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Your postcard from Varadero
Beach is on my dresser at home, where the surf of it rolls day and
night making mild Cuban sounds
—Wallace Stevens, letter to José Rodriguez Feo
8/16
Ladies in charcoal
and pink Chanel suits
sip hot Chai from glass mugs at Michael’s.
They mind the afternoon with eyes fixed
on the side of their faces, like blackbirds.
10/14
The rose-thatched
gazebo at Elizabeth Park
has bared itself into a cloud of thorny vines
where even blackbirds do not perch.
11/1
Along a row of
Perfect-Six town homes,
a woman matted by a field of red brick
caws out of a third floor window like
a blackbird needing other blackbirds.
12/19
Near the end of
fall the black leaves
look like feathers strewn over lawns.
12/21
After the first
snowfall nothing remains
black, not even the night. Nothing breaks
the white reverence, not even a blackbird.
1/5
The reservoir has hardened into a bed of ice
expanding, groaning. It’s the only sound I hear
complaining of winter through the mountains.
1/28
Airplanes pass.
Their shadows land like black
birds on the snowy fields before the runway.
2/3
The buildings
downtown stand like chess pieces
in a stalemate against the frozen riverfront
that will not break until a blackbird flies.
2/24
The Portuguese men in heavy black coats
gather like blackbirds at La Estrella heckling
over Old World days and the World Cup.
3/18
All the bakery cases along Franklin Avenue
in Little Italy, glitter with sprinkled cannoli,
anise candies, and iced cookies. But no pies.
4/2
At the bus stop on Park and Main, I catch
humming birds hovering in the rainforest eyes
of puertorriqueños. Where are my pájaros negros?
4/13
On the telephone lines dripping with snow
in my window, there ought to be blackbirds.
They ought to be slitting the sky open.
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Volcanoes everywhere,
like cathedrals at the end
of every stretch of cobblestone I wobble through.
Volcanoes triangulating the view in every window,
and reading over my shoulder on the patio at night,
funneling the stars between their peaks, threatening
to grumble and leave La Antigua to rise a third time
out of ruin. Volcanoes, keeping watch like a jury
of five gods: Acatenango, Fuego, Tejamulco, Agua,
and Pacaya, the one I climbed, step by step through
rows of corn groomed like manes by Mayan hands,
through the quilt work of terrace farmers’ patches,
through clouds veiling through pinewood forests,
until I walked in pumice fields, barren as the moon, if
the moon were black, and spelled out my name with
freshly minted stones I laid down to claim I was here
on this newly kilned rock that in a few eons will be
the soil of the valley, the earth I savor in my coffee,
the dust that settles over the sills and counter tops.
I scaled the peak, reached the crater, and stood
balanced on its igneous lip, speechless, looking
into the cauldron of molten, blood-orange petals,
a pearlescent fire, an open wound weeping smoke,
terrified I might fall, terrified that, for a moment,
I’d let myself be seduced by the pure, living heart
of the raw earth, saying: here, let me take you back.
for V.C.L.
Two
days ago, I was below the equator and you
were driving, holding the wheel with one hand, and
my hand with the other. It was summer on the road,
iron-red dust lifting like a ghost, and I was hoping
this: that I belonged wherever I was going with you,
north into the Amazon or south toward the coast—
I couldn’t tell, it was all green to me, it was all acres
of sky-filled lakes, all waterfalls and streams tearing
through the mountains, it was all mountains, it was
about you and me, the possibility, the odds of me
disappearing with you into your country, into one
of its villages with gables and bell towers peeking
through the landscape. I’d get used to blooms
bursting through October, frost glazing over July,
you’d teach me Portuguese, I’d teach you Spanish:
mão is mano, pan is paõ, amanhã is mañana, but today
I’m at the old grains of my desk again with nothing
changed: the same bouquet of pen-n-pencil stems,
the furniture unmoved, the same color on the walls,
the same books on sagging shelves, and winter here,
a season away from you, a continent against me. |
