I speak by cutting ruts in air. The dust—
Imagine that it’s gold, the Spaniards did—
Is caking in my throat. And when I sing,
Pretend the hawks aren’t vanishing, pretend
The fallen fortresses the chaparral
Forgets defend a way of life again.
I speak as if I knew this road. I speak
The Spanish that I never really learned;
The mission walls, spit out like broken teeth
Along the desert roads, are punishments
I can’t recall, but vaguely recognize.
The Spanish that I never knew at all,
My heritage and punishment, the walls
At once too sharp and weak to lean upon,
The screeching of the hawks—with these, like them
I want to cut a road, an artery
Directly to the place I know. Pretend
You know it, too, imagine gold is words,
Pure gold is in our chalices and throats,
And watch the mission priests tame hawks for pets.
The protected Venezuela, the rare,
Scarlet birds everywhere—I see it now.
To have a memory is cloudless air
And greenest streets, to have it all right now,
Again, is true abundance! I walk where
Huge mangos sway in every tree, and leaves
Are bigger than my hands, and women swear
At dusty streets clamoring at their feet for laundry
Balanced on their heads, out of reach, in mountains
Crumpled as the Andes. If there are boundaries
To this place, or if really there are fountains
In grand plazas brimming with equator
And the sun the light in every face, I cannot say.
I lived there only as a child. I remember seeing waiters
Dressed in white, bringing demitasse on small black trays,
The wind a vast white hand across the plaza
Touching, for a moment, the café.
Another night, gone. More forgetting of
the way nights end.
You turned the night to oceans. Wrecked upon
the bright beach daylight is, I drowned
remembering.
The birds, afloat like sticks, debris, wash in;
some garbage is exotic shells.
The morning, useful, everything
wanted, clean.
I can’t remember drowning, but I know
my lungs are full of words I want
to say. “I love you.” (How I’ve failed.)
I drowned in smashed glass: night and stars.
I breathe my blood.
The sunrise finds me hemorrhaging, my blood
is pouring down deserted streets.
The stray dogs lap me up; the last stars
outnumber me.
Each night extracts, on passing through us, lives
immeasurable.
My dream of you is heaviness, stars weighed
down by the burdensome, dark wish
I make: I don’t want to drown. Night
outlives us all.
I wonder at the weight of your possessions.
How heavy is your mirror? Have you saved
toys from childhood? Please take
me with you, too.
I’ll let you wear me, blood-rubies clasped to your lapel.
Imagine that the bed is not a bed
And illness is a cave, the bags of blood
Stalactites, the doctors eyeless fish—
Imagine that an illness is a cave
From which the body must emerge, but can’t
Because the flesh is always so forgetful,
Because a certain greed has brought it there—
A vein of gold, the River Styx, a dream,
Persephone—imagine that the bed
Is not a bed, that God is waiting white
And glorious, and that the beach, which stings,
Is limitless and has no name except
Romance, or sex, just throbbing there all white
Like Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, God
It hurts, and then the medication, beds
Everywhere, the cave deepening, the cave
A smile in the Earth: she knows the time
Has come, and she remembers everything.
I am bathing. All my greyness—
The hospital, the incurable illnesses,
This headache—is slowly given over
To bath water, deepening it to where
I lose sight of my limbs. The fragrance,
Twenty different herbs at first (dill, spices
From the Caribbean, aloe vera)
Settles, and becomes the single, warm air
Of my sweat, of the warmth deep in my hair—
I recognize it, it’s the smell of my pillow
And of my sheets, the closest things to me.
Now one with the bathroom, every oily tile
A different picture of me, every square
One in which I’m given the power of curves,
Distorted, captured in some less shallow
Dimension—now I can pray. I can cry, and he’ll
Come. He is my shoulder, maybe, above
The grey water. He is in the steam,
So he can touch my face. Rafael,
He says, I am your saint. So I paint
For him the story of the day: the wife
Whose husband beat purples into her skin,
The jaundiced man (who calls me Ralph, still,
Because that’s more American), faint
Yellows, his eyes especially—then,
Still crying, the bright red a collision
Brought out of its perfect vessel, this girl,
This life attached to, working, the wrong thing
Of a tricycle. I saw pain—
Primitive, I could see it, through her split
Chest, in her crushed ribs—white-hot. Now,
I can stop. He has listened, he is silent.
When he finally speaks, touching my face,
It sounds herbal, or African, like drums
Or the pure, tiny bells her child’s cries
Must have been made of. Then, somehow,
I’m carried to my bed, the pillow, the sheets
Fragrant, infinite, cool, and I recognize
His voice. In the end, just as sleep takes
The world away, I know it is my own.
There are two sides to life. The side where life
Remains unconsummated, reticent—
A shady tree grows there. The other side
Has no beginning, middle, or an end,
It’s just the act itself laid bare—a hand
Inside the lion’s mouth, extracting what
Our sacrifice demands. I understand
It takes much courage to take out one’s heart
And lay it bare beneath the shady tree;
I understand the vagaries of love
And what it means to crave authority.
I still desire what I’ll never have:
His perfect body next to me, his cock
And all of its gigantic nothingness,
From what was once a pair, the missing sock,
The memory of shady trees where once
I know I played. But I’ve heard children scream
Outside within the deepening of night,
And so I realize to intervene’s
Impossible—what’s lost is lost, what’s right
Is necessarily what’s wrongly taught.
A parent craves authority and love,
The privacy of one subconscious thought,
And thoughtlessly to give his son the half
Of life he never had. Except he’s not,
He’s never sure, which one he lacked. The tree
Seems vaguely unfamiliar; the lion’s not,
But is ferocious, hungry. Finally,
Not knowing which to choose—as some would say,
Not making clear his preference—the act
Is left unconsummated. Nothing waits.
The shady trees accumulate in tracts
Until they’re forests where the lions live.
These lions carry babies in their jaws
Paternally, and teach them about love—
How in our language there are hidden laws.
Behind him, saffron hills so passionate
I nearly cry, knowing he was killed.
I read his biography. It is like
Embracing myself—the black hair on our chests
Crackles, mixes, bristles. If I could
Kiss him, I wonder if I’d taste the same
As his mouth would on mine. He would press
Against me, my back against the door,
My shoulders tense as his, my legs
Locked between his legs, pulling at his shirt
As he unbuttons mine. I glance up:
Across the room, I wait in a mirror.
I’m Spanish, the hardcover open on my lap
Makes me pensive. I touch my brown hand
To my face, and imagine that it’s always him.
I know this really isn’t Spain. But still,
You’d think I’d find my father here, his lips
On every cup. You’d think the holly bush
Weren’t quite so sharp. I think Rumanian
Is coming from my favorite table in
The back. Are all these people reading Lorca?
My father never orders flan. I have
Café con leche. I’m in Santander,
Before the war. These people reading Lorca
Suspect that he’s a Communist. You’d think
The Germans at the table in the back
Would carry out their spying more discreetly.
My father hates the Fascists, but he hates
The Communists much more. The waiter glides.
You’d think I’d find my father somewhere, but
He says he never trusted poets. All
These people reading Lorca would disgust him.
Communists and homosexuals, he’d say.
I order flan. I know this isn’t Spain.
The waiter is a hand on every saucer,
Clearing tables, wearing white. You’d think
I’d find him, lips on every wide-lipped cup.
I’m not in Santander. The Civil War
Is over. Lorca’s dead. All these people know
The holly bush is sharp. You’d think they’d guess
I’m Spanish, since it’s clear I can’t forget.
I write to you in English, Father,
Because I am evolving. I’m freer
Than I was before. My hairy chest
Contains a thumping drum, some resolving
Process, a demand to be loved. When you
Fooled me, it was like I’d been to Cuba.
The dark men. The inaccessible island,
Like the parts of you I couldn’t see
Beneath your towel. It was cold there,
Or for all I knew they didn’t believe in Jesus
Or ate horse meat for supper. You’ve had us
All confused, Father, for so many years
I can almost imagine centuries. I know
Almost the knife of your exile,
How you lost your middle name in the sea
On a ninety-mile journey. In your smile,
That relic of your happiness, I see
A businessman, my dad, a broken Catholic man
Who had servants once. I save the parts of you
You let me have, like shards of pottery,
Like fragments of my own puzzle. I think
I found them in some abandoned plaza.
The wind that blew behind Columbus
Defined my back. I cried into this ink,
Dipped my pen, and saw you. Father,
You were naked, my martyr, hot coals
Awaited you somewhere. Your mouth opened,
As if to tell me something you’d forgotten.
What I saw was dust rising distantly.
Small frogs chirped in dry trees. I scratched
Over this page, until your eyes stopped me.
I’ll keep this with the things I save, for you.
I went to Cuba on a raft I made
From scraps of wood, aluminum, some rope.
I knew what I was giving up, but who
Could choose his comfort over truth? Besides,
It felt so sleek and dangerous, like sharks
Or porno magazines or even thirst—
I hadn’t packed or anything, and when
I saw the sea gulls teetering the way
They do, I actually felt giddy. Boy,
It took forever on those swells of sea,
Like riding on a brontosaurus back
Through time. And when I finally arrived,
It wasn’t even bloody! No beach of skulls
To pick over, nothing but the same damn sun,
Indifferent but oddly angry, the face
My father wore at dinnertime. I stripped
And sat there naked in an effort to
Attract some cannibals, but no one came;
I watched my raft drift slowly back to sea,
And wished I’d thought to bring a book
That told the history of my lost people.
A sonnet? Tension. Words withheld. A rhyme
Where memory has left its watermark,
A turn of phrase that brings another time.
(My parents arguing about the stork,
And whether it appears in Shakespeare’s work:
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds—”
“That’s enough, dear!”) A passion gone berserk,
A whetstone where the ax of language grinds
Until precision is its point, until
The carving out of one’s own heart is fine
And painless as a summer’s breeze. Control
Is what I shout into this microphone
About: I want to say I love them. Wait,