Letter to Yeni on Peering into Her Life

I see you, not as you stand before me, so full of language threatening to spill from you, a silver-blue luminous substance the page of cups might carry in love, in a gold chalice, but as a child I might have seen, held, had I been an adult on that island where we might have become anyone other than ourselves. You are a sound you say your father carries, a beat in the heart of an African drum that seduced him with the thunder of Changó the red of blood and earth, a flesh-pink guava growing inside you, its seeds on the tips of your fingers like islands, like memories becoming leaves, their veined undersides becoming maps, palmlines, bridges where the sound of water collects childhood in a blue bucket of memory, where my Tío Machuco stands with childhood sandwiches I ate sitting on the cold terraza, leaning against the Southwest red of that couch Tía Hilda discarded like a useless memory when we were no longer voices in open rooms with connecting doors, when we were words, onion-skinned paper as transparent as re-written history or exile.