478 Identity poems

we didn’t really speak my summer wants to answer the architecture doesn’t matter this is not my real life when I am here I want to know why do I believe what I was taught a storm is on the way close all the windows begin at the earliest hour is there a self

Yes, I was born on the street known as Glass—as Paper, Scissors or Rock. Several of my ancestors had no hands. Several of my ancestors used their pens in odd ways. A child of seven I prayed for breath. Each day I passed through the mirrored X into droplets of rain congealed around dust. I never regretted this situation. Though patient as an alchemist I failed to learn English. Twenty years later I burned all my furniture. Likewise the beams of my house to fuel the furnace. Once I bought an old boat. I abandoned the tyrannical book of my dreams and wrote about dresses, jewels, furniture and menus eight or ten times in a book of dreams. It sets me to dreaming when I dust it off. Our time is a between time; best to stay out of it. Send an occasional visiting card to eternity or a few stanzas to the living so they won’t suspect we know they don’t exist. Sign them Sincerely Yours, Warmest Regards, Thinking of You or Deepest Regrets. Brown river outside my window, an old boat riding the current. What I like most is to stay in my apartment. So that is my life, pared of anecdotes. I go out occasionally to look at a dance. Otherwise the usual joys, worries and inner mourning. Occasionally in an old boat I navigate the river when I find the time. Water swallows the days. I think maybe that’s all I have to say except that an irregular heart sometimes speaks to me. It says, A candle is consuming a children’s alphabet. It says, Attend to each detail of the future-past. Last night the moon was divided precisely in half. Today a terrifying wind.

I write my name as one, On sands by waves o’errun Or winter’s frosted pane, Traces a record vain. Oblivion’s blankness claims Wiser and better names, And well my own may pass As from the strand or glass. Wash on, O waves of time! Melt, noons, the frosty rime! Welcome the shadow vast, The silence that shall last! When I and all who know And love me vanish so, What harm to them or me Will the lost memory be? If any words of mine, Through right of life divine, Remain, what matters it Whose hand the message writ? Why should the “crowner’s quest” Sit on my worst or best? Why should the showman claim The poor ghost of my name? Yet, as when dies a sound Its spectre lingers round, Haply my spent life will Leave some faint echo still. A whisper giving breath Of praise or blame to death, Soothing or saddening such As loved the living much. Therefore with yearnings vain And fond I still would fain A kindly judgment seek, A tender thought bespeak. And, while my words are read, Let this at least be said: “Whate’er his life’s defeatures, He loved his fellow-creatures. “If, of the Law’s stone table, To hold he scarce was able The first great precept fast, He kept for man the last. “Through mortal lapse and dulness What lacks the Eternal Fulness, If still our weakness can Love Him in loving man? “Age brought him no despairing Of the world’s future faring; In human nature still He found more good than ill. “To all who dumbly suffered, His tongue and pen he offered; His life was not his own, Nor lived for self alone. “Hater of din and riot He lived in days unquiet; And, lover of all beauty, Trod the hard ways of duty. “He meant no wrong to any He sought the good of many, Yet knew both sin and folly,— May God forgive him wholly!”

He tells me in Bangkok he’s robbed Because he’s white; in London because he’s black; In Barcelona, Jew; in Paris, Arab: Everywhere and at all times, and he fights back. He holds up seven thick little fingers To show me he’s rated seventh in the world, And there’s no passion in his voice, no anger In the flat brown eyes flecked with blood. He asks me to tell all I can remember Of my father, his uncle; he talks of the war In North Africa and what came after, The loss of his father, the loss of his brother, The windows of the bakery smashed and the fresh bread Dusted with glass, the warm smell of rye So strong he ate till his mouth filled with blood. “Here they live, here they live and not die,” And he points down at his black head ridged With black kinks of hair. He touches my hair, Tells me I should never disparage The stiff bristles that guard the head of the fighter. Sadly his fingers wander over my face, And he says how fair I am, how smooth. We stand to end this first and last visit. Stiff, 116 pounds, five feet two, No bigger than a girl, he holds my shoulders, Kisses my lips, his eyes still open, My imaginary brother, my cousin, Myself made otherwise by all his pain.

the gates of mercy slammed on the right foot. they would not permit return and bent a wing. there was no choice but to learn to boogaloo. those horrid days were not without their pleasure, learning to swear and wearing mock leather so tight eyes bulged, a stolen puff or two behind crack-broken backs and tickled palms in hallways dark, flirtations during choir practice as the body organized itself against the will (a mystic gone ballistic, not home but blood on the range) as one descended on this effed-up breeding hole of greeds—to suffer chronic seeings was’t hunger or holiness spurred the sighting?

In the redcoat she (who is I) was an angel, dark and bright. Mama chose the drama: pretty scarlet to subdue the white walk, a world dumb with snow, patentleather shoes to shine the path over ice. My father paid the way. His teeth salt inside the grin. I (who’s she) had a manner of leaping toward a light suddenly running into ecstasy or heat, exquisitely blind in the body racing inside it- self. A little fit of imagining. Thin arms, cropped wings, to hold the bristly branches of fir, and sing- ing, sisters and brothers itching, happy from angelhair fine as a strand of cat hair split six ways and brushed into the skin to itch and itch again. We were wild and giddy with gifts. It was then and always as all souls itch and spin in lit-red coats that float down this narrow vein, so we spin in O, to someone who loves us and suffers the world for each turn before a mirror, quiet as ice, we fall all through at last here in memory’s tiny Paradise.

Had I remained in innocent security, I should have thought all men were born my slaves, And worn my power like lightning in my eyes, To have destroyed at pleasure when offended. —But when love held the mirror, the undeceiving glass Reflected all the weakness of my soul, and made me know My richest treasure being lost, my honour, All the remaining spoil could not be worth The conqueror’s care or value. —Oh how I fell like a long worshipped idol Discovering all the cheat.

From a newspaper photo and article about my godfather, James Moreno, East Los Angeles, 1950. (Three police officers took a brutal beating in a wild free-for-all with a family, including three young girls. From left, James, 19, and Alex, 22, in jail after the fracas on the porch of their home at 3307 Hunter.) Jimmy is staring off the page, hands in his pockets. A four-button dark shirt. No bruises, but he looks dazed. Alex wears a leather coat and a polka-dot shirt, which is in itself a crime. Nowhere is there a photo of a young girl with a face carved like a racetrack saint, eyes with all bets called off, grinning like a coyote. (Officer Parks had his glasses broken with his own sap and was thrown through a window.) Jimmy and Alex are my dad’s cousins, lived on Boyle Heights and tortillas. Mama says the cops always harassed them, those niños from East L.A., driving their low-riders, chrome shinier than a cop’s badge. And why wasn’t Coyote Girl mentioned, that round-armed girl with a punch like a bag of bees, a girl with old eyes, her lips cracking open as she saw the cop sailing through glass, boiling out of Boyle Heights, skidding on the sidewalk, flat as a tortilla? (The officers received severe cuts and bruises, were treated at a hospital and released in time to jail the youths, who were charged with assault with a deadly weapon.) Two years later, I was born and Jimmy entered the church, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched, watching the christening. Four drops of water, like popped-off wafer-thin buttons, fell on my head. No. He never showed up that day or any other. My spiritual guardian must’ve been there in spirit only. He didn’t know nada about Got and no one knows where he is today, but I think you could find him at the end of a knife. Or in the slash of the z in ¡La Raza! the dark blood reds of graffiti. Or tomatoes grown in old coffee cans by a white-haired man sitting in the sun in a dark shirt, next to an old woman growing younger every day as I tell her story, my story, our story with all the grace and power of a deadly weapon.

Debasement is the password of the base, Nobility the epitaph of the noble. See how the gilded sky is covered With the drifting twisted shadows of the dead. The Ice Age is over now, Why is there ice everywhere? The Cape of Good Hope has been discovered, Why do a thousand sails contest the Dead Sea? I came into this world Bringing only paper, rope, a shadow, To proclaim before the judgment The voice that has been judged: Let me tell you, world, I—do—not—believe! If a thousand challengers lie beneath your feet, Count me as number thousand and one. I don't believe the sky is blue; I don't believe in thunder's echoes; I don't believe that dreams are false; I don't believe that death has no revenge. If the sea is destined to breach the dikes Let all the brackish water pour into my heart; If the land is destined to rise Let humanity choose a peak for existence again. A new conjunction and glimmering stars Adorn the unobstructed sky now; They are the pictographs from five thousand years. They are the watchful eyes of future generations.

1 The woman on the mantel, who doesn't much resemble me, is holding a chainsaw away from her body, with a shocked smile, while an undiscovered tumor squats on her kidney. 2 The present is a sentimental favorite, with its heady mix of grandiosity and abjection, truncated, framed. 3 It's as if I'm subletting a friend's apartment. Even in the dream, I'm trying to imagine which friend. And I'm trying to get all my robes together, robes I really own and robes I don't