Rhina P. Espaillat

What the scale tells you is how much the earth has missed you, body, how it wants you back again after you leave it to go forth into the light. Do you remember how earth hardly noticed you then? Others would rock you in their arms, warm in the flow that fed you, coaxed you upright. Then earth began to claim you with spots and fevers, began to lick at you with a bruised knee, a bloody shin, and finally to stoke you, body, drumming intimate coded messages through music you danced to unawares, there in your dreaming and your poems and your obedient blood. Body, how useful you became, how lucky, heavy with news and breakage, rich, and sad, sometimes, imagining that greedy zero you must have been, that promising empty sack of possibilities, never-to-come tomorrow. But look at you now, body, soft old shoe that love wears when it’s stirring, look down, look how earth wants what you weigh, needs what you know.

I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl— Life's little duties do—precisely As the very least Were infinite—to me— —Emily Dickinson, #443 My mother’s mother, widowed very young of her first love, and of that love’s first fruit, moved through her father’s farm, her country tongue and country heart anaesthetized and mute with labor. So her kind was taught to do— “Find work,” she would reply to every grief— and her one dictum, whether false or true, tolled heavy with her passionate belief. Widowed again, with children, in her prime, she spoke so little it was hard to bear so much composure, such a truce with time spent in the lifelong practice of despair. But I recall her floors, scrubbed white as bone, her dishes, and how painfully they shone.

My father liked them separate, one there, one here (allá y aquí), as if aware that words might cut in two his daughter’s heart (el corazón) and lock the alien part to what he was—his memory, his name (su nombre)—with a key he could not claim. “English outside this door, Spanish inside,” he said, “y basta.” But who can divide the world, the word (mundo y palabra) from any child? I knew how to be dumb and stubborn (testaruda); late, in bed, I hoarded secret syllables I read until my tongue (mi lengua) learned to run where his stumbled. And still the heart was one. I like to think he knew that, even when, proud (orgulloso) of his daughter’s pen, he stood outside mis versos, half in fear of words he loved but wanted not to hear.