My brother called on a Friday night: If you want to see him, come now. I bought a plane ticket from Boston to San Francisco. On Saturday, there was a blizzard. The flight was canceled. Frank Espada died on Sunday, February 16, 2014.
I arrived the next day, drove my mother to the mortuary, and wrote a check for my father’s cremation. The white box of ashes sits on a chair in my study. Atop the box there is a snapshot of my father at age seventeen, in his baseball uniform, kicking high in the air and reaching back with his right hand, almost to the ground, in the action of whipping a baseball home.
I would talk to the box of ashes. I missed the hour of his death, my last chance to say something meaningful in his ear, to lean over and kiss his forehead.
There were no more kisses once I reached junior high. Years later, I handed him a poem about the time he had been jailed for a sit-in protesting racial discrimination and I, being seven in 1964, concluded that he must be dead. He read it and lurched into in my arms, sobbing. I should’ve kissed him.
Jack Agüeros was my father’s compañero and co-conspirator in the Puerto Rican community. Both made images. Many faces lived in my father’s camera: a street preacher, a weathered tobacco-picker, a woman grieving the loss of two sons to gang warfare. Jack’s sonnets praised a one-legged bicycle messenger, a loquacious character on the unemployment line, the dancers who died in a nightclub fire.
He was the first poet I ever met. Over the years, Jack became my second father. Somewhere, there is a handwritten contract on a paper napkin that says so. I would call whenever I came to New York, and hear: Agüeros advises declarative sentences—after the beep. Two generations of Espadas slept on his couch. I would open my eyes to a stack of poems on the table.
We gave readings together. Jack would show up early to defy the stereotype of PR Time. He wore a suit, so I wore a suit. He answered a question about why he sometimes wrote in Spanish by saying: To bust chops! He was always the quickest guy in the room.
I did not invite Jack to speak at my father’s memorial. The quickest guy in the room was dying of Alzheimer’s disease. His daughter Natalia called: If you want to see him, come now.
I leaned over the rails of Jack’s bed to read a poem in his ear, his own “Psalm for Distribution.” I smoothed back his hair and kissed his forehead. The hospice nurse said: Él te conoce. He knows you.
Jack Agüeros died on May 4, 2014. Two weeks later, Natalia walked to the podium at my father’s memorial. She read the words I said to Jack before I kissed him:
Lord,
on 8th Street
between 6th Avenue and Broadway
there are enough shoe stores
with enough shoes
to make me wonder
why there are shoeless people
on the earth.
Lord,
You have to fire the Angel
in charge of distribution.