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Went down home ’bout a year ago things so bad, Lord, my heart was sore. Folks had nothing was a sin and shame every-body said hard time was the blame. Great-God-a-mighty folks feeling bad lost every thing they ever had. Sun was shining fourteen days and no rain hoeing and planting was all in vain. Hard hard times, Lord, all around meal barrels empty crops burnt to the ground. Great-God-a-mighty folks feeling bad lost every thing they ever had. Skinny looking children bellies poking out that old pellagra without a doubt. Old folks hanging ’round the cabin door ain’t seen times this hard before. Great-God-a-mighty folks feeling bad lost every thing they ever had. I went to the Boss at the Commissary store folks all starving please don’t close your door want more food a little more time to pay Boss Man laughed and walked away. Great-God-a-mighty folks feeling bad lost every thing they ever had. Landlord coming ’round when the rent is due you ain’t got the money take your home from you take your mule and horse even take your cow get offa my land you ain’t no good no how. Great-God-a-mighty folks feeling bad lost every thing they ever had.

The lousy job my father lands I’m tickled pink to celebrate. My mother’s rosary-pinching hands stack pigs in blankets on a plate. Teeny uncircumcised Buddha penises (cocktail hot dogs in strips of dough): I gobble these puffed-up weenie geniuses as if they’d tell me what I need to know to get the fuck out of here. They don’t only stink of fear. They’re doom and shame and dumb pig fate. I tell my mom I think they’re great. Dad chews his slowly with a pint of gin, and says he eats a whole shit deal because of us. My mom’s in tears again. I don’t know who to hate or how to feel.

Tricky work sometimes not to smell yourself, ferment being constant—constant as carnival sweat (a non-stock phrase I palmed from a girl from Canada, a land where I once saw this graffiti: life is great). And I have tasted myself, especially when I spilled sinigang all down my arm in a Pinoy workers' caff in Little Manila. I drank sinigang (is soup drunk?) in Big Manila too, with all its dead skyscrapers. Seen myself? In looking glasses or, looking down, stocky as a shift working cop, maybe a Mexican cop full of beans (frijoles, I mean, not vim), paunch full of sopa de vigilia, pulling over a sozzled bus driver. Heard myself speak fluently in my own language, have heard myself too described as hard work (as hard to get through as Scotch broth), though once someone rather bladdered told me I was magnetic. And I may as well admit that I have touched myself (who hasn't?). In a forest, on a train, in New York and Paris with unparalleled handiwork, sinning as I go, merry as an office boy spooning onion soup.

You lean disconsolate on your stool, Sullen and certain As minor royalty rusticated to this Unhelpful climate of solvents, gaskets, pliers, and bolts. Because they are new and manifold and useful You feel their whispers against you. The staunch Resistance of objects. How can I tell you O my soul, To exhaust the realm of the possible when Ever the light Is uncongenial as February and your hand unlovely? Like a dog nearly annihilated by nerves And boredom chewing her paw to sore, red velvet, You’ve torn your nails so far flesh swells Closed around each bed like an eyeless socket. That you should be making such small change! Fingers inarticulate as moles nudge a debris Of dimes not thick enough to hide The candy-colored butterfly flaring Across the tender, veined delta of your hand Heralding indelibly the eviction Of this vulgar flesh Or the one word needled in black, knuckle-Gothic

Fleeing his clubs, dull honors, wives, the ageing Hardy hunches down in his potting-shed with his thumbtip-fumbled, fine- printed seed catalogue’s inflorescences— peripherally glimpsing the oxygenless blue line of the fleur-de-lys scaling his inner wrist; his chalky knuckles, his forearm’s crisp,lisse, pleated wrinkles; softly brown-spotted as a fox terrier’s belly. Yet this pleases, only this— age-speckled surfaces, sun-galls rose-speckled; puckering petals rugosely leaf-veined: the saturate, flooded stemlines’ mauves and verdures on the backlit catalogue’s tissuelike (nearly self-composting) pages—like his skin, all milliner-ribboned; yet with, barely hooded, things as they are and will be visible beneath it.

“All accounts of the past are made up of possibilities.” —Dionisio Martinez for Larry Villanueva i. For years, you were a story of ancestors, pre-revolutionary Cuba: Barrios, Donate, Gallata, Villanueva, family names strung and pearled in the Caribbean by blood and memory, nostalgia and calamity en Artemisa, a small town in my mother’s childhood, a woman in December of 1967, your Tía Marta, a hospital room en la Covadonga, rows and rows of children, my sisters, unexpectedly two, your cousins, whose clothes Mae and Mitzy wore into history and exile. En el exilo, La Cuba del Norte, ten years after the summer of El Mariel, you were my map of Cuba, un espejo, un reflejo, a tisa-blue knot of possibility. Mi esquina Habanera, a street en la arquitectura del pasado, a superficial distance in the patina of memory, a me I had never really known, a language I had learned not to think in. Later, you were a face on T.V. en Guadalupe, María Elena, my mother’s telenovelas en el canal 23, an actor, a director, a sculptor, abstract angst with a face history and coincidence had given me. ii. So when you become fingerprints and words, a noun, a verb, a snapshot in motion, I am no longer alone with my ghosts, las sombras de el pasado, inventing truth, reclaiming language, my old self. I am me, unadorned by speech, English or translation; I am an I, simple, exposed, this afternoon in our lives, a conversation about the circle of coincidence and persuasion, a photograph of an idea we once were, and you are familiar, somehow. iii. Constantly returning, we breathe in Spanish, move through blank spaces like incantations, waiting for words to fill a moment (often ninety miles long) with etymology, jargon, ghostwords, shadows and nostalgia, and become Harina de Castilla, Larry, re-shaped, translated, improvised, sculpted and redefined.

Stepping over the stones of my mother, chicken bones, straw, the cellar in which the man was found, that man my grandfather the day the sharecroppers left town, their son shot dead — the thing whiskey’ll do to a man. The woman who waited under the house at night, counting ghosts and bobcats through lattice of leaves, walking bare-boned lanes, toes buried beneath blackened leaves — no cause for worry if you’ve walked every acre, planted every row. Nothing can get you if you pay it no mind. I tell you these things so you’ll not mistake my actions for fear, not think I do not know what makes a life, what makes people do the things they do. I know my fears — I’ve named them, counted them out one by one like tarot cards, voodoo dolls: birth, death, poverty, obscurity, that you will leave me, or I will leave you.

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?

One foot down, then hop! It's hot. Good things for the ones that's got. Another jump, now to the left. Everybody for hisself. In the air, now both feet down. Since you black, don't stick around. Food is gone, the rent is due, Curse and cry and then jump two. All the people out of work, Hold for three, then twist and jerk. Cross the line, they count you out. That's what hopping's all about. Both feet flat, the game is done. They think I lost. I think I won.

Not by hammering the furious word, Nor bread stamped in the streets, Nor milk emptied in gutter, Shall we gain the gates of the city. But I am a prophet without eyes to see; I do not know how we shall gain the gates of the city. August, 1943