my hair and mind, my ears breathing in the melancholy notes of any sad song I could find on the radio: Fire and Rain, Landslide, Dust in the Wind. Singing along into the windshield, my eyes catching themselves in the rearview mirror, then looking away to keep speeding away from the self I was in Miami toward another self I wanted to bump into striding down Royal Street. Treat him to a swig of bourbon at a jazzy lounge, tell his eyes: I love you, man, you belong here with me.

I couldn’t find that me, until it started raining. There’s nothing like rain in New Orleans to forget yourself. It shatters everything. It shattered me like glass, gritty, glittery as the woman’s voice that seduced me into La Bon Vie. A hibiscus tucked in her hair and a spotlight on her soul as she finished her set crooning: good morning, heartache, sit down. I sat next to her at the end of the bar. Asked her name. She wouldn’t say. But I bought her a whiskey anyway for the loss I saw fathomed in her eyes, as brown and dazed as mine. We cheered to lives like the city split by the Mississippi, its waters murky yet always flowing, an incessant filling and emptying of itself, like myself.

For New York’s skyscrapers gleaming like proud kings in a giant game of chess I wanted to master and win. Though I was only a pawn that weekend, riding the click-clack of subways in sync with my heartbeat. Uptown to El Barrio to taste the Spanish of my Puerto Rican kin, their street vendors’ icy piraguas and steamy pasteles. Downtown to stare into the gap left by the towers and my regret for the 9/11 poem I never wrote because I didn’t love or hate America enough, then. Then Midtown to gaze at Van Gogh and Matisse, trying to reconcile the truth of art owned by a city whose art is also true greed.

And yet, always the light atop the stairwell beckoning me up toward its grand avenues to imagine a new life as vivid and rude as the yellow streaks of its taxi cabs, as necessary and imposing as its bridges, as sweet-n-sour as the exhaust swirling through its avenues, as charged as its brigade of shoulders hurtling down gum-blotched sidewalks crowded with opportunities fresh as its fruit stands, powerful yet dismal as its jumbotron nights swallowing every star whole. Could I live a life without stars?

For the blackbirds perched like commas on the telephone wire strung outside my kitchen window like a sentence scrawled in a language as foreign to me as Hartford’s granite mansions and grist mills, its white-washed steeples and snuffed-out smokestacks. All like another country to me, feeling my parents’ exile as my own, thinking I deserved it for believing that to be an American meant betraying the mango and palm trees that raised me for the winter skeletons of the birches, as beautiful as they were lonely, as I was among them, barely surviving along the gray stretch of Grandview Avenue on my drive to the university to teach how poems sing and save.

Yet what saved me then was my neighbor who fed me cannoli, espresso, and the strums of her guitar recasting steel skies into the cobalt notes of Segovia. What salvaged me was the man who found my eyes over a martini, held my hand down the trail at Talcott Mountain along the reservoir, listened with me to the ice sheets groaning and shifting like my life. The man I married for teaching me how to read William James, how to sauté shallots with filet mignon, how to make my first snow angel amid the frozen souls of the rose garden at Elizabeth Park.

For all the photos I’ve taken wandering, wanting to capture myself in-love with a country I could not simply live with, but could also die with. See me here: pocketing a stone from the Colosseum as a souvenir of how an empire or a life crumbles under the weight of its own excess. See me: out of breath atop Fuego volcano wanting to mix my blood with the earth’s blood in its crater, simmering with Guatemala’s revolutions. See me: inside the dungeon walls of the Palazzo Ducale carved with the last words of the condemned. Hear me: imagining, dreading the last poem I would ever carve.

Here I was: sinking with the mortal wealth of Venice’s chandeliers and marble floors. Here I was: showered by a Brazilian waterfall in el Rio das Almas, River of Souls, flowing through the hillside resorts of Pirenópolis and the village women beating their wash against its rocks. Here I was: on the top floor of La Grande Arche de la Défense, overlooking the luminous anatomy of Paris, so beautiful it hurt like a lover I can never possess and must abandon. Here I was, wherever I was: lost in always trying to find someplace, someone, something to belong to, yet always returning to myself. Here I am, again.

For the half of me who never lived in Cuba, yet remembers it as if I was returning to its chartreuse fields and turquoise-laced coasts coloring my eyes again for the first time as the plane descends toward the land of which I am a descendant. I step into a mirage of myself haunted by impossible memories of who I was and would be had my life been lived here.

The boy who hacks into the flesh of coconuts I never tasted, who reads time from the village clock in the square where I never played marbles with my cousins, who pedals through country roads raising dust that never raised me, who catches fireflies that I never chased, the neon green flashes that never dazzled my childhood here.

The son who slashes sugarcane I never harvested with my father, adores him as I never did for his careworn hands that never held mine, my hands around his waist riding his horse that I never rode to the dirt-floor home where I never grew up watching my mother stir pots of arroz con pollo in a kitchen where I never ate, and never listened to bedtime stories she never told me in a bed where I never dreamed.

The man who misses a life I never knew was mine to miss, claim as my own in Spanish, as muy mío: the conga beats of my tropical storms, ballad of my palmeras, balmy whispers of my Caribbean song. Muy mío: the iron-red soil of my flesh, sand of my white bones, pink hibiscus of my blood. Muy mío: the constellations I reconfigure into an astrology to read the past of who this half of me was, or never was. The future of who I will never be, or who will always be as an island within this island, muy mío.

For the destiny of desire that drove the Potomac’s course and mine here, to live along its marshy banks in a colonial townhouse with flower boxes and shelves of poetry I hauled to teach my students questions the other half of me had been asking all my life: What of my love for this country, my faith in its ideals? I heard faint answers through its capital’s streets: We the people waiting at traffic lights and metro stops. Justice for all echoed in statues’ eyes and every fountain’s trickle. A more perfect union breezing through its marble colonnades and beaming off its glorious domes.

Like a tourist wanting to be a native, I said yes to all of it. Yes, to the glow of the full moon I caught aglow with promises teetering at the tip of the Washington Monument. Yes, to a fistful of cherry blossoms I praised as delicate as our democracy. Yes, to the veins of my hands pressed against the granite veins of the Vietnam Memorial, standing beside a veteran with only one arm and one rose for one name he thanked for saving his life. Yes, to hating myself for acknowledging the innateness of war, empire, and also the privilege it granted me.

But also—yes—to my duty to contest it, try to shape its story with my deeds and words, with the inaugural poem I’d write ten years later and read before the National Mall looking out into the mirror of a million faces like mine, like so many of us, still hoping to belong and heal as one, under one sun, over one nation. Yes to the half of me I recognized in the reflecting pool capturing the Lincoln Memorial and the wisdom chiseled in his eyes, still speaking to us today: yes, a house divided cannot stand. Nor can I.

For the whole of me steeped in this dusk before the stars embroider the sky and the Milky Way’s swatch appears above the back porch of my life in Maine. Needing to be nowhere and no one but this stillness: a drop of rain on my eave just before it swells and adjourns into the ground, a hummingbird paused at my buttercup, my honeysuckle vine before it inches another inch, my still pond just before the ripple from a frog’s leap or a loose stone’s fall, the content maple leaves before the October wind stirs and chills my hillside and my bones.

For now: the fixed geometry of the White Mountains that needn’t move or heed a thing, drawn across my window, for now: a spider patient at the center of its web spun across my doorway, for now: my peonies satisfied with the beautiful weight of their immense blooms, for now: my loyal ferns like flags that unfurl, wither, and unfurl again, loyal to the same ground. For now: my wandersong the carol of robins perched in my pear tree, my soul the wisps of these clouds tendering the watercolor sunset. For now: I am citizen of these dimming skies, in the country of my body, homeland to myself—for just a moment.

IMAGINARY EXILE

Dawn breaks my window and dares me

to write a poem brave enough to imagine

the last day I’ll ever see this amber light

color the wind breathing life into the dark

faces of these mountains I know by name,

risen from the bedrock of the only country

I’ve truly lived, resting on the same earth

as this house in which I’ll never rise again—

a poem that captures me making my bed

one last time as the sun climbs the maples

I’ll never again watch burst like fireworks

into fall, or undress themselves, slip into

snow’s white lace. Never again the spring

giggles of my brook, or creaks of my floor.

Never the scent of my peonies or pillows.

Never my eyes on my clouds, or my ears

to the rain on my rooftop in this country—

a poem that finds a word for the emptiness

of suddenly becoming a stranger in my own

kitchen, as I sip my last cup of coffee, linger

with the aroma of my last meal, my hands

trembling as I toss leftovers, wash dishes,

eat one last piece of bread I’ll never break

again, and cork a half-empty bottle of wine

I’ll never finish, a vintage I’ll keep savoring

like memories through my mind’s palate—

a poem that lists which parts of me to part

with, or take: Give up my orchids and dog

to my neighbor Jewel, but keep our stares

goodbye. Leave the china and crystal, but

box the plastic souvenirs. Forget my books,

but pack every letter and card I’ve saved.

Not the gold chains that won’t buy back

my life, but stuff all the loose photos like

crumbs in my pockets I’ll need to survive—

a poem that brings daisies for my mother,

holds her as I swear I’ll return to hold her

again, though we both know I never will.

That speaks with my father one last time

at his grave, and forgives his silence again,

forever. That hopes my husband can flee

with me, knowing he can’t—our last gaze

a kiss meaning more to us than our first,

as I hold his hand and hand him my keys—

a poem ending as I walk backwards away

from his love at my door to open another—

step into some strange house and country

to harden into a statue of myself, my eyes

fixed and crumbling like the moon, and like

the moon, live by borrowed light, always but

never quite, dying in the sky, never forgiving

my fate, in a poem I never want to write.

LET‘S REMAKE AMERICA GREAT

Yes: Let’s re-shoot America as a fantasy, a ’50s TV show in clear black and white, sponsored by Kent cigarettes, Wonder Bread, and good old-fashioned war, again. Let’s re-create the backlot suburb with rows of five bedroom homes for every Wilson and Johnson, walled by perfectly trimmed hedges, weedless lawns, and at least one 12-cylinder sedan parked in every driveway, in the right neighborhood, again.

Let’s recast every woman as a housewife, white and polite as Donna Reed always glowing on the kitchen set, again. Let’s direct them to adore making and serving deviled eggs, tuna casserole, apple pies from scratch, again, costumed in pleated skirts and pearl chokers, aprons as immaculate as their thoughts—no lines about a career or rape, again. Let’s re-create Bewitched, but keep the same script for all women to follow, again: Samantha—blonde and busty, of course—but a real witch who tames her powers for the love of fetching her husband’s slippers and stirring his martinis, again.

Let’s write-out women like my mother, who fled Cuba broken as her broken English, who cooked dinner in her uniform after twelve-hour shifts at the supermarket, set the table with plastic cups she could rinse out and reuse. Let’s cast her as a maid, though even the help needs to be white and proud, again. No roles for Mexican nannies and gardeners unless they are murderers, nor black businessmen unless they are armed drug dealers, nor Muslim taxi drivers unless they are terrorists, again.

Let’s give every leading role to men like Jim from Father Knows Best, never dangerous, never weak, never poor, always white with a great job and time to page their newspapers, lounge in their wing chairs in command of their wives, their children, and the plot, again. Let’s not consider true-to-life parts for men like my immigrant father, who had to work as a butcher all day, help my mother wash the dishes, then clean offices all night. Always too tired to say: I love you champ, and kiss me goodnight. Never enough time to be the father, man he wanted to be, again.

Let’s audition only straight boys like Opie, who carry slingshots and fishing poles, catch crickets and frogs, who don’t play patty-cakes with girls or grow up to marry a man like I did. Let’s keep gay characters in the closet for the camera, again: keep Miss Hathaway in skirt suits with cropped hair and single at forty, but keep her mad crush on Jethro, again; keep Uncle Arthur in his floral-print ascots with his hand on his hip, dishing out campy gossip, but keep him acting like a true lady’s man, again.

Let’s remake America as great as it never really was: Take two. Quiet on the set.

UNTIL WE COULD

for Mark

I knew it then—when we first found our eyes,

in our eyes, and everything around us—even

the din and smoke of the city—disappeared,

leaving us alone as if we were the only two

men in the world, two mirrors face-to-face:

my reflection in yours, yours in mine, infinite.

I knew since I knew you—but we couldn’t.

I caught the sunlight pining through the sheers,

traveling millions of dark miles simply to graze

your skin as I did that first dawn I studied you

sleeping beside me: I counted your eyelashes,

read your dreams like butterflies flitting under

your eyelids and ready to flutter into the room.

Yes, I praised you like a majestic creature god

forgot to create, till that morning of you tamed

in my arms, first for me to see, name you mine.

Yes, to the rise and fall of your body, your every

exhale and inhale a breath I breathed as my own

wanting to keep even the air between us as one.

Yes to all of you. Yes I knew, but still we couldn’t.

I taught you how to dance salsa by looking

into my Caribbean eyes. You learned to speak

in my tongue, while teaching me how to catch

snowflakes in my palm, love the gray clouds

of your worn-out hometown. Our years began

collecting in glossy photos time-lining our lives

across shelves and walls glancing back at us:

Us embracing in some sunset, more captivated

by each other than the sky brushed plum-rose.

Us claiming some mountain that didn’t matter

as much as our climbing it, together. Us leaning

against columns of ruins as ancient as our love

was new, or leaning into our dreams at a table

flickering candlelight in our full-mooned eyes.

I knew me as much as us, and yet we couldn’t.

Though I forgave your blue eyes turning green

each time you lied, kept believing you, though

we managed to say good morning after muted

nights in the same bed, though every door slam

told me to hold on by letting us go, and saying

you’re right became as true as saying I’m right,

till there was nothing a long walk couldn’t solve:

holding hands and hope under the streetlights

lustering like a string of pearls guiding us home,

or a stroll along the beach with our dog, the sea

washed out by our smiles, our laughter roaring

louder than the waves. Though we understood

our love was the same as our parents’, though

we dared to tell them so, and they understood.

Though we knew, we couldn’t—no one could.

When fiery kick lines and fires were set for us

by our founding mother-fathers at Stonewall,

we first spoke of defiance. When we paraded

glitter, leather, and rainbows, our word then

became pride down city streets, demanding:

Just let us be. But that wasn’t enough. Parades

became rallies—bold words on signs, shouting

until we all claimed freedom as another word

for marriage and said: Let us in, insisted: love

is love, proclaimed it into all eyes that would

listen at any door that would open, until noes

and maybes turned into yeses, town by town,

city by city, state by state, understanding us

and all those who dared to say enough until

the gavel struck into law what we always knew:

Love is the right to say: I do and I do and I do …

and I do want us to see every tulip we’ve planted

come up spring after spring, a hundred more years

of dinners cooked over a shared glass of wine, and

a thousand more movies in bed. I do until our eyes

become voices speaking without speaking, until

like a cloud meshed into a cloud, there’s no more

you, me—our names useless. I do want you to be

the last face I see—your breath my last breath,

I do, I do and will and will for those who still can’t

vow it yet, but know love’s exact reason as much

as they know how a sail keeps the wind without

breaking, or how roots dig a way into the earth,

or how the stars open their eyes to the night, or

how a vine becomes one with the wall it loves, or

how, when I hold you, you are rain in my hands.

BETWEEN [ANOTHER DOOR]

[the door] Between playing dress-up, parading in his mother’s pleated skirt, marvelous as her clip-on ruby earrings, or noosed in his father’s necktie, cuffed by his wristwatch ticking with his pulse. [the door] Between playing house with his cousin’s Barbie dolls, or careening his toy truck through backyard mud. [the door] Between the coloring book prince he was supposed to be, and made to color in blue, or the princess dress he dreamed of wearing, colored in pink. [the door] Between the Wonder Woman lunchbox he pleaded for at Kmart, or the Superman backpack his grandmother chose for him. [the door] Between his face slapped for putting on a plastic tiara at Craft World, or praised by his grandfather for wielding his plastic sword. [the door] Between cowboys shooting Indians with his brother’s cap gun, or sipping make-believe tea with his cat Ferby. [the door] Between what he could grow up to be: a doctor or nurse; a fireman or secretary; an astronaut or housewife; but never both. [the door] Between hula-hooping with the girls at recess, or dodging the boys who’d trip him, shove him, bruise him. [the door] Between the razzle-dazzle of pom-poms he longed to shake, or the boredom of football games he couldn’t follow. [the door] Between the soft wrist of the first girl he held hands with, or the stubble of the first man he kissed. [the door] Between mother’s head-bowed shame at the dinner table and his fear of father’s inch-wide belt on the hook. [the door] Between their small talk about his homework, and their silences about his friends. [the door] Between lying to a priest upright in his chair, or lying with his truth on a therapist’s couch. [the door] Between playing it straight, or leaving town for the rest of his life. [the door] Between loving the only way he could love, or loving a gun to his head, or opening [another door].

ONE PULSE—ONE POEM

Here, sit at my kitchen table, we need to write this

together. Take a sip of café con leche, breathe in

the steam and our courage to face this page, bare

as our pain. Curl your fingers around mine, curled

around my pen, hold it like a talisman in our hands

shaking, eyes swollen. But let’s not start with tears,

or the flashing lights, the sirens, nor the faint voice

over the cell phone when you heard “I love you …”

for the very last time. No, let’s ease our way into this,

let our first lines praise the plenitude of morning,

the sun exhaling light into the clouds. Let’s imagine

songbirds flocked at my window, hear them chirping

a blessing in Spanish: bendición-bendición-bendición.

Begin the next stanza with a constant wind trembling

every palm tree, yet steadying our minds just enough

to write out: bullets, bodies, death—the vocabulary

of violence raging in our minds, but still mute, choked

in our throats. Leave some white space for a moment

of silence, then fill it with lines repeating the rhythms

pulsing through Pulse that night—salsa, deep house,

electro, merengue, and techno heartbeats mixed with

gunshots. Stop the echoes of that merciless music

with a tender simile to honor the blood of our blood,

without writing blood. Use warm words to describe

the cold bodies of our husbands, lovers, and wives,

our sisters, brothers, and friends. Draw a metaphor

so we can picture the choir of their invisible spirits

rising with the smoke toward disco lights, imagine

ourselves dancing with them until the very end.

Write one more stanza—now. Set the page ablaze

with the anger in the hollow ache of our bones—

anger for the new hate, same as the old kind of hate

for the wrong skin color, for the accent in a voice,

for the love of those we’re not supposed to love.

Anger for the voice of politics armed with lies, fear

that holds democracy at gunpoint. But let’s not

end here. Turn the poem, find details for the love

of the lives lost, still alive in photos—spread them

on the table, give us their wish-filled eyes glowing

over birthday candles, their unfinished sandcastles,

their training wheels, Mickey Mouse ears, tiaras.

Show their blemished yearbook faces, silver-teeth

smiles and stiff prom poses, their tasseled caps

and gowns, their first true loves. And then share

their very last selfies. Let’s place each memory

like a star, the light of their past reaching us now,

and always, reminding us to keep writing until

we never need to write a poem like this again.

SEVENTEEN FUNERALS

Seventeen suns rising in seventeen bedroom windows. Thirty-four eyes blooming open with the light of one more morning. Seventeen reflections in the bathroom mirror. Seventeen backpacks or briefcases stuffed with textbooks or lesson plans. Seventeen good mornings at kitchen breakfasts and seventeen goodbyes at front doors.

Seventeen drives through palm-lined streets and miles of crammed highways to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School at 5901 Pine Island Road. The first bell ringing in one last school day on February fourteenth, 2018. Seventeen echoes of footsteps down hallways for five class periods: algebra, poetry, biology, art, history. Seventeen hands writing on whiteboards or taking notes at their desks until the first gunshot at 2:21 pm.

One AR-15 rifle in the hands of a nineteen-year-old mind turning hate for himself into hate for others, into one hundred fifty bullets fired in six minutes through building number twelve. Seventeen dead carried down hallways they walked, past cases of trophies they won, flyers for clubs they belonged to, lockers they won’t open again. Seventeen Valentine’s Day dates broken and cards unopened.

Seventeen bodies to identify, dozens of photo albums to page through and remember their lives. Seventeen caskets and burial garments to choose for them. Seventeen funerals to attend in twelve days. Seventeen graves dug and headstones placed—all marked with the same date of death.

Seventeen names: Alyssa. Helena. Scott. Martin—seventeen absentees forever—Nicholas. Aaron. Jamie. Luke—seventeen closets to clear out—Christopher. Cara. Gina. Joaquin—seventeen empty beds—Alaina. Meadow. Alex. Carmen. Peter—seventeen reasons to rebel with the hope these will be the last seventeen to be taken by one of three-hundred-ninety-three-million guns in America.

AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL, AGAIN

How I sang O, beautiful like a psalm at church

with my mother, her Cuban accent scaling up

every vowel: O, bee-yoo-tee-ful, yet in perfect

pitch, delicate and tuned to the radiant beams

of stained-glass light. How she taught me to fix

my eyes on the crucifix as we sang our thanks

to our savior for this country that saved us—

our voices hymns as passionate as the organ

piping towards the very heavens. How I sang

for spacious skies closer to those skies while

perched on my father’s sun-beat shoulders,

towering above our first Fourth of July parade.

How the timbre through our bodies mingled,

breathing, singing as one with the brass notes

of the marching band playing the only song

he ever learned in English. How I dared sing it

at assembly with my teenage voice cracking

for amber waves of grain that I’d never seen,

nor the purple mountain majesties—but could

imagine them in each verse rising from my gut,

every exclamation of praise I belted out until

my throat hurt: America! and again America!

How I began to read Nietzsche and doubt god,

yet still wished for god to shed His grace on

thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood.

How I still want to sing despite all the truth

of our wars and our gunshots ringing louder

than our school bells, our politicians smiling

lies at the mic, the deadlock of our divided

voices shouting over each other instead of

singing together. How I want to sing again—

beautiful or not, just to be harmony—from

sea to shining sea—with the only country

I know enough to know how to sing for.

WHAT I KNOW OF COUNTRY

Those picture books from grade-school days:

Pilgrims in tall hats, their gold-buckled shoes

I wanted so badly. White-wigged men standing

tall in velvet-curtained rooms, holding feathers

in their hands, inked words buzzing off the page

into my heart’s ear: Life, Liberty, Happiness for

we, the people, singing of shining seas crossed,

the spacious skies of a God-blessed land when

a song and a book were all I knew of country.

I’ve forgotten the capital of Vermont and Iowa,

but I remember my eyes on a map mesmerized

by faraway cities, towns I couldn’t pronounce,

or believe the vast body of this land belonged

to me, and I to it: the Rockies’ spine, blue stare

of the Great Lakes, and the endless shoulders

of coastlines, the curvy hips of harbors, rivers

like my palms’ lines traced with wonder from

beginning to end, the tiny red dot of my heart

marking where I lived—when what I knew

of country was only what I read from a map.

I wanted to live in the house I dreamed from

television: cushy sofas, crystal candy dishes,

mothers who served perfectly roasted turkeys

with instant stuffing, children with allowances

and perfect teeth, fathers driving teal-blue cars

with silver fins to some country club I’d surely

belong to someday. Though the gunfire, blood

of war beamed into my bedroom, though I fell

asleep, though our men from the moon landed

on my roof with empty promises from space—

fantasy was still all I could believe of country.

I didn’t want to change the channel, but I did:

I lifted the shades, let light shine on the carpets

stained with lies I’d missed, and saw the dust

of secrets settled over the photos. The house

began to creak, fall apart around me, alone

for years waiting at the kitchen table, the last

to know, asking my reflection in the windows:

How could you, America? With no answer for

all I knew of country was my hurt and rage.

But home was home: I dusted off the secrets,

cleaned up the lies, nailed the creaky floors

down, set a fire, and sat with history books

I’d never opened, listened to songs I’d never

played, pulled out the old map from a dark

drawer, redrew it with more colors, less lines.

I stoked the fire, burning on until finally: Okay,

nothing’s perfect, I understood, I forgive you,

I said—and forgiveness became my country.

I stayed, you stayed, we stayed for our boys

and girls returning as heroes, some without

legs or arms, for our Challenger and Towers

fainting from the sky, for the terrified lives

of the Big Easy stranded like flightless birds

on roofs, for the sea that drowned our North,

but we swept each grain of sand back to shore,

for the candles we lit for our twenty children

of Sandy Hook, feeling what we’ve always felt:

to know a country takes all we know of love:

some days better than others, but never easy

to keep our promise every morning of every

year, of every century, and wake up, stumble

downstairs with all our raging hope, sit down

at the kitchen table again, still blurry-eyed,

still tired, and say: Listen, we need to talk.

AND SO WE ALL FALL DOWN

after and for Anselm Kiefer’s installation

Steigend steigend sinke nieder

(rising, rising, falling down), 2009–2012

And so the hunks of pavement heaved and set

before us are every road we’ve tired, and those

we wish we had, and those we will, and those

we never will, or those that’ll dead-end when

our empire ends. And so let our debris to be

reassembled as tenderly as these curated bits

of rubble letting us see how chaos yields order,

and order chaos. And so let our nation’s faces

be these boulders like tiny, bruised moons out

of orbit, and yet enduring, still spinning across

the shiny gallery floor, despite the brutal love

of the universe and brutal love for our country.

And so let us believe we won’t simply end like

the speck of a star that will explode as quietly

as a poem whispered above our rooftops into

a black hole into the black night. And so let us

believe there is still eternity even in our ruin,

like this art made out of these remains, made

more alive by destruction. And so all the dead

stalks of these sunflowers embalmed with paint

and fixed by our imagination dangling forever

from the ceiling like acrobats that’ll never fall.

And so the hope in what they let us hope: that

our ideals won’t all disappear, that some trace

of what we have believed must endure beyond

our decay, beyond entropy’s law, assuring us

we’ll live on, even after our inevitable dissolve.

DECLARATION OF INTER-DEPENDENCE

Such has been the patient sufferance …

We’re a mother’s bread, instant potatoes, milk at a checkout line. We’re her three children pleading for bubble gum and their father. We’re the three minutes she steals to page through a tabloid, needing to believe even stars’ lives are as joyful and bruised.

Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury …

We’re her second job serving an executive absorbed in his Wall Street Journal at a sidewalk café shadowed by skyscrapers. We’re the shadows of the fortune he won and the family he lost. We’re his loss and the lost. We’re a father in a coal town who can’t mine a life anymore because too much and too little has happened, for too long.

A history of repeated injuries and usurpations …

We’re the grit of his main street’s blacked-out windows and graffitied truths. We’re a street in another town lined with royal palms, at home with a Peace Corps couple who collect African art. We’re their dinner-party talk of wines, wielded picket signs, and burned draft cards. We’re what they know: it’s time to do more than read the New York Times, buy fair-trade coffee and organic corn.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress …

We’re the farmer who grew the corn, who plows into his couch as worn as his back by the end of the day. We’re his TV set blaring news having everything and nothing to do with the field dust in his eyes or his son nested in the ache of his arms. We’re his son. We’re a black teenager who drove too fast or too slow, talked too much or too little, moved too quickly, but not quick enough. We’re the blast of the bullet leaving the gun. We’re the guilt and the grief of the cop who wished he hadn’t shot.

We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor …

We’re the dead, we’re the living amid the flicker of vigil candlelight. We’re in a dim cell with an inmate reading Dostoevsky. We’re his crime, his sentence, his amends, we’re the mending of ourselves and others. We’re a Buddhist serving soup at a shelter alongside a stockbroker. We’re each other’s shelter and hope: a widow’s fifty cents in a collection plate and a golfer’s ten-thousand-dollar pledge for a cure.

We hold these truths to be self-evident …

We’re the cure for hatred caused by despair. We’re the good morning of a bus driver who remembers our name, the tattooed man who gives up his seat on the subway. We’re every door held open with a smile when we look into each other’s eyes the way we behold the moon. We’re the moon. We’re the promise of one people, one breath declaring to one another: I see you. I need you. I am you.

CLOUD ANTHEM

Until we are clouds that tear like bread but

mend like bones. Until we weave each other

like silk sheets shrouding mountains, or bear

gales that shear us. Until we soften our hard

edges, free to become any shape imaginable:

a rose or an angel crafted by the breeze like

papier-mâché or a lion or dragon like marble

chiseled by gusts. Until we scatter ourselves—

pebbles of gray puffs, but then band together

like stringed pearls. Until we learn to listen to

each other, as thunderous as opera or as soft

as a showered lullaby. Until we truly treasure

the sunset, lavish it in mauve, rust, and rose.

Until we have the courage to vanish like sails

into the horizon, or be at peace, anchored still.

Until we move without any measure, as vast

as continents or as petite as islands, floating

in an abyss of virtual blue we belong to. Until

we dance tango with the moon and comfort

the jealous stars, falling. Until we care enough

for the earth to bless it as morning fog. Until

we realize we’re muddy as puddles, pristine

as lakes not yet clouds. Until we remember

we’re born from rivers and dewdrops. Until

we are at ease to dissolve as wispy showers,

not always needing to clash like godly yells

of thunder. Until we believe lightning roots

are not our right to the ground. Though we

collude into storms that ravage, we can also

sprinkle ourselves like memories. Until we

tame the riot of our tornadoes, settle down

into a soft drizzle, into a daydream. Though

we may curse with hail, we can absolve with

snowflakes. We can die valiant as rainbows,

and hold light in our lucid bodies like blood.

We can decide to move boundlessly, without

creed or desire. Until we are clouds meshed

within clouds sharing a kingdom with no king,

a city with no walls, a country with no name,

a nation without any borders or claim. Until

we abide as one together in one single sky.

HERE I AM

New Poems
Part 2

UNCERTAIN-SEA PRINCIPLE

after Werner Heisenberg

the more I try to measure x

the more I know where I am

I scribble my name across the sand

the more I know where I’m going

the ebb of each wave seduces me

the more I know how to get there

freighter lights burn on the horizon

like candelabras floating toward port

the more I know when I’ll arrive

the tide rises on cue to kiss the shore hello

the less I try to solve for y

the less I know where I am

rustling palms protest losing

their green to the darkness

the less I know where I’ve been

the ocean vanishes into the midnight sky

the less I know who I can be

there’s no horizon in the stark night

the less I know who I am

I erase my name with a wave of my palm

the more I try to determine my I

the less I can measure y

the less I know where I’m going

the burnt-orange moon rises, cools, disappears

the less I know how to get there

silhouettes of sailboats sleep till morning

the less I know when I’ll arrive

sea oats sway to the wind’s pitch

like inverted pendulums of timelessness

the less I know where I am

seagulls abandon the sea every night

the more I can solve for x

the more I know where I’ve been

the sea gives and gives itself to the shore

yet returns again and again to itself

the more I know who I can be

the midnight sky vanishes into the ocean

the more I know who I am

even in the dark my eyes shape clouds

the more I know that I am, here

I clutch a fistful of sand, breathe, listen

the less I can determine my self

SEASHORE: ANOVILLEJO

You: a wave born from everywhere?

From nowhere.

You: destined to crest, spill yourself?

Into myself.

You: who leave no prints on the sand?

Yet I am.

Again I sink back to sea, damned

to keep breaking on foreign shores,

to live always in exile, unsure

from nowhere into myself. Yet I am.

HINENI

When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to look, God called to him out of the bush: “Moses! Moses!” He answered, “Here I am.”

—EXODUS 3:4

God of these waves’ gracious hands anointing my feet

—hineni—here I am—again trudging

along this shore with the sins of my greed for love,

sins of my gluttony for homeland, sins of my wrath against myself

—hineni—here I am—again asking

the ebb to wash my guilt back into the depths of forgiveness.

God of these salt-laden breaths, these breezes

—hineni—here I am—again breathing their balm into my body of hurt, that I might heal and exhale words to ease this world’s aching.

God of these devout seagulls peering into our everyday eternity, inscribe anew across the pale blue of the sky’s vellum

—hineni—here I am—again reading

the clouds’ ellipses, following their drift into glimpses of a divinity I must divine in myself.

God of the infinite possibilities of sand I was sculpted from

—hineni—here I am—again infinitely

a boy with bucket and shovel still wanting to sculpt

something almighty out of the sparkly grains of myself,

something sacred that can’t be washed away, something eternal.

God of this sunset’s tangerine eye burning holy between eyelids of sky and sea

—hineni—here I am—

called by your gaze to ask once again: what would you have me do with the rest of this undone life of mine

—here as I am?

WEATHER OF MY WEATHERING

Some days mostly cloudy, a smeared canvas

of vapory questions stalled in the gray skies

of my mind, waiting for answers to blow in

and clear this overcast life. Then days I beam

mostly sunny with the sweat of boyhood,

riding my bike. No end to the innocence

of my gusting endlessly down sidewalks,

no doubts in my forecast. Other days

mostly rain, the torrent of boys in high school

who spat on me: faggot, faggot, you faggot, pelting

my soul. At my feet puddles of hate I’d learn

to jump over. Followed by much calmer days,

balmy as the poems I recited out loud to

myself back then, lines breezing through

my room, across my ears, trusting my life

to blow where it must sometimes

thunderstorms, rapturous as those nights

ignited with the amber lightning of rum

on my lips pressed against men I’d engulf

with my lust for lust. Some nights clear as

all the years I spent couched in therapy,

the eye of my pain’s hurricane spiraling

in me with my mother’s regrets, father’s

absence, and grandmother’s hate. Today,

though, calls for a warm front as my smile

in the mirror tells me to keep smiling at

all this living, as little as I may know how

to predict the weather of my weathering.

LIFE WITHOUT RAIN

Imagine: the last of the roses—dead

hanging in every kitchen window like

upside-down martyrs, drying humbly,

their spirals of brittle petals on display.

Imagine: the river dry, bare and opened

like the split carcass of some giant beast

exposing its ribs of bleach-white stones

embedded in soft folds of muddy flesh.

Imagine: rainbows of tattered umbrellas,

sugar-yellow raincoats, bottles of rain—

all encased in museum glass, placards

teaching us how succulent earth was.

Imagine: the last perished drops, never

again hear the tin jangle of a hundred

thousand silver pins falling on rooftops

not the gush of waterfalls at doorways.

Imagine: windswept bands never again

strumming windowpanes, vibrating like

a harp, or the incessant drum of drops

on the green and taut palms of leaves.

Imagine: forgetting the jubilant gnats

swarming about the cloud-cooled air,

foretelling the eclipse of an imminent

storm taking custody of the sunlight.

Imagine: remembering your last breath

of the world, wet, full, how you’ll miss

your drenched hair, drops dammed at

your eyebrows, spilling down your nose

to bless your lips, how you will never

taste rain again, never catch the tears

of clouds comforting you, those days

they stopped your tears’ fall. Imagine.

THANK YOU: FOR NOT LETTING ME DIE

for Michael Kalamaris

For: the mellow moon of your face, breaking

the lonely smoke of that bar with the brilliance

of your simple hello. I gave your smile my name,

and you gave my eyes yours, and that was all

the eternity we needed to lean into each other.

For: that first night you took my body, laid me

on the luscious cloud of your satin duvet, made

me holy, an angel, guiltless at last, worthy of all

the blessings of those divine kisses of yours over

my chin and shoulders, at each of my fingertips.

For: those juicy lamb chops I’d never tasted until

you played chef for me the afternoon you spent

aproned, lavishing me with a seven-course dinner

in your one-bedroom apartment, more tantalized

yet by the spun-sugar love we made as dessert.

For: that weekend you gave me New York to lose

ourselves in, believe our love would go on, long as

5th Avenue’s glam, delectable as Dean & DeLuca’s

macarons, unique as the rings we bought in SoHo,

our vows breezy as that picnic in Central Park.

For: playing Shirley Horn for me through shared

earbuds as we flew back home, listening as one to

her lyrics as if our own: Isn’t it a pity we never, ever

met before. Lyrics to love the lyrics of us: Let’s forget

the past, let’s both agree that I’m for you, you’re for me.

For: those thirty thousand miles in midair and

those three hours you held me in the wings

of your arms, letting the man I had never been

die gladly, letting me be reborn in the promise

of your every breath breathing new life into me.

For: the fountain at our park when you told me:

I can’t love you this much any longer. Trickles turned

into tears then, but now I hear what you meant:

that your loving would’ve slowly killed the man

you gave life to. Thank you for not letting him die.

BLUEJAY DIALOGUE: AN OVILLEJO

Say you had wings, where would you go?

Toward my unknown.

Where would you land to stitch your nest?

I can’t rest.

If you could choose, where would you die?

As I fly.

Then why sit on your porch and spy

on me? What does your soul hunger

for? To be free as your flutter,

fly toward my unknown till I rest.

THE CUTTING

I saw the blade slip, slit my palm, no longer crying just because of the onions, but

my blood, as if the blood of another animal I’d hurt, compelled to save it, save

myself by pressing my wound with my dish towel to stanch the flow, quiet the guilt

of cutting into my flesh, as if I’d meant to do it. But then the miracle of witnessing

the gash steadily healing itself, how the will of my skin cells knew exactly how to mend

such a divide, called each other to meet at that river of dried blood, and restore

the lifeline across my palm without so much as a scar, unlike my own thoughts, cutting into me,

bleeding tears, wishing my mind could heal as perfectly.

WRITING HOME

I’ve straightened the arching fronds of palms

into the stiff lines of poems that pity them for

knowing no other home but the patch of sand

where they were born to die |I’ve considered

seagulls as a simile that envies their home as

the invisible wind, the expanse of ocean and

earth I can’t soar above | I’ve repeated images

of waves and waves, marveled at how they die,

seep secretly through the pores of sand back

into the homeland of their own seas, again

and again, as I wish I could | I’ve personified

the moon, needing it to speak in the voice of

my soul to myself, lost in the sky of my own

boundless darkness, yet at ease in the universe

of my loneness | I’ve given verse to the epic

lifeline of stones: once molten souls spewed

from volcanoes’ mouths, then their hardening

their weathering into pebbles I get to behold

in my fists as mute metaphors for my own

journey’s questions of where I began, where

I will end | I’ve jotted down the beats of rain

that rhyme with the soft syllables of snow,

tasking me to ask myself if I could ever be

as fluid and homeless | I’ve made an allegory

out of wildflower seeds: how they surrender

their destiny to windborne miles that blow

them to root in my tamed garden | Maybe

this is their home more than it will ever be

mine, though I’ve rendered my poems with

images of them | That’s what I’m wondering

tonight: if every line I’ve written, or will, is

merely a long road that dead-ends | Always

breaking on the thought that my ultimate

home is ultimately some wordless place.

FOR THE HOMELAND OF MY BODY

For my ears:

still these ears, lullabied by Madrid’s rains

the day I was born into the tempest of

my parents’ exile, holding their lost Cuba

in their arms along with me.

For my hands:

still these hands, sculpting sandcastles, guarded

by the seagulls and palm trees that raised me

to reach for the sun, to be as confident

as Miami’s skyscrapers rising as I did.

For my feet:

still these feet wandering forever through

my father’s sugarcane fields, tousled by

the wind of his dead voice blowing with

stories of the sweet-sour life his machete

earned for him, for me.

For my lungs:

still these lungs, breathing the scent of mangos

my mother peddled by dirt roads to pay for

her schoolbooks, the dust in her eyes

graced by the sea-green Caribbean still

hemming the island of her life.

For my eyes:

still these eyes, peering back into the sparkling

shore I left for the stark brick of New England

walls enclosing years of my loneliness, quiet

as the snow-covered fields out my window.

For my hips:

still these hips, swaying to carnival drums

with the Brazilian lover whose samba pulsed

through me, let me lust for the hills and valleys

of his body, only let it all go.

For my veins:

still these veins, coursing through me like

the canals of a sinking city, the cobblestone

maze of its streets lead me to lose myself

in the echoes of my own footsteps.

For my legs:

still these legs, standing at the mouth of

a volcano, kissing a man I’ll fall in love with,

fiery and gorgeous as the lava at our feet, as

the sunsets above the home we’ll build

nested in the thick bones of northern pines.

For my flesh:

still this flesh, alive with all the places I have

ever loved, or lost, or have yet to find and

to lose, this constant homeland of my body,

wherein all my homelands reside at once, as

they will do, until my body’s memory

disappears into the dust of my own dust.

BECOME ME

for my husband

Become the salt of my blood, my veins’

abating pulse. Become the soft alabaster

of my softening bones, the stale marrow

of this aging life. Become my dull teeth,

and faded lips, still glossing a smile when

you smile into my dimming eyes. Become

my eyes that’ve studied the anatomy of

our love: my arms in the arc of your arms,

my thighs knotted with yours, our fingers

woven into each other. Become my lungs,

their last gasp, my nerves firing through

every scene of our loving. Become the soil

of my soul. There’s nothing more blessed

than taking you with me into the ground.

REVERSE BUCKET LIST

☑ Walked across the dirt of my mother’s childhood home in Cuba that she never stepped into again. Felt the bareness of her life under my feet, yet the abundance of the country she gave up, gave me to understand her losses. Saw her never again gazing up at her dreams swaying in her backyard palm trees, never again gossiping about boys’ kisses with her sisters at the kitchen table on rainy days, never again cradling her mother’s face, even on the day she died without her.

☑ Visited my father’s grave one last time. Confessed to the bronze plaque of his full name and color of his eyes that I grew up to incessantly twirl my hair, to sink into my sofa, daydream myself away and master the art of my silence, just as he did. Plucked a fistful of dandelions I laid down and forgave his void in my life. Forgave myself for not knowing how to mourn him, for wanting more from him than he knew how to give.

☑ Swam through the treacherous waters of my grandmother’s voice drowning me as a faggot with her hateful words. Survived to hear she spoke a kind of cruel yet loving desire for me to pass as a macho in the world she only knew as cruel, to save me from pain through the pain of her. Learned to adore her as my friend who’d pull a magical mint or quarter out of her pocketbook, who taught me how to roller-skate, how to tell a good joke, how bizarre love can be.

☑ Traveled into my husband’s green eyes that welcomed me into the paradise I found in him, in the throbbing hearts of volcanoes we climbed, in the icy-blue silence of glaciers we scaled, in the fury of rivers we rafted, in the solid marble columns and teetering skyscrapers of cities we shared, in the azure shores we strolled, and every tangerine sunset and platinum moonrise we witnessed, that witnessed back the daring light of our adventurous love.

☑ Met my obsessions: waves born to break back into the sea, starlight visible or not, mountains weathering or inching into the sky, clouds lingering or drifting, suns glowing or dying, birds visiting then fleeing, the moon’s always changing face, sandcastles meant to last forever, crumbling, the fickle wind combing palm trees, or not. All that’s never fixed, never at home, forever fleeting like me. Understood that.

TIME CAPSULE

—a lock of my mother’s bouffant the day I gazed at her not as my mother, but an immortal beauty, even as her hand slipped away from mine and she tumbled down the stairs, broken, teaching me she wouldn’t be forever—

—the whiff of the first raindrops’ sizzle on a summer sidewalk the day my grandmother yelled go, and let me go, let me fly for the first time, pedaling my bike straight into the thunderheads clapping for me—

—the names of crayons I wore down to stubs to recolor the sorrow of my mother’s eyes, spring green, my father’s frown, lemon-yellow, and my own lonely stick figure as the razzmatazz of my imagination—

—the precious seconds of the last dusk I lingered on the porch with my grandfather in pitch-perfect silence, when I heard the stars speak light in his eyes saying I needn’t be the same kind of man he had to—

—decades-old trinkets from my memories: a whisker from the first man whose kiss scratched my lips, the rainbow of dance-club lights, the burn of sunrises waking up in my apartment alone, only my silence beside me—

—those first syllables from my husband’s lips when he spoke life into me: So, do you live here? the timbre of his tender words through all our years scaling far away volcanoes or stoking the flames of our own fireplace—

—all the mementos of truth I’ve seen before every mirror understanding my eyes holding the certitude of I am, along with the doubts of I am not the terrible joy of myself as a rose dying in the chipped vase of my body—

—a piece of the moon the night I first saw it as my soul: a thing orbiting my heart, glowing immortal within me, unlike any trinket I might stuff in a box and leave behind. So then, bury only my bones, in my end—

—though they’ll rot, at least the earth will know the story I had to let go—

LIVING WILL

ARTICLE I

I, RICARDO DE JESÚS BLANCO-VALDÉS, being of sound soul and a resident of the state of my surrender, do hereby revoke all other mortal wills and publish this poem as the last will of my will to live on, testament to all I must leave unfinished.

ARTICLE II

I bequeath, devise, and give to my ashes the ashes of all the following:

A. My mother’s HEIRLOOM PEARLS, each bead a hardened memory harvested from the sea of her sorrows for the Cuban homeland she deserted, a strung choker of lustrous losses.

B. My father’s GOLD-TONED TIMEX, its wobbly hands, its battered face, much like his own, lost in the hours of this country, until his heart could no longer wind itself. His pulse still ticks at my wrist, but it’s time I stop waiting for the father he never became.

C. My grandmother’s RECIPE BOX, along with all the words, sweet or pungent, she’d serve me at the dinner table: my boy / sissy / my dear / faggot / my love.

D. My grandfather’s GILDED CIGAR BOX filled with my childhood’s rainbow of colored pencils and memories of the silver-gray smoke signals from his cigar puffs that never quite spelled it out: I know who you are … but I still love you.

E. My stockpile of PHOTO ALBUMS with posed selves I’ll never understand pressed between their pages like dried rose petals: grainy snapshots of sandcastles crumbling with my innocence; overexposed birthday candles lighting my wish to be the someone else I became, but never fully loved; my prom portrait smiling into a future life of children and church I never let go of completely.

F. All the accounts in MY JOURNALS: the scribbles of I’m sorry I never voiced to lovers I left without explanation; my inked hopes of what if’s still banked in my heart for those who left me; the exclamation points the day I met the man I would marry; the ensuing pages of question marks and ellipses of our love’s mystery, unresolved.

G. EVERY HOME in which I’ve tried to find a homeland: the musty apartment in Hartford scented by candles I lit to see me through my darkness; the Guatemalan villa circled by volcanoes as smoldering and unpredictable as my desires; the dusty antiques of the Virginian townhouse that matched my taste for a tangible history, even if not my own.

H. All these INTANGIBLE ASSETS: the investment my eyes have made in silver stars; the gold coins of every sunset I’ve pocketed; my garden’s stock of gerberas and sunflower stalks; the worth of every diamond snowflake and drop of platinum rain I can’t take with me.

ARTICLE III

If I could return, I would do so on the CONDITION that I be regranted the entire estate of my memory so that I might cherish what I forgot to cherish; give what I forgot to give; resolve what I forgot to resolve; write the poems I forgot to write; save myself from having to die again INCOMPLETE.

SELF TO SELF

What have you yearned for all your life, Richard? You,

who’s aged in me. Do we know enough now to know

that our answer isn’t happiness? Not the sweet petals

of some flower we’ve imagined should forever scent

our heart. Not the nomad clouds we’ve tried to hold

still in our eyes, long enough to see our soul eternally

at home in them across a homeless sky. Not the face of

the moon, a mime whose gestures of shadow and light

have entertained our desire for immortal glory. Not

the persistence of waves we’ve wanted to believe are

as fated and willed as we’ve wished to be. Oh, Richard

have I been asking you the wrong question? Maybe

it’s not what we’ve yearned for, but what we’ve always

lived on. Isn’t our answer the joy of all the temporal

moments that grace us? A bud just before it blooms,

or leans into its wilt. A cloud just before it’s sighed

from a wave’s wisp and drifts into the destiny of wind.

The dark moon free of our eyes just before it ascends

into the slavery of its sunlit cycles. Tides just before

the purpose of ebb or flow. And Richard, just before

we’re Richard, just before the greed of our ego rises,

needing to shine before we slip into yet another day.

ANTI-POEM

Coffee, strong and bitter as the street

outside, waking up to rainfall wetting

city lights and leaves. People suddenly

afraid of water, moving shelled inside

their umbrellas, colorful props in some

bizarre choreography of headless bodies.

For once, I’m not compelled to imagine

their faces above their arms clutching

briefcases, toting purses, and jeweled

with watches, diamond bracelets. Not

tempted to give them or myself a name,

nor stories of sorrow or joy, nor places

we run to become who we’re not. None

of it matters to me today. I’m transparent

behind the storefront window, watching

the city move with eyes that aren’t mine,

but someone’s who for a moment rests

with wanting nothing but what rain gives.

A GOOD DAY TO DIE

When there’s nothing but a knowing, when

you wake up to the stare of your dog’s eyes

like tiny brown suns shining with the truth

of all you are before the alarm rings, when

you lock your door, turn up the volume and

dance barefoot, swaying alone with your eyes

closed, your robe open to the world and all

you lust for is a song to hold your body, when

you beam a Good morning at the post office,

or Great to see you at the market, meaning

every word, cut by your lips into little jewels

that sparkle with syllables of kindness, when

you toss your to-do list in the garbage, waste

yourself in the lazy beauty of being witness

to the gestures of an oak, a squirrel’s dramatic

pause, to the frenzy at the bird feeder, when

you sit under the clouds for dinner, filled with

gratitude for more than bread, and say grace

for dusk’s feast of savory hues and the dessert

of sugary stars that indulge your soul, when

you smile back at your smile floating in the fog

of the bathroom mirror, your faint yet fulfilled

eyes return the gaze of god within you pleased

with the honest life you’ve given yourself, when

all that’s left is a knowing that you don’t need

to know yet another home in some new city for

the love of something other than you, blanketed

in the peace of your worn bed, ready to die with

all you are or aren’t, all you’ve given or gotten,

all you’ve believed or doubted, all you’ve done

or haven’t done, ready to kiss the moon’s cheek

goodbye, forever, but the moon says: No, not yet.

MOONRISE

I write: a giant tiger’s eye peering out

from the dome of a dark thicket, then

I write: the worn face of a doubloon,

a gold fortune lighting the poor night,

and the moon says: I am simply the moon.

Yet I write on—an amber pearl rising,

fading into a geisha’s porcelain pallor,

a humble seductress, a chaste coquette.

I write of the color of white chocolate,

the fine texture of talc like the cinders

of light settling out of the darkness onto

my thought-filled page of inked words,

when the moon pauses, tells me: Listen, I am

as rough as you, merely hard rock, gray dust.

SAY THIS ISN‘T THE END

Say we live on, say we’ll forget the masks

that kept us from dying from, the invisible,

but say we won’t ever forget the invisible

masks we realized we had been wearing

most our lives, disguising ourselves from

each other. Say we won’t veil ourselves again,

that our souls will keep breathing timelessly,

that we won’t return to clocking our lives

with lists and appointments. Say we’ll keep

our days errant as sun showers, impulsive

as a star’s falling. Say this isn’t our end.

Say I’ll get to be thrilled as a boy spinning

again in the barber’s chair, tell him how

I’d missed his winged scissors chirping

away my shaggy hair eclipsing my eyes,

his warm clouds of foam, the sharp love

of his razor’s tender strokes on my beard.

Say I’ll get more chances to say more than

thanks Shirley at the checkout line, praise

her turquoise jewelry, her son in photos

taped to her register, dare to ask about

her throat cancer. Say this isn’t her end.

Say my mother’s wrinkled eyes won’t die

from the goodbye kiss I last gave her, say

that wasn’t our final goodbye, nor will we

be stranded behind a quarantine window

trying to see our refracted faces beyond

the glare, read our lips, press the warmth

of our palms to the cold glass. Say I won’t

be kept from her bedside to listen to her

last words, that we’ll have years to speak

of the decades of our unspoken love that

separated us. Say this isn’t how we’ll end.

Say all the restaurant chairs will get back

on their feet, that we’ll all sit for another

lifetime of savoring all we had never fully

savored: the server as poet reciting flavors

not on the menu, the candlelight flicker

as appetizer, friends’ spicy gossip and rich

saucy laughter, sharing entrées of memories

no longer six feet apart, our beloved’s lips

as velvety as the wine, the dessert served

sweet in their eyes. Say this is no one’s end.

Say my husband and I will keep on honing

our home cooking together, find new recipes

for love in the kitchen: our kisses and tears

while dicing onions, eggs cracking in tune

to Aretha’s croon, dancing as we heat up

the oven. Say we’ll never stop feasting on

the taste of our stories, sweet or spicy, say

our table will never be set for just one,

say neither of us dies, many more toasts

to our good health. Say we will never end.

Say we’ll all still take the time we once

needed to walk alone and gently through

our neighborhoods, keep noticing beauty

in ant hills and sidewalk cracks blossoming

weeds, of yappy dogs and silent swing sets

rusting in backyards, of neat hedges hiding

mansions and scruffy lawns of boarded-up

homes. Say we won’t forget our seeing

that every kind of life is a life worth living,

worth saving. Say this is nobody’s end.

Or say this will be my end, say the loving

hands of gloved, gowned angels risking

their lives to save mine won’t be able to

keep me here. Say this is the last breath

of my last poem, will of my last thoughts:

I’ve witnessed massive swarms of fireflies

grace my garden like never before, drawn

to the air cleansed of our incessant greed,

their glow a flashback to the time before

us, omen of earth without us, a reminder

we’re never immune to nature. I say this

might be the end we’ve always needed

to begin again. I say this may be the end to

let us hope to heal, to reach the stars. Again

I’ll say: heal, reach, and become the stars

that became us, whether this is our end—

or not.

NOTES

Questioning Villa Vizcaya Museum and Gardens. The Vizcaya Museum and Gardens (previously known as simply Villa Vizcaya) make up the former estate of businessman James Deering, built between 1914 and 1922 in Coconut Grove, a present-day neighborhood of Miami, Florida.

Radiant Beings: Photos by Joyce Tenneson. Inspired by Joyce Tenneson’s photography book, Radiant Beings: The Magical Essence of Flowers.

—anatomy of light— was commissioned by LnS Gallery for Transcendentalism, Distilled, a solo exhibition of artist Rafael Soriano, one of the major Latin American artists of his generation and one of the premier painters of Cuba.

To the Artist of the Invisible. A commissioned poem commemorating the 2013 Fragrance Foundation Awards and performed at Lincoln Center in New York City, April 2013.

Big Wood River. Written while the writer in residence at the Hemingway House and Preserve in Ketchum, Idaho, where he died by suicide. The house sits on twelve acres along the Big Wood River and is managed by the Community Library. The writer-in-residence program encourages ongoing creative work and deep thinking in a landscape that Hemingway loved. I remain ever so grateful to the Community Library for the experience of a lifetime and the poem that arose from it.

What You Didn’t Let Us Lose. Andrew John Sweet was an American photographer known for his documentary photography of the residents of South Beach in the 1960’s and 1970’s, with a particular focus on the Jewish community, many of them Holocaust survivors. Sweet was murdered in 1982, when he was twenty-eight years old.

Visiting Elizabeth. A variation of a glosa, a Spanish form that quotes four lines of poetry as an epigraph from another poem or poet. These four lines act as a refrain in the final line of the four stanzas written by the poet. So the first line of the epigraph would be the final line of the first stanza, the second line ends the second stanza, etc.

What Governs Us: Written for the occasion of Governor Janet Mills’s second-term inauguration on January 4, 2023. She is the first female governor of Maine.

Décima Guajira. A variation of a décima, a traditional form popular in Latin America and Spain. It’s octosyllabic with ten lines to the stanza. Often recited, or sung, with improvisation and written with variations in different countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9cima#Poetry

Como Tú / Like You / Like Me is dedicated to the young people impacted by DACA and the DREAM Act, who are often called DREAMers. DACA refers to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an American immigration policy that allows some individuals who were brought to the United States illegally as children to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation. The DREAM Act (short for the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act) was a bill in Congress that would have granted legal status to certain undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children and went to school here. Although several versions of the bill have been introduced in Congress since 2001, it has never passed.

Island Body was commissioned by Bacardi Limited and served as the script for a short film and radio segment. While this was a more commercial commission, as a Cuban American I obviously felt personally drawn to the plight of exiles like the Arechabala family (originators of Havana Club rum), who were forced to flee Cuba at gunpoint. The poem has been slightly revised for this volume.

Until We Could was commissioned to commemorate and celebrate the tenth anniversary of Freedom to Marry, the organization that developed the leading national strategy for marriage equality in the US. The poem is dedicated to Mark Neveu and our journey together for over twenty years. A short film of the poem was produced by Peter Spears and narrated by Ben Forster and Robin Wright. The poem has been slightly revised for this volume.

One Pulse—One Poem was written in response to the Pulse nightclub shooting of June 12, 2016. The tragedy particularly disturbed and affected me as a gay man, who understands that places like Pulse are not merely nightclubs; they are community; they are a surrogate home for many like me. To have such a home desecrated in such a manner was doubly devastating. In that respect, I intended for the poem to speak of the very act of writing a poem as a way to process our shared grief and honor the lives of the victims and survivors. The poem appeared in Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, a powerful anthology that brings together the voices of poets and citizens most impacted to call for the end of gun violence with the activist power of poetry. One Pulse—One Poem was first published in the Miami Herald.

And So We All Fall Down is a quasi-ekphrastic poem reflecting on Anselm Kiefer’s Steigend steigend sinke nieder (rising, rising, falling down) 2009–2012 large-scale installation, an assembly of debris collected from the demolition of the Rue des Archives in Paris.

Uncertain-Sea Principle was inspired by the uncertainty principle formulated by German physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg in 1927. It states that we cannot know both the position and speed of a particle, such as a photon or an electron, with perfect accuracy; the more we know of a particle’s position, the less we know about its speed, and vice versa. I “applied” this principle to my search for home in this stereoscope, also known as a contrapuntal poem, which can be read in more than one way, such as left to right across the two columns or down first one column and then the other.

Seashore and Bluejay Dialogue. An ovillejo is an old Spanish form popularized by Miguel de Cervantes. A ten-line poem comprised of three rhyming couplets (or two-line stanzas) and a quatrain (or four-line stanza). The first line of each couplet is eight syllables long and presents a question to which the second line responds in three to four syllables—either as an answer or an echo. The quatrain is also referred to as a redondilla with an abba rhyme pattern. The final line of the quatrain combines lines 2, 4, and 6 together.

Hineni. The word hineni is found in the Hebrew Scriptures and means “here I am”. […] On spelling alone, the word would seem to appear 178 times in the scriptures. Once vowels are applied, however, it is easy to confuse hineni with the ubiquitous hi’nih’ni, which means “I am here.” These two words apparently mean the same thing, but they do not. […] Hineni accomplishes two things: the caller has the full attention of the protagonist whose story will change in a dramatic way. The reader must wait to find out what the protagonist will be asked to do. […] Hineni is different. It says, “I am here to listen to whatever the caller has to say, but […] I do not yet know what the caller wants from me.” http://www.jewishchronicle.org/2014/11/30/hineni-here-i-am-and-i-am-here-are-different/

Thank You: For Not Letting Me Die. The lines: “Isn’t it a pity we never, ever / met before” and “Let’s forget / the past, let’s both agree that I’m for you, you’re for me” are from Shirly Horn’s rendition of Isn’t It a Pity, composed by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin.

CREDITS

Excerpt from “Questions of Travel” from Poems by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 2011 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Publisher’s Note and compilation copyright © 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved.

“Time as Art in the Eternal City,” “A Poet in Venice,” “We’re Not Going to Malta …” “Somewhere to Paris,” “Torsos at the Louvre,” “After Barcelona, in Barcelona,” “Directions to the Beach of the Dead,” “Winter of the Volcanoes: Guatemala,” “Bargaining with a Goddess,” “Return from El Cerrado,” “Silent Family Clips,” “Papá’s Bridge,” “What’s Love Got to Do?,” “Visiting Metaphors at South Point,” “Translation for Mamá,” “The Perfect City Code,” “When I Was a Little Cuban Boy,” “Looking for Blackbirds, Hartford,” “How Can You Love New York?,” “No More Than This, Provincetown,” “Crossing Boston Harbor,” “Mexican Almuerzo in New England,” and “where it begins—where it ends” from Directions to the Beach of the Dead by Richard Blanco. © 2005 Richard Blanco. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press.

Selected poems from City of a Hundred Fires, © 1998 Richard Blanco, reproduced by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Selected poems from Looking for The Gulf Motel, © 2012 Richard Blanco, reproduced by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

From How to Love a Country. Copyright © 2019 by Richard Blanco. Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to the editors of the publications in which the following new poems first appeared: Scientific American (“Uncertain-Sea Principle”); The Atlantic (“Why I Needed To” and “Say This Isn’t the End”); Academy of American Poets, Poem-A-Day (“Maine Yet Miami”); The Map of Every Lilac Leaf, Smith College Museum of Art (“Music in Our Hands”); Grist: Journal of the Literary Arts (“Big Wood River”); and The Red Letters Project (“The Splintering”). The poems “Complaint of El Río Grande,” “between [another door],” and “Cloud Anthem” first appeared in Boundaries, a limited-edition fine press book published by Two Ponds Press.

My most heartful gratitude for Sandra Cisneros, whose work and life example first gave me permission to tell my story; for Professor Campbell McGrath, whose mentorship first fostered my voice; for Rob McQuilkin, the best agent and literary buddy I could’ve ever wished for; for Helene Atwan from Beacon Press, who embraced my work and champions all the good that poetry can do in the world; and for the great minds, generous hearts, and beautiful souls of those who continue to nurture my voice and my life: Sonia Bonilla, Nikki Moustaki, Brian Leung, Ruth Behar, Caridad Moro-Gronlier, Emma Trelles, Spencer Reece, Kim Dower, Eduardo Aparicio, Jan Beatty, Ed Ochester, Alison Granucci, Francisco Aragón, Ada Limón, Natasha Trethewey, and Patricia Smith.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Selected by President Obama as the fifth inaugural poet in US history, Richard Blanco was the first Latinx, immigrant, and gay person to serve in that role. In 2023, Blanco was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Biden. Blanco was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and has received numerous honorary doctorates. He has taught at Georgetown University, American University, and Wesleyan University, and currently is an associate professor at Florida International University.

Born in Madrid to Cuban exile parents and raised in Miami in a lower-working-class family, Richard Blanco has navigated cultural identity, sexuality, and sociopolitical matters in his five collections of poetry: How to Love a Country (Beacon Press, 2019); Looking for The Gulf Motel, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012); Directions to The Beach of the Dead, recipient of the Beyond Margins Award from the PEN American Center (University of Arizona Press, 2005); City of a Hundred Fires (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998); and now Homeland of My Body (Beacon Press, 2023).

Blanco is also the author of the memoirs For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet’s Journey (Beacon Press, 2013) and The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood (Ecco, 2014), winner of a Lambda Literary Award and a Maine Literary Award. Exploring other genres, with Vanessa Garcia, Blanco cowrote the play Sweet Goats & Blueberry Señoritas, which premièred at Portland Stage and is currently slated for a second production at Actors’ Playhouse in Miami. His inaugural poem “One Today” was published as a children’s book, in collaboration with renowned illustrator Dav Pilkey (Little, Brown 2015), and Boundaries (Two Ponds Press 2017), a collaboration with photographer Jacob Hessler, is a book that challenges the physical and psychological dividing lines that shadow the United States. He is currently a writing co-executive producer for a TV series adapted from his memoir and is also co-lyrist for Waiting for Snow in Havana, a musical in development.

As a civically engaged author, Blanco has written occasional poems for organizations and events including the reopening of the US Embassy in Cuba, Freedom to Marry, and the Boston Strong benefit concert following the Boston Marathon bombings. Nationally as well as internationally, Blanco lends his art and voice to advocate for diversity, LGBTQ rights, immigration rights, and arts education.

BEACON PRESS BOSTON

BEACON PRESS

Boston, Massachusetts

www.beacon.org

Beacon Press books
are published under the auspices of
the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

© 2023 by Richard Blanco

All rights reserved

Text design and composition by Kim Arney

Several poems in this volume have been slightly revised from their original
versions in the respective collections where they first appeared.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Blanco, Richard, author.

Title: Homeland of my body : new and selected poems / Richard Blanco.

Description: Boston : Beacon Press, 2023. | Summary: “A rich, accomplished, intensely intimate collection with two full sections of new poems bookending Blanco’s selections from his five previous volumes.

“An engineer, poet, Cuban American … his poetry bridges cultures and languages—a mosaic of our past, our present, and our future-reflecting a nation that is hectic, colorful, and still becoming.”—President Joe Biden, conferring the National Humanities Medal on Richard Blanco, 2023” — Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023025939 | ISBN 978-0-8070-1297-0 (hardcover) |

ISBN 978-0-8070-1298-7 (ebook)

Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.

Classification: LCC PS3552.L36533 H66 2023 | DDC 811/.54—dc23/eng/20230605

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023025939