95 Immigration poems

The Indiscriminate Citizenry of Earth are out to arrest my sense of being a misfit. “Open up!” they bellow, hands quiet before my door that’s only wind and juniper needles, anyway. You can’t do it, I squeak from inside. You can’t make me feel at home here in this time of siege for me and mine,mi raza. Legalized suspicion of my legitimacy is now a permanent resident in my gut. “Fruit of the prickly pear!” they swear, striding up to my table to juice me a glass of pink nectar. They’ve brought welcome baskets stuffed with proof I’m earthling. From under a gingham cover, I tug a dark feather iridescing green — cohering to “magpie” thought, to memory’s chatter, to mind. Mine. And here they have my mind translated into a slate-surfaced pond, which vibrates in the shape of a cottonwood’s autumn molt, which trees me to dirt, which soils me heat & freeze — But you’ll always be one definitive document short! I complain. Doubts can forever outstrip your geo-logic. For which they produce a lock of my natal dust, bronzed to the fluttering fiber of lacebark pine. Where’d they get that stuff? The baskets are bottomless, and it’s useless for me to insist on being distinct. Undergoing re-portation, I’m awakened to a Center, where walls between all beings are dreamt to dissolve.

Hmong Hunter Charged with 6 Murders Is Said to Be a Shaman — new york times If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound? If a rifle fires a shot in the woods, whose body first hits the ground? If a group of angry hunters surrounds, curses at, and accosts you for wandering onto their land If you apologize for being lost, inform you saw no posted signs, swallow their chinks this and gooks taking over that; are walking away over mud and fallen leaves when a loud crack far behind you kicks up black earth If your father was conscripted to fight on the side of the United States for the cia during the war in Vietnam If he, your mother, you—the oldest son— and all your younger siblings were later abandoned in the hills of Laos as targets for genocide by the Viet Cong If after five years in a Thai refugee camp, you come to this land as a teen, a casualty of history and time, then receive three years of training to become a sharpshooter in the u.s. military If you spent your adolescence watching blacks, Asians, Latinos, and whites watching one another watch each other for weakness and flaws If, after this first blast, you wheel around in a bright orange vest; glimpse in that split second an angry, possibly inebriated man lowering or resighting his rifle If, in that icy moment, you recall the Native friend you used to collect cans with; once watched his three-hundred-pound father unload himself from a Chevy Impala and chase the boy down University with a ball-peen hammer If, of your own children, your quietest son lately lacks the wherewithal at school to defend himself; and your oldest daughter has always been for some inexplicable reason ashamed of you If hunting for you is not just a sport; never a time to drink beers with friends in a cabin, but rather is a factor in considering your family's winter protein consumption If you believe in God, but not the good in everyone If you hate to think about this shit, because why the fuck is it always on you to preprove your loyalty and innocence? If—frightened for your life and the livelihood of your immediate and extended family—in that split second, you reel and train your own gun back at the far face of that vapory barrel now aiming at your own If, yes, you are sometimes angry and so look forward to escaping your truck driver's life on certain designated dates, on certain designated lands, not always clearly demarcated, but always clearly stolen from the ancestors of fat drunk red men so confused they chase their own firey songs in the form of their sons Stolen from generations of skewed black backs, hunched your whole life on street corners laughing and picking their bones Stolen from the paychecks of your brown coworker social security ghosts Stolen like your own people from mountains in one land only to be resettled and resented here in projects and tenements If you barely finished high school, but you know from all you've ever seen of this system Might Makes Right, and excuses, treaties, and cover-ups appear the only true code inscribed on most white men's souls If, after such slurs, pushes, and threats in these woods it is now also on you to assess if that far rifle still locked on your face just issued a mistake, a warning shot, or murderous attempt— and the answer is: your military muscle fibers act If you then spot three four five six seven? other hunters now scattering for their atv s and, of course—if a gook, don't be a dumb one— scattering now also for their weapons If you are alone in this land, on foot, in miles of coming snow, wind, and branches and don't even know in which direction you'd run If from birth you've seen what men with guns, knives, and bombs are capable of doing for reasons you never wanted to understand If in this very same county's court of all-white witnesses, counsel, judge, and jurors it will forever be your word against theirs because there was no forensic testimony over who shot first If, yes, sometimes you can hear voices, not because you're insane, but in your culture you are a shaman, a spiritual healer, though in this very different land of goods and fears, your only true worth seems to be as a delivery man and soldier If, upon that first fateful exchange in these woods, your instinct, pushing pin to balloon, were to tell you it's now either you and your fatherless family of fourteen, or all of them Would you set your rifle down; hope the right, the decent, the fair thing on this buried American soil will happen? Or would you stay low, one knee cold, and do precisely as your whole life and history have trained? And if you did, would anyone even care what really happened that afternoon eight bodies plummeted to earth like deer?

People have been trying to kill me since I was born, a man tells his son, trying to explain the wisdom of learning a second tongue. It’s an old story from the previous century about my father and me. The same old story from yesterday morning about me and my son. It’s called “Survival Strategies and the Melancholy of Racial Assimilation.” It’s called “Psychological Paradigms of Displaced Persons,” called “The Child Who’d Rather Play than Study.” Practice until you feel the language inside you,

Let us not speak of those days when coffee beans filled the morning with hope, when our mothers' headscarves hung like white flags on washing lines. Let us not speak of the long arms of sky that used to cradle us at dusk. And the baobabs—let us not trace the shape of their leaves in our dreams, or yearn for the noise of those nameless birds that sang and died in the church's eaves. Let us not speak of men, stolen from their beds at night. Let us not say the word disappeared. Let us not remember the first smell of rain. Instead, let us speak of our lives now— the gates and bridges and stores. And when we break bread in caf é s and at kitchen tables with our new brothers, let us not burden them with stories of war or abandonment. Let us not name our old friends who are unravelling like fairy tales in the forests of the dead. Naming them will not bring them back. Let us stay here, and wait for the future to arrive, for grandchildren to speak in forked tongues about the country we once came from. Tell us about it, they might ask. And you might consider telling them of the sky and the coffee beans, the small white houses and dusty streets. You might set your memory afloat like a paper boat down a river. You might pray that the paper whispers your story to the water, that the water sings it to the trees, that the trees howl and howl it to the leaves. If you keep still and do not speak, you might hear your whole life fill the world until the wind is the only word.

All birds—even those that do not fly —have wings A constant confession Admission of omission This is your punctuated equilibrium And everything in between Slow it down The moment of extinction The death of the last individual of a species (Let’s put it aside for now) Stay with it This is our gene flow How do you like our genetic drift A riff, a rift, a raft… Too rough for the second half Take us under, take us downhill Paint pangenesis all over your dancing body The new party god Keep the beat going, don’t stop, you can’t stop Crick & Watson Evo-devo This is your mother’s local phenomenon If this is racial hygiene Why do I feel so dirty? Microcosmic soul It’s an involutionary wonderland This living matter A modern synthesis 4.6 billion years of biology Can’t stop the ideology Graduate from meet/mate To fitness landscape of sexual selection From land over sea It’s a hard lyric The impression of a key in a bar of soap A transitional fossil Keep camping Plant the flag Bury the burial mound Put the pop in popular And the sigh in science

PART ONE I Slip-pilings on the Brooklyn littoral —the poles still tarry, flimsy; the ferry terminus with its walledup doors wan doorshapes on eroded sills. Downstream, the strutwork of the Williamsburg cable tower threw its cool shadow half a mile inland over tarpaper seams, gantried water butts, and splintery tenement cornices milled with acanthus and classical grasses of nineteenth-century dream-slum fantasy. We could see, from our rooftops, the endspan floating its ant-threads of traffic to the granite salients of the anchorage, and through its strands on the west the Financial District’s watery silhouettes. But it was our own foundations, crumbling in the sandy soil, that made us protest the drill rigs sounding for a wider bridge ramp to funnel the airport traffic over us into Manhattan. “Construction tremors will weaken our buildings”: from the over-roosted tenements clinging near the anchorage flew manuscript lists of signatures, block-groups’ painfully Englished petitions. But City Hall adoze, sleep-feeding, just flooded us II with chimerical figures and blueprints, wearing us down. Our own “block-leader,” Luz, a Guatemalan law student at NYU where I studied classics, distracted us more easily with her “pure language” or anti-Puerto Rican tirades. “Call that Spanish? Take my sitter— muy indio, still speaks some Maya mountain-language BUT the beautiful Spanish!” And so one evening this sitter, Pilar, came over—forty, perhaps, with a long fawn-tinted oval face, and read in low tones an archaic poem to the Madonna. “My daughter knows it in Quiché and English—” and she passed around, wistfully, a First Communion photo—flat cheekbones like her mother’s, long black braids, straight look. Luz told us Pilar had lost husband and son to the Violence; a machine-gunned death heap in the center of their village— “They killed all the men. But when my family came here, she came with her girl, we helped with the green card, and she’s a hotel maid now near the UN ...” Much realer, this, than our own bridge-inflicted, some-day disaster. And who knew but our bridge might metamorphose, as the City said (“Global cities draw capital”), into a river of money (“We’ll all sell cuchifritos on the ramp”), and anyway, mainly, summer III was running out, with its open evenings and windows. One Saturday, turning onto my block from the subway, I heard my name, crossed the street where twin buildings had area-ways. and saw you waving, the same, Pilar, from a window below the swag-bellied area railings. “Come have some coffee—go around in back.” I walked down the building-side, and turned in a trash-littered airwell by a door with multiple doorbells. You opened from a wooden hallway, unpainted, with padlocked doors. “See, the super’s cut up his flat for illegals. They took out an inside wall, so our room has a window—we all share the bath.” I entered a lime-walled room—chairs and table, sofa-bed. Your front wall was the building front, the three others drywall. On the bureau, a black-shawled prie-dieu : two photos; two candles in translucent, white-waxed sacks, and a polychrome Madonna with meeting brows. Through your window, car wheels, railings; and, above, my own second-story windows. “We saw you reading there,” you said from behind me, “when we moved in.” You sat me on the sofa, and formally presented your daughter (she moved her schoolbooks all to one end.) Near her, a shallow, linoleumed-over trench and a bathroom sink. You said: “I’m a widow from the mountains near Morache, very near the home-town of Señora Luz. My real work is hotel maid, and I’ve got a nice job, at a place called the Tricontinental.” Then you paused, and I felt how clearly you’d presented yourself, as Americans do, with your job, your état civil, and I said: “I’m a graduate student at NYU, where Luz studies, no, not married, no children ...” I tried to add something else at once, to leave this less ... definitive, but nothing came, so we ran through bridge-rumors, and soon we were hardly listening, waiting for our own next word, and laughing at our gabble. Pequita told us what the priest had said about the drilling; you spoke of Pequita’s First Communion, and none of us could stop finding striking things to say. Next day you came over to see my plants, and I came back for soup-supper, looking up at my windows, which in the easy half-yellow light of autumn looked oddly beckoning. As we ate, you leaned forward, with a sudden rogue’s smile, and mockingly proposed that we three walk across the bridge, “There’s a path up there. If the bridge is bad, we’ll tell off the Mayor—” (In what spirit, I wondered, had you listened to our committee?) And when I got home I looked down, and through your sheer curtains saw you cleaning up, and Pequita, at the table, reading. IV But next week, instead of the plank stair that zigzags up the anchorage-side, we wandered the riverside shipping alleys. From below, we could see overhead the under-arch of the bridge, and feel the resonant top-thrum of westbound subways and trucks. Then the riverside—I loved this part. A sort of post-industrial fenworld, with tiny terrace houses, big dredger-parts laid aside from the drillings, and abandoned wreckers’ lots filled with sea-floor light and trembling, long-awned panicles of switchgrass. Its timelessness soothed me—though ephemeral. Even that day, one freshly tuckpointed facade, and a pair of brandnew bronze Edwardian mermaid doorknockers. I could see our quarter five years from now, say—the withering discount chains, tentative boutiques, and mother and daughter figuring, to the upscale “pioneers,” as neighborhood indigenes, living on with strange literalness among them, supplying their just-permissible quantum of urban grit. You were ahead, and Pequita trailed us, rattling weed stalks with a stray lath. As we progressed in and out of the endspan’s slatted shadows, you turned and called me into a side-lot—sunken concrete, flask- green puddles, to a broken-off building wall. It had been interior, once—rows of soiled roomsized plaster squares trailing sawn pipes, with one high trembling toilet, like a pearl. In a lower square, fringed with ailanthus and barbs of gang graffiti, was a mural. Muy latino: the mountain dreaming the city: a terrace cafe with palm trees and a dancer shawled in black lace, with inward-angled castanets. And you lifted yourself on tiptoe, Pilar, to touch the lace, as you might have grazed Pequita’s cheek. I felt a pang, as if I already needed you sturdy inside your sturdy body, not this gesture as if, exiled within, you reached out— We stepped back, museum-wise, to contemplate, and you said: “Luz likes to say I’m some mountain-woman, but when my mother died, I lived with my aunt in the City—I only went back when I married.” I told her I’d lived in this city, with a stepmother, who’d divorced my uncle to marry my father; and beat me. “A stepmother’s a curse of God,” you said gently. And on the walk back, pointed out more wall palms, beaches, until New York seemed a dot in a belt of capitals high on the globe: world-cities, packed with immigrants, refugees, Gastarbeiter: a snowy latitude suffused with tropical nostalgia. V We were a threesome. Coffee, suppers, TV, Pequita at my computer—you’d asked me to teach her— or sleeping on my sofa, one bad month they moved you to night shift. Yet only that summer, I’d worked in my window like a scholar in a lamplit bay, the night filled with myriad noises, like Roman Juvenal, to whose ears “came ever the sounds of buildings collapsing.” Across, the two tenement-faces, florid, all bucrania, meanders, dusky trails of fire-escape bedding. And everything underlit by the sinister, slow-stopping car lights of our street. But now it was the dailiness of two from another hemisphere. Through snow-fissures, winds fluting on railings and building-flaws, Pilar in her low frame paced with armfuls of laundry, washed in the sink and hung to dry everywhere. The thousand stratagems of those who simply must not spend; and the tiny mother-decisions: though you preferred periphery, housekeeping around her, you’d make yourself interrupt her, to mop behind your sweeping. And Pequita—I saw her wrap you up on the sofa when you had flu, and bring you orange juice, as they’d taught her in school, for she loved you, she was the person who loved you— I saw too, that of what I wanted the university to be for me—a tiny model of the city with its own rules and subsets: “Tell me each day who I am”—you’d found your part in Pequita; I followed the shape of your day touching center as it funneled into her hand and moving pencil-point. VI For everything seemed natural to Pequita: the Credo, her photocopied choir music piled beside the tidy prie-dieu, our neighborhood of syringe-filled gutters, drug-stoops and pimps, her school’s turkey cutouts, metal detectors, backed-up toilets ... Our human wilderness, half-urban, half-surreal to her was a matter-of-fact Eden, like the picturesque ruins and laughably rococo grottoes imagined by the seicento as the Golden Age. —And I, I thought her whole world, it comes back— touching, as if her child’s paradisial will were there for my affectionate recreation, like our still faithfully, occasionally, typed-up and dispatched protests from the Ramp Committee to the Mayor. Slight effects of perspective, tiny human gestures giving point to the city’s vast, ironic beauty. PART TWO VII At a moment when no one was thinking about her, Pequita awoke. Perhaps she enjoyed the solitude, Pilar asleep, me asleep across the street. She got up and stood on the cheap oval bathroom rug before the sink. At seven the drills started, deeper-toned than ever before (they woke me)— and part of your ceiling fell in; a beam splintered, plummeting straight to the oval rug— The person screaming over the phone was Pilar. I thought it must be really all right, or she’d be crying not screaming, but when I’d called 911 and run over, Pequita was barely alive. Then the hospital corridors, me trying to close my winter coat (the buttons were off) on my nightgown, you on a bench, staring straight ahead. When they said Pequita was “gone,” you were utterly silent. I brought you to my place (though our street was a tangle of police lights and yellow tape), terrified of your fixed inner focus, as if you had a plan ... Next night I had Luz stay over, I slept at her place; the third I was back. You, thank God (I thought), were crying, and Luz had set up the service. She propelled us downstairs and to a tiny brick church I must often have passed without seeing it, two blocks inland. Egg-blue inside, it was, with a little green and gilt altar, dark Stations on the walls, and the statue of the Virgin of Guadeloupe placed oddly below the altar stairs, so that Pilar, after the death-mass, could kneel before her, praying straight into her face, while I on a kneeler buried mine in my hands. What would the mother live for now, the hotel, me, or Luz, already writing more endless mad letters? Yet only these had from the City real answers: they’d brace the drill site with vibration-absorbing piers; and they wanted her and her friend Mrs. Citrin to know “that no one else had been more than lightly injured.” VIII It was the end of winter, very dark. The building managers, nervy, had moved you to the first floor next door, till you found a new place (I knew you weren’t looking). Each day I saw you arrive from work, answer my call tersely, then pull down your blinds. A shadow showed rarely, flattened, shapeless; you lay on your sofa a lot. “Thanks Anne—I’m better without company,” or “please understand.” But often, later in the evening, you’d come down the stairs and turn inland. Then, one morning as I was passing with early groceries, you were leaving the parish hall in your black winter coat, heavily scarved, and we paused. Approvingly, you tapped one glove on my armload—you’d told me to cook more, dictated recipes. I asked if this had been Pequita’s choir-practice place; the sentence wavered, but you replied with grim joy, “She’s not practicing now. ” It took me a minute. Pequita was singing, this moment, in the Presence. Still what you felt most (it was in your face) was absence, absence, but from something bitter in your eyes, that seemed small and round with the cold, I felt your desire to exclude me and our old collusive ironies. What were such luxuries now, ironies, Anglo friends; and I thought you hated my mind that remembered the brownpapered books, the orange juice. I reached to touch your arm—to get past this, but no, you had to get home: “I fasted for communion”; and your eyes swerved away. All my laughable, my lovely, delusional studies, that I’d seen you sort through for Pequita, were now an affront. And yet I felt you moving behind your own mind, as if with something held in reserve ... IX But then you stopped answering the phone, went less often to church. What I thought was that you were angry (certainly I was). Perhaps I thought you needed to talk, and I’d visit you in Manhattan. So one morning in March, in the black coat I’d got for the funeral, I walked east from the forty-second street Lexington stop to the three-story, fairy-lit jungle atrium of the Tricontinental, and went to the seventh floor, where you started. There was a cart in the hall, a gleaming chrome maid’s cart half-projecting from a bedroom. On its sides were rows of glasses with lace sani-bonnets, gold- stamped mini-soaps and deodorants. It moved out, and you stood in the door with a sheet-load, looking fat in a starchy pink uniform monogrammed PILAR. When you saw me, you dropped the sheets and in pain, pressed both palms to your cheeks, and looked at me looking at you. When I started sobbing, you took my shoulder and backed me to the elevator. Pressed the button, stepped back, and then, to my surprise, gave me a sudden hug before pushing me in. X It had been always this half-connected and tenuous, our friendship. What light on my own isolation and need, that I hadn’t known. But you actually called me, that week, to propose our old joke, a bridge walk—maybe Saturday? Your voice in my ears sounded wobbly with tension, held-backness, so I got in first: a friend had wound up her doctorate and left me a minute Village studio starting June ... After that I could listen, somber, as you poured out your need to leave, Luz’s cousin, the possible hotel job “right in LA.” You added “Anne,” and broke off. “Well, I’ll tell you that later. Look, it may snow on Saturday, OK?” “I don’t care.” And before you hung up, I’d resigned you, given you up. We’d part, on my side in anger, on yours in oblivion. I met you at the foot of the anchorage stair (not the eastern approach, with its easy grade near the ramp site). We climbed through the snow, slowly, pausing at landings for different views of our old alley world. Like a museum of disused urban functions—we noted a bricked-over backyard privy arch, and from higher, roof-huts, inkily distinct, of old-style tenement dumbwaiters. The whole scene thrown out of drawing by one of those giant NYC cable-spools, charred at the bottom where some homeless had tried to burn it. The moist snow was sweeping through the cable tower when we clambered onto the path beneath it. As we moved, hunched slightly, onto the mainspan, the whole city abruptly whited-out to a monochrome geometry of vertical and stooping gray lines. I thought how Pequita would have loved it, and caught her mother’s eye. We went on cautiously, soon pausing to stamp our boots and look over the rail at the traffic lanes below us. “Anne, what I started to say before—this is it: I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you—you understand?” “Of course,” I lied aimlessly. But you, glancing sideways, “But I’m really sorry ...” “No, really ...” You shook your head slightly, then took my arm. “Okay then— what’s this thing?” pointing a snowy boot at a bolt as high as our knees, with a rusted-on octagonal nut: “It’s just a bolt.” You tapped your glove on a strut— “strut,” I provided. And you said, pompously, in Luz’ very intonations (in what spirit had you listened?)—“The tolerances just aren’t there. ” Then, feeling easier, we started naming everything— spikes, spun-wire vertical cables: English, Spanish, and then I heard you speak Quiché (words once for vines, for split trunks over gorges?) But everything on the bridge was shabby, neglected-looking; and you said soberly: “If anyone was supposed to look after this bridge, he’s forgot all about it.” We didn’t link arms again, but started back, pausing to throw a few loose snowballs on the Manhattan traffic below us. We’d go our separate ways—I’d go on delaying, skirting around my burnt-out places; you’d go where you could, forget what you could— some Job-like relinquishment of inquiry or thought; organisms tend to persist ... When we got down to the massive base of the anchorage, we managed a hug that took in our past, at least: one embrace of two black winter coats in the snow.

We are born with dreams in our hearts, looking for better days ahead. At the gates we are given new papers, our old clothes are taken and we are given overalls like mechanics wear. We are given shots and doctors ask questions. Then we gather in another room where counselors orient us to the new land we will now live in. We take tests. Some of us were craftsmen in the old world, good with our hands and proud of our work. Others were good with their heads. They used common sense like scholars use glasses and books to reach the world. But most of us didn’t finish high school. The old men who have lived here stare at us, from deep disturbed eyes, sulking, retreated. We pass them as they stand around idle, leaning on shovels and rakes or against walls. Our expectations are high: in the old world, they talked about rehabilitation, about being able to finish school, and learning an extra good trade. But right away we are sent to work as dishwashers, to work in fields for three cents an hour. The administration says this is temporary So we go about our business, blacks with blacks, poor whites with poor whites, chicanos and indians by themselves. The administration says this is right, no mixing of cultures, let them stay apart, like in the old neighborhoods we came from. We came here to get away from false promises, from dictators in our neighborhoods, who wore blue suits and broke our doors down when they wanted, arrested us when they felt like, swinging clubs and shooting guns as they pleased. But it’s no different here. It’s all concentrated. The doctors don’t care, our bodies decay, our minds deteriorate, we learn nothing of value. Our lives don’t get better, we go down quick. My cell is crisscrossed with laundry lines, my T-shirts, boxer shorts, socks and pants are drying. Just like it used to be in my neighborhood: from all the tenements laundry hung window to window. Across the way Joey is sticking his hands through the bars to hand Felipé a cigarette, men are hollering back and forth cell to cell, saying their sinks don’t work, or somebody downstairs hollers angrily about a toilet overflowing, or that the heaters don’t work. I ask Coyote next door to shoot me over a little more soap to finish my laundry. I look down and see new immigrants coming in, mattresses rolled up and on their shoulders, new haircuts and brogan boots, looking around, each with a dream in their heart, thinking they’ll get a chance to change their lives. But in the end, some will just sit around talking about how good the old world was. Some of the younger ones will become gangsters. Some will die and others will go on living without a soul, a future, or a reason to live. Some will make it out of here with hate in their eyes, but so very few make it out of here as human as they came in, they leave wondering what good they are now as they look at their hands so long away from their tools, as they look at themselves, so long gone from their families, so long gone from life itself, so many things have changed.

For Ana Menendez It only takes one night with the wind on its knees to imagine Carl Sandburg unfolding a map of Chicago, puzzled, then walking the wrong way. The lines on his face are hard to read. I alternate between the tv, where a plastic surgeon is claiming that every facial expression causes wrinkles, and the newspaper. I picture the surgeon reading the lines on Sandburg’s face, lines that would’ve made more sense if the poet had been, say, a tree growing in a wind orchard. Maybe he simply smiled too much. I’m reading about the All-Star game, thinking that maybe Sandburg saw the White Sox of 1919. . . . I love American newspapers, the way each section is folded independently and believes it owns the world. There’s this brief item in the inter- national pages: the Chinese government has posted signs in Tiananmen Square, forbidding laughter. I’m sure the plastic surgeon would approve, he’d say the Chinese will look young much longer, their faces unnaturally smooth, but what I see (although no photograph accompanies the story) is laughter bursting inside them. I go back to the sports section and a closeup of a rookie in mid-swing, his face keeping all the wrong emotions in check. . . . When I read I bite my lower lip, a habit the plastic surgeon would probably call cosmetic heresy because it accelerates the aging process. I think of Carl Sandburg and the White Sox; I think of wind in Tiananmen Square, how a country deprived of laughter ages invisibly; I think of the Great Walls of North America, each of them a grip on some outfield like a rookie’s hands around a bat when the wind is against him; I bite my lower lip again; I want to learn to think in American, to believe that a headline is a fact and all stories are suspect.

The first time I ever heard about coyotes Was in a book called (in Japanese)Seton’s Animals for Boys and Girls There I encountered Lobo the Wolf King, bighorn sheep, a family of wild boars, cottontail rabbits, and raccoons, but it was the stories of the wise coyote I loved the best I read the book over and over, over and over, it taught me the wisdom of rabbits, wolves, wild boars, but nothing surpassed the wisdom of the coyote Tito was raised by humans, was kept constantly on a leash No one loved her, they teased her until she ran away She learned to survive Ran for her life with her pups in her mouth Trying to get away from dogs and people I read about her over and over, over and over There was a map of America in the front of the book with pictures of animals where the stories took place: coyotes in the central plains, wolves in the southwest and north, elsewhere there were cottontails, boars, and partridges During my childhood, that was America to me Where did that book go? I no longer live in my childhood home, not even in the same town, not even in the same country, I lost my place there, I lost people and relationships, almost lost others too, I lost my language, but what about that book I read over and over, over and over? I must have lost it too Just the other day I tried searching for it on Amazon It popped right up, and I ordered it straight away Lives of the Hunted it’s called in English Published in 1901, reprinted in 1967 It arrived at my home A former library copy, the word discard stamped on it in big letters, probably the library didn’t want it because the stories are too cruel, too cruel for today’s youth, nowadays kids are used to killing one another in the virtual world, but even so, the stories are too cruel, 
a mother coyote was giving her cubs her milk, was licking them when hunters shot her dead, her cubs fled into their den, only to be dragged out one by one Here is how the book describes it: Even at this age there was a certain individuality of character among the puppies. Some of them squealed and some of them growled when dragged out to die. One or two tried to bite. The one that had been slowest to comprehend the danger, had been the last to retreat, and so was on top of the pile, and therefore the first killed. The one that had first realized the peril had retreated first, and now crouched at the bottom of the pile. Coolly and remorselessly the others were killed one by one, and then this prudent little puppy was seen to be the last of the family. It lay perfectly still, even when touched, its eyes being half closed, as, guided by instinct, it tried to “play possum.” One of the men picked it up. It neither squealed nor resisted. Neither squealed Nor resisted ... The book was in English, but I could read it quickly Since I remembered the Japanese I had read the book over and over, over and over All the coyote pups were killed Only one survived, only a single pup Tossed with its dead littermates into a sack and taken to a farm In the original, the hunters named her Tito That’s what I had suspected, I had read it in an old translation, kids in Japan back then couldn’t be expected to pronounce the unfamiliar sound ti, but that’s the version I was brought up on So for me, her name was always Chito I was always Chito Wow-wow-wow-wow-wow-w-o-o-o-o-o-o-w I remember her voice When I was a child, I read the book over and over, over and over Here is how the book describes it: an inborn hankering to sing Her songs were a volley of short barks mixed with doleful squalls — Wow-wow-wow-wow-wow-w-o-o-o-o-o-o-w Here is how the book describes it: when the sun went down she would feel the impulse to sing that wild song of the West which means so much to the Coyotes. It is not the invention of an individual nor of the present, but was slowly built out of the feelings of all Coyotes in all ages. I’m not sure if I remember the Japanese correctly Getting old is no fun at all, you forget important things like that It is not the invention of an individual nor of the present, but was slowly built out of the feelings of all Coyotes in all ages and Her experiences all emphasized for her that old idea to “lay low”— that is, to be quiet, unobtrusive, and hide when danger is in sight Those were the most important things I learned as a child Chito’s wisdom How to survive Seeing the book, I remembered why I came to this place called America The most important things I learned as a child Were in that book I read over and over Maybe I had lost them for a while Or just forgotten The fate of the animals, their lives and deaths Their lives upon the plains, and my life too Chito was killed over and over again But each time she came back to life The humans tenaciously, persistently killed her She tricked them and was tricked by them in return She scattered her feces, went into heat The more they hunted her The more clearly things came into focus In other words, all the things she thought along the way Not the invention of an individual nor of the present But slowly built out of the feelings of all coyotes in all ages It was for Chito For Chito That I abandoned my home, bought an airline ticket And came to this place There was someone I barely knew, I’d only barely caught his scent But still I followed my nose and pursued him I found a room, rented a car And stayed the full three months permitted without a visa, I thought I’d try to stay When people asked me why I’d come, I said I’m a poet, I’ve come to learn about the oral traditions of the Native Americans And that was true But I didn’t even know what I wanted to know I didn’t know where to go I didn’t know whom to ask I was terrible at speaking with people in my native tongue, so in English it was damn near impossible, I couldn’t even tell them who I am (it took me decades to say that even in Japanese) But the real reason I came Was because I wanted to encounter a coyote I wanted to prick up my ears and listen to its howl Rattling dryly over the roads, through the darkness of night Translated from the  Japanese

“I do not know English” —from “I Do Not” by Michael Palmer “Marunong akong mag-ingles” (I do know English) —any 21st-century Filipino poet I do know English. I do know English for I have something to say about this latest peace stirring between a crack that’s split a sidewalk traversing a dusty border melting at noon beneath an impassive sun. I do know English and, therefore, when hungry, can ask for more than minimum wage, pointing repeatedly at my mouth and yours. Such a gesture can only mean what it means: I do not want to remain hungry and I am looking at your mouth. I do know English and still will not ask permission. I shall call you “Master” with a lack of irony; lift my cotton blouse; cup my breasts to offer them to your eyes, your lips, your tongue; keen at the moon hiding at 11 a.m. to surface left tendon on my neck. For your teeth. And so on. No need to decipher your response—and if you wish, go ahead: spank me. I do know English. Therefore I can explain this painting of a fractured grid as the persistent flux of our “selves” as time unfolds. There is a way to speak of our past or hopes for the future, the hot-air balloon woven from a rainbow’s fragments now floating over St. Helena; your glasses I nearly broke when, afterwards, you flung me to the floor as violence is extreme and we demand the extreme from each other; your three moans in a San Francisco hallway after I fell to my knees; your silence in New York as I knocked on your door. There is a way to articulate your silence—a limousine running over a child on the streets of Manila and Shanghai. And Dubai. There is a way to joke about full-haired actors running for President and the birth of a new American portrait: “Tight as a Florida election.” I do know English and so cannot comprehend why you write me no letters even as you unfailingly read mine. Those where I write of the existence of a parallel universe to create a haven when your silence persists in this world I was forced to inherit. Which does not mean I cannot differentiate between a reflection and a shadow, a threnody and a hiccup, the untrimmed bougainvillea bush mimicking a fire and the lawn lit by a burning cross. I can prove Love exists by measuring increased blood flow to the brain’s anterior cingulated cortex, the middle insula, the putamen and the caudate nucleus. Nor is “putamen” a pasta unless I confirm to you that my weak eyesight misread “puttanesca” as the crimson moon began to rise, paling as it ascends for fate often exacts a price. I can see an almond eye peer behind the fracture on a screen and know it is not you from the wafting scent of crushed encomiums. I can remind you of the rose petals I mailed to you after releasing them from the padded cell between my thighs. I slipped the petals inside a cream envelope embossed in gold with the seal of a midtown Manhattan hotel whose façade resembles a seven-layered wedding cake. Which we shall share only through the happiness of others. Which does not cancel Hope. I can recite all of your poems as I memorized them through concept as well as sound. I speak of a country disappearing and the impossibility of its replacement except within the tobacco-scented clench of your embrace. I can tell you I am weary of games, though they continue. Manila’s streets are suffused with protesters clamoring for an adulterer’s impeachment. Their t-shirts are white to symbolize their demand for “purity.” Space contains all forms, which means it lack geometry. My lucid tongue has tasted the dust from monuments crumbling simply because seasons change. Because I do know English, I have been variously called Miss Slanted Vagina, The Mail Order Bride, The One With The Shoe Fetish, The Squat Brunette Who Wears A Plaid Blazer Over A Polka-Dot Blouse, The Maid. When I hear someone declare war while observing a yacht race in San Diego, I understand how “currency” becomes “debased.” They have named it The Tension Between The Popular Vote And The Electoral College. I do know English.