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Virgin, sappy, gorgeous, the right-now Flutters its huge prosthetics at us, flung To the spotlights, frozen in motion, center-ice. And the first rows, shaken with an afterslice That’s bowled them into their seats like a big wet ciao. O daffy panoply O rare device O flashing leg-iron at a whopping price Whipping us into ecstasies and how, The whole galumphing Garden swung and swung, A rescue helicopter’s bottom rung Glinting and spinning off, a scud of fluff, A slash of petals up against the bough, A juggler’s avalanche of silken stuff Gushing in white-hot verticals among Camels and axels and pyramids, oh wow, Bewilderment is parachute enough. We jolt. A sidewise stutterstep in chorus. The other billboards flicker by before us. Gone! with a budded petulance that stung. So talented! So targeted! So young! Such concentration on the bottom line! We vanish down the IRT. A shine. A glimmer. Something. Nothing. To think twice Was to have lost the trick of paradise.

On the rough diamond, the hand-cut field below the dog lot and barn, we rehearsed the strict technique of bunting. I watched from the infield, the mound, the backstop as your left hand climbed the bat, your legs and shoulders squared toward the pitcher. You could drop it like a seed down either base line. I admired your style, but not enough to take my eyes off the bank that served as our center-field fence. Years passed, three leagues of organized ball, no few lives. I could homer into the left-field lot of Carmichael Motors, and still you stressed the same technique, the crouch and spring, the lead arm absorbing just enough impact. That whole tiresome pitch about basics never changing, and I never learned what you were laying down. Like a hand brushed across the bill of a cap, let this be the sign I’m getting a grip on the sacrifice.

—for Frank Espada The beer company did not hire Blacks or Puerto Ricans, so my father joined the picket line at the Schaefer Beer Pavilion, New York World’s Fair, amid the crowds glaring with canine hostility. But the cops brandished nightsticks and handcuffs to protect the beer, and my father disappeared. In 1964, I had never tasted beer, and no one told me about the picket signs torn in two by the cops of brewery. I knew what dead was: dead was a cat overrun with parasites and dumped in the hallway incinerator. I knew my father was dead. I went mute and filmy-eyed, the slow boy who did not hear the question in school. I sat studying his framed photograph like a mirror, my darker face. Days later, he appeared in the doorway grinning with his gilded tooth. Not dead, though I would come to learn that sometimes Puerto Ricans die in jail, with bruises no one can explain swelling their eyes shut. I would learn too that “boycott” is not a boy’s haircut, that I could sketch a picket line on the blank side of a leaflet. That day my father returned from the netherworld easily as riding the elevator to apartment 14-F, and the brewery cops could only watch in drunken disappointment. I searched my father’s hands for a sign of the miracle.

The dim sea glints chill. The white sun is shy, And the skeleton weeds and the never-dry, Rough, long grasses keep white with frost At the hilltop by the finger-post; The smoke of the traveller’s-joy is puffed Over hawthorn berry and hazel tuft. I read the sign. Which way shall I go? A voice says: You would not have doubted so At twenty. Another voice gentle with scorn Says: At twenty you wished you had never been born. One hazel lost a leaf of gold From a tuft at the tip, when the first voice told The other he wished to know what ’twould be To be sixty by this same post. “You shall see,” He laughed—and I had to join his laughter— “You shall see; but either before or after, Whatever happens, it must befall, A mouthful of earth to remedy all Regrets and wishes shall freely be given; And if there be a flaw in that heaven ’Twill be freedom to wish, and your wish may be To be here or anywhere talking to me, No matter what the weather, on earth, At any age between death and birth, To see what day or night can be, The sun and the frost, the land and the sea, Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring,— With a poor man of any sort, down to a king, Standing upright out in the air Wondering where he shall journey, O where?”

Bunny Berigan first recorded “I Can’t Get Started” with a small group that included Joe Bushkin, Cozy Cole and Artie Shaw in 1936. Earlier that same year, the song, written by Ira Gershwin and Vernon Duke, and rendered as a duet patter number by Bob Hope and Eve Arden, made its debut on Broadway in The Ziegfeld Follies. By 1937, when Berigan re-recorded it in a big-band setting, “I Can’t” had become his signature song, even though, within a few months, Billie Holiday would record her astonishing version backed by Lester Young and the rest of the Basie Orchestra. Lovers for a time, Lee Wiley and Berigan began appearing together on Wiley’s fifteen-minute CBS radio spot, Saturday Night Swing Club, in 1936. Berigan died from alcoholism-related causes on June 2, 1942. Although “I Can’t Get Started” is perfectly suited to Wiley’s deep phrasing and succinct vibrato, she recorded the ballad only once, informally, in 1945, during a Town Hall performance date. The Spanish Civil War started in 1936 and ended in 1939 with Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s forces entering Madrid. “I’ve settled revolutions in Spain” goes Gershwin’s lyric, just as odd.

The cat has the chance to make the sunlight Beautiful, to stop it and turn it immediately Into black fur and motion, to take it As shifting branch and brown feather Into the back of the brain forever. The cardinal has flown the sun in red Through the oak forest to the lawn. The finch has caught it in yellow And taken it among the thorns. By the spider It has been bound tightly and tied In an eight-stringed knot. The sun has been intercepted in its one Basic state and changed to a million varieties Of green stick and tassel. It has been broken Into pieces by glass rings, by mist Over the river. Its heat Has been given the board fence for body, The desert rock for fact. On winter hills It has been laid down in white like a martyr. This afternoon we could spread gold scarves Clear across the field and say in truth, "Sun you are silk." Imagine the sun totally isolated, Its brightness shot in continuous streaks straight out Into the black, never arrested, Never once being made light. Someone should take note Of how the earth has saved the sun from oblivion.

Gather 'round, ye scurvy mates, I'm signing on a crew. You there! Can ye tie a knot? Ye’ll do. I'd say you've snatched a purse or two. Ye'll do. Does the thought of plundered gold make ye shiver? Make ye bold? Ye'll do. Ha! You’re rotten through and through! Ye'll do. Phew! You stinking, drunken lout! You'd whack your uncle’s gizzard out! Well step right up! Beyond a doubt ye’ll do!

All night I dreamed of my home, of the roads that are so long and straight they die in the middle— among the spines of elderly weeds on either side, among the dead cats, the ants who are all eyes, the suitcase thrown open, sprouting failures. 2. And this evening in the garden I find the winter inside a snail shell, rigid and cool, a little stubborn temple, its one visitor gone. 3. If there were messages or signs, I might hear now a voice tell me to walk forever, to ask the mold for pardon, and one by one I would hear out my sins, hear they are not important—that I am part of this rain drumming its long fingers, and of the roadside stone refusing to blink, and of the coyote nailed to the fence with its long grin. And when there are no messages the dead lie still— their hands crossed so strangely like knives and forks after supper. 4. I stay up late listening. My feet tap the floor, they begin a tiny dance which will outlive me. They turn away from this poem. It is almost Spring.

Air a-gittin' cool an' coolah, Frost a-comin' in de night, Hicka' nuts an' wa'nuts fallin', Possum keepin' out o' sight. Tu'key struttin' in de ba'nya'd, Nary step so proud ez his; Keep on struttin', Mistah Tu'key, Yo' do' know whut time it is. Cidah press commence a-squeakin' Eatin' apples sto'ed away, Chillun swa'min' 'roun' lak ho'nets, Huntin' aigs ermung de hay. Mistah Tu'key keep on gobblin' At de geese a-flyin' souf, Oomph! dat bird do' know whut's comin'; Ef he did he'd shet his mouf. Pumpkin gittin' good an' yallah Mek me open up my eyes; Seems lak it's a-lookin' at me Jes' a-la'in' dah sayin' "Pies." Tu'key gobbler gwine 'roun' blowin', Gwine 'roun' gibbin' sass an' slack; Keep on talkin', Mistah Tu'key, You ain't seed no almanac. Fa'mer walkin' th'oo de ba'nya'd Seein' how things is comin' on, Sees ef all de fowls is fatt'nin'— Good times comin' sho's you bo'n. Hyeahs dat tu'key gobbler braggin', Den his face break in a smile— Nebbah min', you sassy rascal, He's gwine nab you atter while. Choppin' suet in de kitchen, Stonin' raisins in de hall, Beef a-cookin' fu' de mince meat, Spices groun'—I smell 'em all. Look hyeah, Tu'key, stop dat gobblin', You ain' luned de sense ob feah, You ol' fool, yo' naik's in dangah, Do' you know Thanksgibbin's hyeah?

There is the sudden silence of the crowd above a player not moving on the field, and the silence of the orchid. The silence of the falling vase before it strikes the floor, the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child. The stillness of the cup and the water in it, the silence of the moon and the quiet of the day far from the roar of the sun. The silence when I hold you to my chest, the silence of the window above us, and the silence when you rise and turn away. And there is the silence of this morning which I have broken with my pen, a silence that had piled up all night like snow falling in the darkness of the house— the silence before I wrote a word and the poorer silence now.