a folk singer, my favorite poet
of peace.
SEPARATION
Branches
of
rivers
shift
water
rises
transformed into vapor
an airborne stream
of clouds
and doubts.
Alone in outer space?
Together on solid earth?
No.
Just floating
weightless
somewhere
in between.
Without my first boyfriend
who am
I?
A QUIET HOME LIFE
No more Army M., just afternoons
cleaning a teacher’s house, and Friday nights
babysitting to save for my mythical journey
to India, Borneo, or Peru, and then Saturdays
in the garden with Mom, planting trees,
hoeing weeds, bringing nearly dead plants
back from dry brown
into this soaring world’s
memory
of green.
I live like an old woman, sewing and embroidering
while listening to Cuban music, smiling or crying
depending on the rhythm and how long it’s been
since we received a letter from Abuelita
on the island.
How can a place remain so far away
while feeling as close as these blossoms
in my embroidered world
of silky threads?
COURAGE
My older sister works at the zoo, selling balloons.
Sometimes she walks into the wolf cage
as she studies to be a keeper.
On weekends, she wears a seven-foot
Colombian red-tailed boa constrictor
wrapped around her neck, the giant snake
that she bought as a pet and kept, even though
it keeps getting longer
and more powerful.
I’m not brave enough to do anything
but read
and daydream.
My only courage
is inside my secret world
of imagination.
BEST FRIENDS
Both of my closest bookworm friends
share the same name, so I think of them
as Short E. and Tall E., the first a delicate dancer,
the second happily rugged, wearing men’s shirts
and helping her father invent laser light shows
that flash to the rhythm of rock music.
With Short E. I hitchhike, with Tall E. I hike.
Either way, we never really reach a destination,
just roaming like adventurers, exploring
the city or mountains.
But when Short E. starts smoking pot, her mind
slides away, first slowly, then swiftly, until she sees
people who aren’t there, and hears threatening noises
beyond silent windows. . . .
Most of my bookworm friends are marijuana smokers,
but only Short E. suffers in this panic-twirled way,
yielding to nightmarish terrors while wide awake.
The sweet-scented leaves just make me feel dull and sleepy,
as I watch Short E. teeter at the edge of a cliff called
schizophrenia.
But we don’t drift apart yet
not even when she thinks
she’s a prowling cat
meowing.
Her long years of hospitalization
will come later.
For now, we are still both confident
that drug-riding minds can always
return.
BROTHERHOOD CAMP
Quakers love inviting everyone to meet,
get to know one another, talk, listen, or sit silently,
waiting for friendship.
I’m shy, but when Mom signs me up for camp,
I venture into the mountains with teens from all over
the enormous Los Angeles area, our neighborhoods
so far apart that we know we’ll never
see one another again, and yet it feels right,
like a way of belonging to the whole world
all at once.
When a boy from Watts kisses me, we both agree
that if we lived closer, we’d get to know each other
at a normal speed, instead of so
briefly.
BOY CRAZY
I long to fall in love, believe in love,
convince myself that I’m capable
of love.
But back at school after Brotherhood Camp,
my next boyfriend zooms away on a motorcycle
to visit his Filipino family in a distant state.
but they shout no, and when he doesn’t return
I’m almost relieved, because motorcycles
scare me, and courage is just something
I pretend
to understand.
Still boy crazy, I start dating someone else
almost right away, a polite and studious bookworm
who takes me to botanic gardens and an aviary
where a hummingbird lands on my curly hair
as if I’ve been transformed into a nest.
But this isn’t love, it can never work out,
because the boy is friendly with my parents,
but he warns me that I’ll never
meet his family.
They’re from China, and he tells me
they would definitely think I’m too
foreign.
GLOBAL
In between real-boy craziness
and daydreams of imaginary guys,
there are books.
I’m shocked when the reading list
for world literature class is limited to Europe,
so I dare to read the Mahabharata from India,
Octavio Paz from Mexico, and anonymous
ancient poems from Japan, claiming my right
to explore
the whole globe.
When I turn in reports on books
from my own independent reading list,
the teacher is surprised, but she agrees
that it makes sense, and she accepts
my suggestions, even though they’re
outlaws from beyond
the small-minded curriculum.
Sometimes all you have to do is wish
out loud.
HONORS CREATIVE WRITING CLASS
It sounds so exciting on paper
but the reality is frightening,
a critique group of teens
from all over the city
who sit in a circle
taking turns
smirking
as they tell one another
how much they hate
every poem
and each fragment
of a story.
So I stop writing. I freeze.
Strangers are impossible to please.
If I ever scribble again, I’ll keep
every treasured word
secret.
SCIENCE
Without poetry, I can still love nature,
but the biology teacher is a sports coach
who mostly talks about the size of his wife’s butt,
just to make the popular boys laugh.
So I sign up for a human physiology class
taught by a marine biologist who takes us
to tide pools and shows us the similarities
between octopus anatomy and humans.
All creatures are related, even odd-shaped
sea cucumbers, spiny urchins, and waving
anemones, with plantlike tentacles.
Back in our classroom, the teacher jumps
from the top of one wooden desk to another
,
towering above us as she demonstrates
how a nerve impulse leaps across a synapse,
the microscopic gap between separate cells.
Crossing a chasm, that’s what she says we need,
like a leap
of courageous faith.
AIRMAIL
Letters to and from Cuba
arrive slowly, through a complex maze of other
countries, because nations that don’t have
diplomatic relations
never sit together
listening
to each other.
Maybe there should be a Brotherhood Camp
for grown-ups—politicians and diplomats
all swimming and hiking, before singing
around a campfire, developing friendships,
or even kissing.
Whenever a letter from Abuelita
does manage to reach us, bright postage stamps
are paper-thin proof that the island
of my childhood
still exists.
WOMEN’S LIBERATION
Feminism is all over the news, and now
it’s somehow entered our own home.
Mom goes out and finds a paying job
for the first time since she was fourteen,
when she had to drop out after eighth grade,
because Abuelita couldn’t afford to send
two children
to school,
so only tío Pepe
was able to study,
while Mom—because she
was a girl—had to make money
by painting designs on ceramics,
while she waited to be old enough
for marriage.
Now that she’s working in a store, I have to do
a lot more cooking and cleaning, but the effort
is worthwhile, because my mother finally feels
like her brother’s
equal.
FREE SPEECH
I decide that I’ll never get married.
All I want to do is travel and learn.
All I need is books, not boyfriends.
Most of the time, Short E. is fine, her mind
only slipping away when she’s stoned.
Together we find rides all the way to Berkeley
to visit the university campus
where everyone shouts all the time, demanding
the right
to be heard.
War, racism, sexism, all the topics of the free-speech movement
are so important, but later, back at home,
I’m shocked when Mom
speaks aloud about Cuba at a Quaker meeting, and suddenly
she has to be escorted through the parking lot,
where anti-peace picketers see her as a target
for their hatred.
Free speech can be
so dangerous.
PICTURE DAY
I ditch school,
hiding in the park.
It will be a relief
to open the yearbook
and see
my absence
from predictions
that divide and compare girls—
cutest, coolest, most likely to succeed
as a movie star.
Someday when all of us are old,
this yearbook will prove that I really was
invisible.
WALKING TREES
I’ve read about a forest in Ecuador
where stilt roots grow at angles
that help trees aim themselves
toward patches of sunlight
by moving
just a few
inches
per day
until
the forest
has slowly
reached a new
home.
But I’m not patient, so I aim myself
toward Berkeley, expecting college
and the free-speech movement
to lead me directly to a rebellious
form of peace.
In April, when Martin Luther King is assassinated,
furious protests follow news of his death
all over this
fractured
country
so that riots result
even though King preached nonviolence
in a time when the vast chasm
between war hawks and peace doves
racists and justice seekers
grows grows grows
wide
wider
wild.
Wild Air
1968–1969
COLLEGE AT LAST
The University of California, Berkeley,
my seventeenth birthday, I arrive alone
too stubborn to let my parents help me move
so far away
from
home.
Freak-out, uptight, laid-back, groovy,
bummer means bad news, and bread
means money.
I quickly learn the language of cool
rebellious youth, even though I also
suddenly feel
isolated
ancient
lonely.
Home is now a bed and a desk
in a cooperative dorm, where I work
in the kitchen, peeling potatoes to pay
for room and board.
One of the other girls is only seventeen too,
constantly sobbing for the four-year-old son
she was forced to give up
for adoption.
When we speak to each other, all our words
revolve like moons around the planet
of her spinning, agonized, orbiting
maternal
sorrow.
I’m no help at all.
What do I know of babies?
Years of weekends spent tending them
in exchange for bits of money
taught me nothing more
than how much simpler
life will be
if I never
fall in love
get married
give birth
care.
BRAIN WAVES
My parents are helping
pay for college, but I need a job,
and babysitting no longer seems
like the only choice.
So I soon find work as a test subject
in a psychology lab where grad students
attach eerie wires
to electrodes
on my forehead.
I look like a science-fiction book cover.
Weird gadgets record my hidden brain’s
mysteriously pulsing reactions
as I watch funny movies
followed
by horrifying
war news.
If only politicians could see these results.
Maybe they’d decide to conquer the world
with comedy, instead of weapons.
CHOOSING MY FUTURE
With work and housing settled,
I need classes.
The world seems infinite.
So many choices!
Where do I start?
First I tour the museum-like halls
of science departments,
paleontology and anthropology,
the dusty bones
of dinosaurs
and cavemen
looming
like spooky
campfire tales, as if the past
might spring to life, clearly viewed,
a visual
prehistory.
Still undecided, I stand in one line
after another, hour after hour,
along with thousands
of other perplexed freshmen,
everyone complaining
&nbs
p; that it’s too much
too big
so many classes
are already full.
In the end, I find that I’ve registered
for Introduction to Physical Anthropology,
Italian Renaissance Literature,
Elementary Hindi-Urdu,
and Freshman Composition,
a class about writing essays
designed to convince me that I know
how to express my opinions.
The simple versions of Freshman Comp
were full, so the section I’m in is called
Rhetoric.
Am I really enrolled in a class about
arguing?
SURROUNDED BY STRANGERS
All the students at the off-campus dorm
are pre-med, pre-law, nursing, education,
black and white East Coast kids,
no one familiar, not even one person
from Los Angeles, or one who speaks
Spanish.
It’s hard to explain why I want to study
an outdoor ology that will take me exploring
in distant tropical rain forests,
instead of a practical, profitable,
ordinary
urban career.
So I don’t try to make sense of anything.
I just let myself be a stranger.
Childhood travels back and forth to Cuba
are kept secret, even from myself, because by now
I’m an expert in the slow-motion art
of forgetting.
THE STRANGENESS OF DAILY LIFE
The co-op dorm is on an avenue
crowded with shaggy panhandlers
who beg for spare change
while saffron-robed dancers
spin in circles, pretending to be spiritual
and Indian, even though they’re just
middle-class white kids
having an adventure
as they beg too.
Homeless.
Hungry.
Stoned.
Drunk.
Street people wander
into the cafeteria
to seize food.
Some of them just eat and leave,
but others stay and talk, trying to sound
like students, fibbing about their identities
just so they can gobble the bland potatoes I peeled.
I don’t care when they steal food,
but I’m wary. . . .
Some of these street people
seem gentle, but others are aggressive,
moving like boxers, always ready