248 Family poems

for my sisters Because we did not have threads of turquoise, silver, and gold, we could not sew a sun nor sky. And our hands became balls of fire. And our arms spread open like wings. Because we had no chalk or pastels, no toad, forest, or morning-grass slats of paper, we had no colour for creatures. So we squatted and sprang, squatted and sprang. Four young girls, plaits heavy on our backs, our feet were beating drums, drawing rhythms from the floor; our mouths became woodwinds; our tongues touched teeth and were reeds.

1 Where am I from? In black basilicas dragged incessantly down a cross is a man who here resembles a dress snatched from a hanger, there: thick clouds of muscles — an overcast body — embodied weather of one hardly-known country. (A country where I am from?) Dragging him, they stick their hands under his armpits. How cozy their hands are in such a warm place! Through a cut in his chest Eve watches with her one bloody eye. Of a cut in the chest — a red eyelash! But where am I from? 2 Yes, a man resembles a dress snatched from a hanger. Inside black alphabet dragged incessantly down each letter is a man. 3 To a telephone in a long hallway as if to a well for water. (Well, where am I from?) (Neither mama’s nor papa’s, my round face takes after a rotary phone.) A rotary phone is my gene pool. My body rings as it runs to put my head on the strong shoulder of the receiver. Blood is talking! Blood connection is weak. Inside the receiver I hear crackle as if fire were calling. Who is this? It’s me, fire receiver. But where am I from? 4 Days of merciless snow behind the kitchen window — snow got deposited like fat under our skin. How large we’ve grown on those days! So much time spent at the kitchen table trying to decide where to put commas in sentences about made-up lives, yet no one bothered to tell us that words, uttered once, crowd in the brain like in a hospital lobby. That time is supposed to heal only because once it was seen with a scalpel in its hands. You’ve made a mistake, you’d say mysteriously, pointing at lines written by a child. Think of another word with the same root. As if words can have roots. As if words didn’t come from darkness, cat-in-the-bag words, as if our human roots were already known to us. Here’s Grammar, here’s Orthography, here’s a paper rag “bread, milk, butter.” What roots? What morphology? What rules of subjugation? How is it even possible to make a mistake? Here’s Physics,Chemistry, Geometry with its atlas, now, where are Vaclav’s letters, 1946? What to do about the etymology of us? Our etymology? 1946 crowds my hospital lobby. The face of a rotary phone, the face of a clock, the face of a radio on the wall — these are my round-faced progenitors. But Vaclav’s face — where? (Again a man resembles a dress snatched from a hanger.) And where are the letters? One per week, in his best Sunday handwriting? Inside the receiver — fire. (How cozy are my ears in such a warm place!) But where am I from? 5 A postwar city, barracks — the joy of a first apartment — a coat, a jacket, a leather purse fat with pills, but where are the where-letters from the where-face? Evacuated face, de-evacuated face, sick not sick, stuck through face, vacuum face, lab rat face. This country was tested on Vaclav’s face. Now we can live in peace. So, where am I from? A postwar city, barracks — the joy of a deactivated face, vacated face. A face snatched from a hanger. Absence as an inner organ. 6 In a village known for a large puddle where all children fall between the two categories of those who hurt the living things and those who hurt the nonliving things, in a village known for being unknown (where am I from?), a graveyard around an old church, the frightening alphabet around the village, an alphabet on gravestones, marble letters under the moth-eaten snow. Under the moth-eaten snow my motherland has good bones. 7 My motherland rattles its bone-keys. A bone is a key to my motherland. 8 My motherland rattles its bone-keys. Eve watches with her one red eyelash. Under the moth-eaten snow my motherland has good bones. In my motherland people kneel before wells. In my motherland people pray to the crosses of flying birds. A bone is a key to my people. Among my people, only the dead have human faces. Still, where am I from? 9 Women saints in berets of golden threads, who are they by your feet, seated like pets? An angel with wings of a peacock, an angel with a human face. But who are they by your feet, seated like pets? Now, if you wear such golden berets, if you tame children and angels, if your white boneless fingers leaf through a book while I gnaw on this wooden verse, would you, holy women who wear golden berets, put the hairs on my tongue into a pigtail? 10 A mouse-tail of a word for a word-loving rodent! Inside my alphabet dragged incessantly down each frightening letter is a man. My frightening alphabet in his best Sunday handwriting. A letter addressed to lost letters, phone-face, clock-face, radio-face — face as an inner organ. Where are Vaclav’s letters as an inner organ. On the borderlines of my motherland — wet laundry claps in the wind like gunfire. Have you heard of my motherland? My motherland is a raw yolk inside a Fabergé egg. This yolk is what gives gold its color. This face is a fire-receiver. This face is an inner organ. A bone as a key to my people. Where am I from? 11 The golden bones of my motherland are ringing!

One afternoon the last week in April Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet One-half turn and it sticks in a stump. He recalls the hatchet-head Without a handle, in the shop And go gets it, and wants it for his own. A broken-off axe handle behind the door Is long enough for a hatchet, We cut it to length and take it With the hatchet head And working hatchet, to the wood block. There I begin to shape the old handle With the hatchet, and the phrase First learned from Ezra Pound Rings in my ears! "When making an axe handle the pattern is not far off." And I say this to Kai "Look: We'll shape the handle By checking the handle Of the axe we cut with—" And he sees. And I hear it again: It's in Lu Ji's Wên Fu, fourth century A.D. "Essay on Literature"-—in the Preface: "In making the handle Of an axe By cutting wood with an axe The model is indeed near at hand." My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen Translated that and taught it years ago And I see: Pound was an axe, Chen was an axe, I am an axe And my son a handle, soon To be shaping again, model And tool, craft of culture, How we go on.

It was a time when they were afraid of him. My father, a bare man, a gypsy, a horse with broken knees no one would shoot. Then again, he was like the orange tree, and young women plucked from him sweet fruit. To meet him, you must be in the right place, even his sons and daughter, we wondered where was papa now and what was he doing. He held the mystique of travelers that pass your backyard and disappear into the trees. Then, when you follow, you find nothing, not a stir, not a twig displaced from its bough. And then he would appear one night. Half covered in shadows and half in light, his voice quiet, absorbing our unspoken thoughts. When his hands lay on the table at breakfast, they were hands that had not fixed our crumbling home, hands that had not taken us into them and the fingers did not gently rub along our lips. They were hands of a gypsy that filled our home with love and safety, for a moment; with all the shambles of boards and empty stomachs, they filled us because of the love in them. Beyond the ordinary love, beyond the coordinated life, beyond the sponging of broken hearts, came the untimely word, the fallen smile, the quiet tear, that made us grow up quick and romantic. Papa gave us something: when we paused from work, my sister fourteen years old working the cotton fields, my brother and I running like deer, we would pause, because we had a papa no one could catch, who spoke when he spoke and bragged and drank, he bragged about us: he did not say we were smart, nor did he say we were strong and were going to be rich someday. He said we were good. He held us up to the world for it to see, three children that were good, who understood love in a quiet way, who owned nothing but calloused hands and true freedom, and that is how he made us: he offered us to the wind, to the mountains, to the skies of autumn and spring. He said, “Here are my children! Care for them!” And he left again, going somewhere like a child with a warrior’s heart, nothing could stop him. My grandmother would look at him for a long time, and then she would say nothing. She chose to remain silent, praying each night, guiding down like a root in the heart of earth, clutching sunlight and rains to her ancient breast. And I am the blossom of many nights. A threefold blossom: my sister is as she is, my brother is as he is, and I am as I am. Through sacred ceremony of living, daily living, arose three distinct hopes, three loves, out of the long felt nights and days of yesterday.

I can’t go up because I don’t know how. Nobody has shown me. So many names, my mother, I’m never sure what to call you. So many names for all your predators and crushes and suitors. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m here and I’m sorry I’m not here. Would you have made it on your own without the comorbid condition of motherhood and the slowness and consistency of time? I’m sorry for the slowness and consistency of time; years like zombies dawdling toward a cliff edge holding back the child’s writhing body, itching to grow, packed around the same mind I have now. I’m sorry the concept of promise outgrew the concept of child and that systemic contradiction and wizardry left only a dim sense of suspicion; a crescendoing breeze, accumulating clouds amidst bewildering dichotomies. I’m sorry for resembling your relatives and captors and the man who penetrated you, who’s still there, communicating boldly via intersections of others’ thought waves and memories, blatant into the long nights, haunting, for my inferiority in the face of nuclear family culture, feeding on detritus of white goods, leisure sports, laminate floors, a real home and fake recycling, for creeping by night into a tight void, blinds down, brain blown glass-thin, electric impulses and bloated thoughts bolted in. For this life being the only one my quiet mind knows, its many versions and phases, I’m sorry. I wasn’t your daughter — or anyone — when you were the blue-water navy, or the beheaded, or the baby boy. Or was I? I’m sorry I was not yet born and could not yet hear you when you were over there, listening carefully for the rain and small movements of animals, for sounds of life, through a green, five-fingered haze. I’m sorry I consider sentiment, fact; authenticity, originality, when they are irrelevant. So many choices in supermarkets, the natural habitat of panic attacks, it’s enough to make anyone sorry and I am. I’m sorry it’s taking over half a century to link your purple-patched brain scan to the basic biology of stress. The piano thunders on, sustain pedal wired to the facial muscles of all your neglecters, aching like hell behind their stamina and machinery. I’m sorry I had, logically, to think of my own self first / simultaneously, navigating through the fire and acid of Trust and her sycophant Love before returning. All the powerful were women; the power of penises and facial hair originated there, cajoled by matriarchs. As if skin and breath were insignificant! I’m so sorry. Where are you now, to take into my arms and resuscitate? Is it too late, given you’re fifty and no longer a child? It’s always mothers and mind control which is why I thank you for breaking the cycle, withstanding the enormity of generations, magnetic as water, to let us go. You weren’t to know about other outrageous families and sadistic counterparts. A nugget of my limbic system remembered choosing my own lemon-yellow baby clothes so thank you. I squeezed that into the thumb-sized space in the palm of my hand knowing all along they were wrong and imploding with it. I’m sorry I wept in the shower for your canceled wedding, letting the violet dress down the plughole, unsure what it all meant except things staying the same,future aggravating my brain, a baby brother gone again. I’m sorry you were out there, alone, defined by the worst of others and defined by your children’s prisms of hope and survival mechanisms. In one version, you did marry and lived in a house with green walls and extravagant furniture. I’m sorry that consensus reality had you set fire to your bed as you lay in it; arrested, put in a cell, let off the next day because the lawyer believed it was a genuine attempt and convinced the police. I’m sorry you’ve had to withstand such torrents of  knowledgeless advice and legal toxification, clinging to reality by a sinew of tooth, remembering yourself, through the rough and the smooth. I’m sorry I was absent, memorizing books of the Bible for a bar of Dairy Milk, owning up to things I’d never done, getting confirmed as an antidote to the evil core of me. I’m sorry it was exotic to think of kids like me ending up in prison, coincidentally, inevitably or prevented (which is the same), salvaged, peristalsized through society, brain safely contained, doused daily in cold water or electricity or disgrace, temptations kept consistently far enough away as to appear illusory like you, my brave mother, fantastic prodigy in flowing white caftan, knotted long brown hair, a beautiful gaze of solemnity, rare stone, emotionless (defined by others). I’m sorry I was ill-prepared for your soiled mattress and comatose body, under a wave of advocaat and transistor radios oozing with cheap Scotch. Even I developed feelings for them amidst adults acting like it’s okay to leave you this way, the blue bottle flies in on it, inflated with dog shit and red hot egos, resting on your cheek, your lip, too cunning to get rid of. I’m sorry that laughing off a difficult childhood didn’t make it never happen. Even a basic calculator recognizes an infinite loop as a malfunction; don’t they see cutting off my privates every night

I. Although Tía Miriam boasted she discovered at least half a dozen uses for peanut butter— topping for guava shells in syrup, butter substitute for Cuban toast, hair conditioner and relaxer— Mamá never knew what to make of the monthly five-pound jars handed out by the immigration department until my friend, Jeff, mentioned jelly. II. There was always pork though, for every birthday and wedding, whole ones on Christmas and New Year’s Eve, even on Thanksgiving day—pork, fried, broiled, or crispy skin roasted— as well as cauldrons of black beans, fried plantain chips, and yuca con mojito. These items required a special visit to Antonio’s Mercado on the corner of Eighth Street where men in guayaberas stood in senate blaming Kennedy for everything—“Ese hijo de puta!” the bile of Cuban coffee and cigar residue filling the creases of their wrinkled lips; clinging to one another’s lies of lost wealth, ashamed and empty as hollow trees. III. By seven I had grown suspicious—we were still here. Overheard conversations about returning had grown wistful and less frequent. I spoke English; my parents didn’t. We didn’t live in a two-story house with a maid or a wood-panel station wagon nor vacation camping in Colorado. None of the girls had hair of gold; none of my brothers or cousins were named Greg, Peter, or Marcia; we were not the Brady Bunch. None of the black and white characters on Donna Reed or on the Dick Van Dyke Show were named Guadalupe, Lázaro, or Mercedes. Patty Duke’s family wasn’t like us either— they didn’t have pork on Thanksgiving, they ate turkey with cranberry sauce; they didn’t have yuca, they had yams like the dittos of Pilgrims I colored in class. IV. A week before Thanksgiving I explained to my abuelita about the Indians and the Mayflower, how Lincoln set the slaves free; I explained to my parents about the purple mountain’s majesty, “one if by land, two if by sea,” the cherry tree, the tea party, the amber waves of grain, the “masses yearning to be free,” liberty and justice for all, until finally they agreed: this Thanksgiving we would have turkey, as well as pork. V. Abuelita prepared the poor fowl as if committing an act of treason, faking her enthusiasm for my sake. Mamá set a frozen pumpkin pie in the oven and prepared candied yams following instructions I translated from the marshmallow bag. The table was arrayed with gladiolas, the plattered turkey loomed at the center on plastic silver from Woolworth’s. Everyone sat in green velvet chairs we had upholstered with clear vinyl, except Tío Carlos and Toti, seated in the folding chairs from the Salvation Army. I uttered a bilingual blessing and the turkey was passed around like a game of Russian Roulette. “DRY,” Tío Berto complained, and proceeded to drown the lean slices with pork fat drippings and cranberry jelly—“esa mierda roja,” he called it. Faces fell when Mamá presented her ochre pie— pumpkin was a home remedy for ulcers, not a dessert. Tía María made three rounds of Cuban coffee then Abuelo and Pepe cleared the living room furniture, put on a Celia Cruz LP and the entire family began to merengue over the linoleum of our apartment, sweating rum and coffee until they remembered— it was 1970 and 46 degrees— in América. After repositioning the furniture, an appropriate darkness filled the room. Tío Berto was the last to leave.

If light pours like water into the kitchen where I sway with my tired children, if the rug beneath us is woven with tough flowers, and the yellow bowl on the table rests with the sweet heft of fruit, the sun-warmed plums, if my body curves over the babies, and if I am singing, then loneliness has lost its shape, and this quiet is only quiet.

That time my grandmother dragged me through the perfume aisles at Saks, she held me up by my arm, hissing, “Stand up,” through clenched teeth, her eyes bright as a dog’s cornered in the light. She said it over and over, as if she were Jesus, and I were dead. She had been solid as a tree, a fur around her neck, a light-skinned matron whose car was parked, who walked on swirling marble and passed through brass openings—in 1945. There was not even a black elevator operator at Saks. The saleswoman had brought velvet leggings to lace me in, and cooed, as if in the service of all grandmothers. My grandmother had smiled, but not hungrily, not like my mother who hated them, but wanted to please, and they had smiled back, as if they were wearing wooden collars. When my legs gave out, my grandmother dragged me up and held me like God holds saints by the roots of the hair. I begged her to believe I couldn’t help it. Stumbling, her face white with sweat, she pushed me through the crowd, rushing away from those eyes that saw through her clothes, under her skin, all the way down to the transparent genes confessing.

It feels like I need To go to my dad's house And when I'm at my dad's house I want to go to my mom's house I want to be at both houses

although my father although my mother although we rarely although we whispered although the silence although the absence although even now some TV books not to mention radio websites new militias hate groups raging against our socialist- communist-fascist although but still: our textbooks now our museums mostly our college literature courses even our crayons not to mention our young president who could scarcely have been imagined when we when I— and although I've gone back and filled in some blanks I'm still learning this un- learning untying the knot of Yes but re- writing this Yes Yes