Victor Hernández Cruz

Two guitars were left in a room all alone They sat on different corners of the parlor In this solitude they started talking to each other My strings are tight and full of tears The man who plays me has no heart I have seen it leave out of his mouth I have seen it melt out of his eyes It dives into the pores of the earth When they squeeze me tight I bring Down the angels who live off the chorus The trios singing loosen organs With melodious screwdrivers Sentiment comes off the hinges Because a song is a mountain put into Words and landscape is the feeling that Enters something so big in the harmony We are always in danger of blowing up With passion The other guitar: In 1944 New York When the Trio Los Panchos started With Mexican & Puerto Rican birds I am the one that one of them held Tight    like a woman Their throats gardenia gardens An airport for dreams I've been in theaters and cabarets I played in an apartment on 102nd street After a baptism pregnant with women The men flirted and were offered Chicken soup Echoes came out of hallways as if from caves Someone is opening the door now The two guitars hushed and there was a Resonance in the air like what is left by The last chord of a bolero.

Time is crying upon the backs of lizards, Through the white stone of the medieval city They dash. The houses that are walking up the stairs, Flowers out of ruins, Further into the fortress, The sounds of a language registers In our dreams. Words which are my hat in the city, Coming through the bamboo The shadows of lost meaning— Tilted light making slivers Through the forest of the mambo Behind the eyes. Time will shine your head into skull The circle song will come again and again, If we forget how to lay out a village, Just open a guayaba in half, These seeds are perfect, And can guide you back, Your hands the electric of the ghosts. In the Persia of shining alfombras, A belly button silks upon a horse, Enters a tent of rhythms, Makes the trees dance into shape, Rubén Darío saw them in the river, Bathing in the echoes of the castles, His Indio head, Clean enough to measure The tempo of a camel, The first string that vibrated The Rock of Gibraltar, To sway Greco-Roman lips, Arising fire of Gypsy song, Was making Castile dress and undress, With the sounds that were hitting the moon And falling down unto earth as colors. Of boats that were my shoes. Atlantic chachachá. Splicing through 101st Street brick. Which covered dancing verdure green Rectangular mangos, Cylindric bananas Sounds in the sky blue tropic: mind. Trees are making maracas That will soon make you dance. Water is their god of cadence, As I sea walk through coconut heights, Legs of tamarind, Purple orchids arranged like syllables, Insects of the morning dew sting verses on café. In embroidery of Italians, Garcilaso came to José Martí, Who ducked Spanish spies In Manhattan And hugged Walt Whitman’s beard in Philadelphia As the Cuban Habaneras’ Shango Made it south to tango. Boats are ages sailing on water, Parrots are flying out of castanets, Flamenco peeling pineapples That go up the river, The water that became El Quijote’s language, As a cane field disappears into a bottle, To awake in a little town With molasses orbiting the cathedral, A wooden saint slicing through the Mountain full of potassium radiation, Slanted plátanos pointing into medieval Liturgy, Bongo and ocean waves carving Phantasmal antiquity Through the fabulous language That has taken the shape of An Andalusian rhyming door, One after the other. Perfume pagano Sailing out of the archways, As Ricardo Ray turns into a centipede, Marching across a Brooklyn piano, For dancers to Sanskrit their Gypsy feet, Upon Albaicín ceramic tile. Caribbean sun melts the caramel, Making our first national flag: White skirts waving  in the air. Machetes taking off like helicopters Chopping off branches for timbale sticks, The hands of the sun hitting the Moon like a drum— Making the atmosphere of moisture Heat up, For the chorus of the song To come back down upon us polinizando The carnival flower, A serenade walkilipiando. Sliding upon seashells, That disappear into the foam of time, One age living next to another, We are both living things at once, We are the cadaver that is About to be born.

Song 1 Julito used to shine the soul of his shoes before he left for the Palladium to take the wax off the floor while Tito Rodriguez flew around the walls like a parakeet choking maracas It was around this time that Julito threw away his cape because the Umbrella Man and the Dragons put the heat on all the Ricans who used to fly around in Dracula capes swinging canes or carrying umbrellas Even if there was no rain on the horizon That same epoca my mother got the urge to paint the living room pink and buy a new mirror with flamingoes elegantly on the right hand corner because the one we had was broken from the time that Carlos tried to put some respect Into Julito and knock the party out of him. Song 2 All the old Chevies that the gringoes from upstate New York wore out Were sailing around the neighborhood with dices and San Martin de Porres el negrito who turned catholic Hanging in the front windows. Song 3 There was still no central heating in the tenements We thought that the cold was the oldest thing on the planet earth We used to think about my Uncle Listo Who never left his hometown We’d picture him siting around cooling himself with a fan In that imaginary place called Puerto Rico.

Next  to white rice it looks like coral sitting next to snow Hills of starch border The burnt sienna of irony Azusenas being chased by the terra cotta feathers of a rooster There is a lava flow through the smoking white mounds India red spills on ivory Ochre cannon balls falling next to blanc pebbles Red beans and milk make burgundy wine Violet pouring from the eggshell tinge of the plate.

La luna Sang the miles por los palos de Nebraska You bunch of lights And houses    How did you walk to this place Buffalo Bill Better know him some Spanish Para Horses    ride rubber horseshoes moderno. El café Boiled water/no milk in sight. Homes that will travel interstate 8 o tomorrow in the morning for the next edge of town. The cowgirls/the local rodeo As they galloped by their hair unmoved by 15 miles per hour wind It seems that 25 pounds of hair spray is enough to hold a mountain down Their hair style longer than their faces. Que Pasa? Y los palos do not feel at home any more La luna goes round the star dotted cielo Let’s watch In this part of Mexico Se habla inglish.

The mountain have changed to buildings Is this hallway the inside of a stem That has a rattling flower for a head, Immense tree bark with roots made out of Mailboxes? In the vertical village moons fly out of Apartment windows and though what you See is a modern city The mountain’s guitars pluck inside It’s agriculture taking an elevator Through urban caves which lead to Paths underground They say Camuy To Hutuado Taino subground like the IRT in Constant motion The streets take walks in your dark eyes Seashell necklaces make music in the Origin of silence What are we stepping on? Pineapple Fields frozen with snow Concrete dirt later the rocks of the Atlantic The sculpture of the inner earth Down there where you thought only worms And unnamed crocodiles parade Lefty stands on a corner Analyzing every seed Squeezing the walls as he passes Through at the bottom of the basement Where the boiler makes heat The flesh arrives out of a hole In the mountain that goes up like a Green wall Bodies come in making maraca sounds An invisible map out of the flora Bees arrive in the vicinity and sing Chorus while woody woodpeckers make Women out of trees and place flowers On their heads Waterfalls like Hurakan’s faucets Caress the back of Yuquiyu God to all whose tongues have the Arawak’s echoes Hallway of graffiti like the master Cave drawings made by owls when they Had hands You see the fish with pyramids inside Their stomachs Hanging near the doorways where San Lazaro turns the keys Villa Manhattan Breeze of saint juice made from Coconuts Slide down the stairs to your Belly and like a hypnotized guanabana You float down the street And win all your hands at dominoes The Moros live on the top floor eating Roots and have a rooster on the roof Africans import okra from the bodega The Indians make a base of guava On the first floor The building is spinning itself into a spiral of salsa Heaven must be calling or the Residents know the direction Because there is an upward pull If you rise too quickly from your seat You might have to comb a spirit’s Hair They float over the chimneys Arrive through the smog Appear through the plaster of Paris It is the same people in the windowed Mountains.

Her voice comes out of her knees, her fingernails are full of sound, Birds are in her lungs, which gives her gargantuan flight, A florescence through ether waves, like ancestral Morse codes. Oriente province de Cuba her first steps. At nineteen she dismantled retinas— roosters blew themselves inside out, When she swayed by cathedrals they folded, guayacan trees fell to their knees, Mountains bowed with the contents for ajiaco. She filled the horizon with kerchiefs, gypsies danced behind her, Her bracelets were snakes, forces were captured in her gold chains, The moon was in her silver, there were reptiles stationed In her Afro-Siboney cheeks, there were in her Asian eyes Radars picking up the fingertips of the piano player— The language of the trumpet— black changos landing upon The shelf of her eyelids. She motioned in songs to live them. Her passion destroyed the container, She blew up into false promises, romantic lyrics tied her in knots, Broken into pieces of kisses, she knew it was “theater” That you offered, A landscape hanging in the museums of desire, Rows of guayava paste, stories that according To your point of view, salons of dried roses. Illusions. Her songs became the windows of the city, In the distance a hurt bellows from a bird locked in a radio. Classroom teacher of tropical children, reading to them native flora— A wind entered her and she flew to New York, eating the skyline, Bridges of electric lights, conduits to the house of the Saints. At the Jefferson Theater she melted the microphone Into liquid mercury, and an ambulance had to Get her off the stage. She embodied in gowns, capes, dresses, necklaces, bonnets, Velvets, suedes, diamond-studded, flowers, sequins, All through which she wanted to eat herself She salvaged us all, but took the radiation. Each time she sang she crossed the sea. From the Bronx she went back to Cuba, Adrift on the sails of a song.

Is the ocean really inside seashells or is it all in your mind? — PICHON DE LA ONCE Behold and soak like a sponge. I have discovered that the island of Puerto Rico is the ears of Saru-Saru, a poet reputed to have lived in Atlantis. On the day that the water kissed and embraced and filled all the holes of that giant missing link, this bard’s curiosity was the greatest for he kept swimming and listening for causes. He picked up rocks before they sank and blew wind viciously into them. Finally he blew so hard into a rock that he busted his ear drums; angry, he recited poems as he tried turning into a bird to fly to green Brazil. His left ear opened up like a canal and a rock lodged in it. Rock attracts rock and many rocks attached to this rock. It got like a rocket. His ear stayed with it in a horizontal position. Finally after so many generations he got to hear what he most wanted: the sounds made by flowers as they stretched into the light. Behold, I have discovered that the island of Puerto Rico is the ears of Saru-Saru.

you are falling sun shine miracle your lips are wet rain to our hearts floods in every opening on the stoop your skirt rises fingers go up your legs you are falling in the streets the hallways of east harlem the dark hallways of east harlem the dark hallways with mattresses of east harlem you are falling roll with us the avenues you are falling the night queen of the earth you are falling on us with lips & thighs & big round breasts we hold in our hands & hear your bomb tick your blood get hot come out crack your eggs on stupid american heads queen of the earth push us to the walls fall on us kill us with your love & tongue harlem queen fine mama sprinkle us with it there are no bargains pure product you are falling bloom bloom you got all sing dark & you shine grown fat for love in the dark you are like a volcano with a sea of heat explode you are falling explode

In which everything goes backwards in time and motion Palm trees shrink back into the ground Mangos become seeds and reappear in the eyes of Indian women The years go back cement becomes wood Panama hats are seen upon skeletons walking the plazas Of once again wooden benches The past starts to happen again I see Columbus’s three boats going backwards on the sea Getting smaller Crossing the Atlantic back to the ports of Spain    Cadiz    Dos Palos    Huelva Where the sailors disembark and go back to their towns To their homes They become adolescents again become children                infants they re-enter the wombs of their mothers till they become glances Clutching a pound of bread through a busy plaza that becomes the taste of the sound of church bells in reverberation.