Always here
Always.
MATEO
THE WORK CREW
Six hundred Spaniards—all hired in Cuba—
now sleep in boxcars. My team of twelve
is a muttering nest of secret plots.
As I listen to the gruff voices
of my angry crew, I barely
understand their raging way
of seeing the world.
Anarchy is their favorite word.
It means no government, no rules.
It means: Cause trouble.
Create chaos.
Dig a deep canal,
and then explode it.
Destroy our own work,
just to defeat the rich men
who pay us.
The anarchists decide to include me,
even though I am so much younger,
and an islander,
and frightened.
So I nod, pretending that I’m willing
to carry their smuggled messages
and smuggled weapons,
but the truth is, I’ve already lived
in a house of trouble
for too long.
Dodging the fists of an angry
war veteran
was enough to make me
permanently cautious.
MATEO
BACKBREAKING
Nights of imagining anarchy
are terrifying, but days
of lifting and moving
heavy train tracks
are so exhausting
and painful
that I feel
as though I’m being
swallowed
and chewed
by a monster
made of living
breathing
hungry
mud.
Each morning after breakfast,
a labor train steams us down, down, down,
into the depths of an excavation pit
called Culebra—“the Serpent.”
My doom.
We line up beside a muddy train track
that we are expected to shift
deeper and deeper and deeper
as the Serpent Cut grows
more hellish,
with gigantic mounds of dynamited rock
and swampy dirt
that the spoil trains haul up, up, up,
in endless, dreary, soul-drowning
rain, rain, thunderous, lightning-strike
rain.
To move a track, we have to bend, lift,
heave, and grunt as one,
all of us bursting
with furious curses, screaming
across this impossibly steep
canyon
that we are creating
by moving these tracks
farther and farther downhill,
so that more and more
rock and mud
can be hauled
up and out,
as if we are
struggling
to reach
the fiery
earth’s
melted
heart.
HENRY
from the island of Jamaica
THE LIFE OF A DIGGER
Jamaican digging crews have to sleep
eighty men to a room, in huge warehouses
like the ones where big wooden crates
of dynamite are stored.
My hands feel like scorpion claws,
clamped on to a hard hard shovel all day,
then curled into fists at night.
At dawn, the steaming labor trains
deliver us by the thousands, down into
that snake pit where we dig
until my muscles feel
as weak as water
and my backbone
is like shattered glass.
But only half the day
is over.
At lunchtime, we see sunburned
American engineers and foremen
eating at tables, in shady tents
with the flaps left open,
so that we have to watch
how they sit on nice chairs,
looking restful.
We also watch the medium-dark
Spanish men, relaxing as they sit
on their train tracks, grinning
as if they know secrets.
We have no place to sit. Not even
a stool. So we stand, plates in hand,
uncomfortable
and undignified.
Back home, I used to dream of saving
enough Panama money
to buy a bit of good farmland
for Momma and my little brothers
and sisters, so that we would all
have plenty to eat.
Now all I want is a chair.
And food with some spice.
And fair treatment.
Justice.
MATEO
TRAPPED
The life of a train-track mover
is grueling. Exhausting. Painful. Dull.
Even worse, the anarchists expect me
to risk my life smuggling their
handwritten newsletters
from one boxcar barracks to another.
So I sneak away at night, planning
to find my way back to the docks,
hoping to board any ship
headed home . . .
but I’m caught by a policeman
and dragged back to my boxcar,
where all of us are warned
that it’s too late for escape.
We signed contracts. If we break them,
we’ll be arrested and chained.
MATEO
PAYDAY
The payroll office is just a train car
with two windows and two signs:
GOLD. SILVER. My first two
English words.
Our whole crew waits in a slow, snaking
line that leads to the SILVER sign,
while beside us at the GOLD window,
a short, swiftly moving row of americano
foremen and steam-shovel drivers
hold out big, floppy cowboy hats
to catch a shower
of gold.
Gold. Just like the bell-bright coins
in that recruiter’s magic show
of metallic
music.
When my turn finally comes,
I hold out a cupped palm
to receive a moon-glossy
trickle
of silver.
My pay amounts to a mere
twenty cents per hour
of spirit-crushing
misery.
HENRY
HALF PAY
When the Spanish track-moving crew
goes ahead of us, we watch, we count.
Then our turn comes, and we hold out
eager hands, palms cupped to receive
ten cents per hour.
We’ve been in Panama only a few days,
and already we’re twice as poor
as the Spaniards.
It’s just like the sugar fields at home,
where Englishmen own the land
and medium-dark foremen supervise,
while men like me
have to chop, chop, chop,
with sharp machetes that make us
feel like slaves. Waiting to fight.
Ready to escape.
JOHN STEVENS
from the United States of America
Chief Engineer, Panama Canal
TEAMWORK
If I could hire only white Americans,
I would, but they don’t want shovel jobs
and they won’t work for silver.
Dark islanders are my only choice,
along with a few hundred semi-whites,
just to show the Jamaicans how easily
they can be replaced.
But islanders are childlike, easily bored . . .
so I’m creating a sporting atmosphere
to motivate hard work. I’ve divided
all the laborers
into ethnic teams.
Hearty competition will spur men
from each nation
to dig faster and shovel
more mud, loading
more and more dirt and rocks
into the
spoil trains.
Maybe I’ll even keep score
and publish the names of winners
in newspapers all over the world.
Imagine how proud those Jamaicans
will feel, if they can manage to beat
the French speakers from little islands
like Guadeloupe
and Martinique.
It will probably be
just a matter of time
until islanders start
placing bets.
MATEO
SILVER TOWN
Rain, rain, rain, mud, mud, mud,
and labor so brutally grueling,
and hope draining, and muscle
straining, and filth heaving,
that it’s almost impossible for me
to believe that this much muddy sludge
can be moved by ordinary men
instead of giants.
The only relief is payday, no matter
how stingy.
We take our wages to a makeshift town
made of mud
and rum.
In ramshackle tents and market stalls,
vendors from all over the world
shout in a hundred languages.
There are Sikhs from India wearing
colorful turbans, and Chinese doctors
offering strange cures, and Italians selling boots,
Greeks with jars of olives,
Romanians telling fortunes,
indios from Ecuador weaving
fine white hats from dry reeds,
and local children from right here
in Panamá offering lottery tickets
and spicy snacks—corn fritters,
sweet cakes, and fried fish
from the river,
round eyes staring
from greasy heads.
Bullfights.
Cockfights.
Card games.
Dancing girls.
There are so many choices
for ways to spend payday
that I almost feel tempted
to go off by myself and keep my
stingy silver wages so that I can buy
paper and pencils to sketch
every wonder that I see when I walk
through the forest, or even right here,
on this bustling Bottle Alley street
made of mud
and rum.
Long ago, when Mami was alive
and Papi was sane, I had the chance to go
to school for two whole years. I fell in love
with art class, even though I was supposed to
like reading and writing or learning math
and geography.
I never imagined that I would work
in one of the faraway places I studied
on those big, flat maps that made me
long to paint the whole world
with bright colors.
Now, while most of the Spanish men
rush off to bullfights and others vanish
into tents where I imagine that secret
anarchist meetings
must be going on, I roam alone,
wondering what to do with the rest
of my life.
Each saloon has separate entrances
for silver men and gold, so I slip in
through a silver door, but not too far,
just barely inside—until slowly, I end up
edging closer and closer
to a boxing ring
where a young Jamaican
is fighting a young Barbadian,
both of them wearing the names
of their islands on scribbled signs
that dangle around their necks.
The sight of fists should send me
scurrying for safety, but so far away
from my drunken father, I begin
to wonder how it would feel
to fight back.
When the Barbadian loses,
the Jamaican goes up against
a Trinidadian, and when the new man
is knocked out, I leap forward,
and without any sign to name
my island, I flail
wild punches
and kicks,
imagining
that my enemy
is Papi.
HENRY
THE BOXING MATCH
I could say it’s the rum,
but it’s really those humiliating
lunches, watching Spaniards
lounging on train tracks
while I have to eat
standing up
like an animal
in a corral.
Each punch I throw
at this inexperienced kid
feels like a bite
making all those
shameful mealtimes
a little more
tasty.
MATEO
AFTER THE FIGHT
Losing is so familiar that I almost feel
as though I’m home.
I walk out of the saloon alone, slogging
across Bottle Alley, this street of muddy
lost dreams.
Like a vision from the forest, la yerbera
appears—Anita, the herb girl—with her
delicately balanced
enormous basket
of twigs and petals
that seem to overflow
like a magical fountain
as she sings:
willow bark for pain,
basil stems for peace of mind,
goosefoot epazote leaves
to charm the gas out of beans . . .
She looks like a ruffled forest bird,
with her colorful skirts and a necklace
of green feathers strung between red seeds
and the blue wings of huge
shimmering
butterflies.
Without any way to paint her true beauty,
I pull one of the twigs from her basket
and scratch a rough shadow
of her smile
in mud.
ANITA
RARE CURES
Mateo asks the price of azafrán—
saffron, the most expensive spice
because it is the golden pollen
of a tiny purple crocus flower,
gathered one strand at a time
by my own hand.
Mateo’s fists are bruised, his cheeks
blood-streaked. Has he been arguing
in the dance halls, fighting over a girl?
The thought makes my basket feel
as protective as a helmet.
But he looks too sad for real wildness,
so I give him a bit of the fragrant spice
as a gift, to help him remember
his mother’s kitchen
and to thank him
for the strange
little portrait, pressed
into mud.
Then I leave him standing
as if dazed, while I roam away
from Silver Town, back into
my forest,
my musical
green home.
THE HOWLER MONKEYS
DYNAMITE
WE HATE YOUR BOOM
WE FEAR YOUR BLAST
WE ROAR OUR FURY
OUR RAGE
OUR TERROR
OUR HORROR
OF STRANGERS
WITH EXPLOSIONS
SO MUCH LOUDER
THAN OUR OWN
POWERFUL
POWERFUL
POWERFUL
VOICES
AS WE HOWL
GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY
GO GO GO GO GO GO GO GO GO
A MONKEY-EATING EAGLE
PEERING DOWN FROM SKY
Smaller monkeys are tasty
but big hairy howlers
are the meatiest
so I search from high above
for dark specks in treetops
far below
so far
yet easy enough to pierce
with sharp talons
after I plummet
down
from
hunger
to
my wild
forest feast.
A THREE-TOED SLOTH
PEERING UP FROM A BRANCH
Above me, a loud monkey vanishes,
but I’m slow and silent;
no eagle can see me
dangling
upside down
with green plants growing
all over my shaggy hair.
Beetles munch my algae.