I said: I want to feed the birds. I want to feed bread
to the birds. I want to feed bread to the birds at the park.
After the walk around the pond and the war memorial,
after the signs at every step that read, Do Not Feed the Geese,
after the goose that rose from the water like the god of geese,
after the goose that shrieked like a demon from the hell of geese,
after the goose that scattered the creatures smaller than geese,
after the hard beak, the wild mouth taking bread from my hand,
there was quiet in my head, no cacophony of the dead
lost in the catacombs, no mosquito hum of condolences,
only the next offering of bread raised up in my open hand,
the bread warm on the table of my truce with the world.
MAD LOVE
No one wants to look at pictures of Puerto Ricans, Frank.
—Cornell Capa
My brother said: They harvested his corneas. I imagined
the tweezers lifting the corneas from my father’s eyes,
delicate as the wings of butterflies mounted under glass.
I imagined the transplant, stitches finer than hair,
eyes fluttering awake to the brilliance of an open window.
This is not a horror movie. This is not Peter Lorre in Mad Love,
the insane and jealous surgeon grafting the hands of a killer
onto the forearms of a concert pianist, who fumbles with the keys
of the piano, flings knives with lethal aim, Moonlight Sonata
swept away by lust for homicide, his wife shrieking.
The blind will see like the captain of the slave ship who turned the ship
around, voices in the room will praise the Lord for the miracle, yet
the eyes drinking light through my father’s eyes will not see the faces
in the lens of his camera, faces of the faceless waking in the darkroom:
not the tomato picker with a picket sign on his shoulder that says
Reagan Steals from the Poor and Gives to the Rich; not the fry cook
in his fedora, staring at air as if he knew he would be stomped
to death on the stoop for an empty wallet; not the poet in a beret,
grinning at the vision of shoes for all the shoeless people on the earth;
not the dancer hearing the piano tell her to spin and spin again;
not the gravedigger and his machete, the bandanna that keeps the dust
of the dead from coating his tongue; not the union organizer, spirits
floating in the smoke of his victory cigar; not the addict in rehab gazing
at herself like a fortune-teller gazing at the cards; not the face half-hidden
by the star in the Puerto Rican flag, the darkness of his dissident’s eye.
Now that my father cannot speak, they wait their turn to testify
in his defense, witnesses to the mad love that drove him to it.
THE SINKING OF THE SAN JACINTO
para mi padre
Coming to this country was the worst thing
that ever happened to me, you would say.
The steamship called the San Jacinto
dragged you from Puerto Rico to New York.
You swore in Spanish, dangling from the rails
like a nauseous acrobat, a seasick boy
who prayed to plunge over the side
and disappear into the green water.
A Nazi U-boat trailed behind the San Jacinto
on the voyage back to Puerto Rico. The torpedo
splintered the deck, six thousand tons creaking
and sinking into the sea. Among the dead:
Ramón Castillo, who shoveled the coal
into the furnace down below; Antonio Cortez,
who cleared the plates in the officers’ mess,
daydreaming of La Parguera, the luminescent
bay, illumination of water on a moonless night.
You escaped the U-boat. Seven decades later,
the torpedo catches up to you, ripping through
your heart, and you sink into a moonless sea
like the six thousand tons of the San Jacinto,
Ramón Castillo and his shovelful of coal,
Antonio Cortez and his armload of plates.
I kissed the ground, you would say, sitting
at the kitchen table in Brooklyn, and I tried
to imagine licking the dirt off my own lips.
Years after the San Jacinto took you away,
you would return to your island, step off
the plane, drop to your knees at the airport
and kiss the ground. Back you came to Brooklyn,
a car stalled on the highway, steam pouring
from the hood, when all you wanted
was the sand of the beach burning your feet.
Now, if your ancestors wait for you anywhere,
they wait on the shores of the bay at La Parguera.
May you navigate through the night without
the compass devoured by the salt of the sea.
May you rise up in the luminescent bay,
stirring the microscopic creatures in the water
back to life so their light startles your eyes.
May the water glow blue as a hyacinth in your hands.
THERE BUT NOT THERE
the way they look at you.
you don’t know if it’s something you did
or something you are.
—Tino Villanueva
I was my father’s catcher at Highland Park in Brooklyn,
bracing myself for the curveball that started to spin
at my left shoulder and bounced off my right knee,
as I swatted with my yawning mitt and missed it.
He would roar at my bulging eyes, the stupefaction
of a boy studying a magician’s every move, unable
to figure out the trick. I squeezed the fingers of his glove,
wrinkled and black, like shaking hands with a gorilla.
During the War, my father taught himself the grips,
the spins, the drops, the in-shoots, the knuckleball
to pitch for the team paid for by the Democratic Party
ward boss of the Upper West Side, who counted out
the cash for the uniforms and the team bus, put up
the stakes on every game, collected on the bets.
The skinny refugee from Puerto Rico pitched every game,
even the game at the pig farm in the land of Weehawken.
New Jersey was wild in those days, he said. We played in pig shit.
Somebody gored the second baseman on the slide, punches
fell like hail from a clear sky, and the pig farmers chased
the team back to the bus, the driver in a whiskey haze
as he spun the wheel, tires spitting mud at the mob.
Once, my father told me of the day his curveball was a cloud
of steam, a spirit there but not there, a hummingbird
blurring in the eyes of the hitters, dipping away from the bat,
the day he no-hit the American Legion team from Queens,
the day he turned fifteen and would live forever.
The big-league scouts watched him pitch at Central Park.
I didn’t throw hard enough for them, he said. Or maybe
it was my dark skin. They loved blond hair and blue eyes.
He never knew, and so the scouts would visit him in sleep,
notching illegible notes on a clipboard, there but not there.
There is a browning photograph of my father in his uniform
from 1947, tilting into his windup, spikes high to dazzle
the batter, knuckles almost scraping the grass behind him,
ready to fire the spin, the drop, the curveball. There is no baseball
in his hand. The magician in him made the baseball disappear.
His pitching hand rolls into a fist for all the scouts to see.
Eddie McClain from 108th Street, my father’s catcher seventy years ago,
the best man at his wedding, shook my hand at the memorial service
in Brooklyn. Sweating in my suit and tie, I never had a chance
to ask him for the secret, how he caught the curveball, that cloud
of steam, the flight of the hummingbird, my father there but not there.
THE SHAMROCK
My father was a Shamrock, not the kind blooming everywhere
on Saint Patrick’s Day, but a Puerto Rican Shamrock, wearing
the white clover emblazoned on green trunks, loping down court
with the Maloney twins, Fitzgerald and Plunkett. My father
was brown as an Indian Head penny, the center on the team,
flipping his hook at the backboard, shoving two-handed set shots
from the chest, elbows sharp wings on the rebound beneath
the basket at PS 165 on West 108th Street. Another boy yelled
Hey, Pancho and slapped him off the brick wall behind the basket.
Pancho swung as he bounced off the wall, bursting the boy’s nose
like a hydrant of blood, spraying red on a summer night in the city.
My father was a Shamrock all his life. He hammered up the backboard
and the basket in the driveway for me to practice free throws, the only
Puerto Rican at Central High in Valley Stream. I listened to the echo
of the ball on concrete, the clatter off the rim. The day a boy yelled
Foul, you spic, I swung and scraped my knuckles on his belt buckle,
too far away to stain his teeth with blood. I set picks, standing still
as defenders rammed blindly into me. My father was a Shamrock,
and so was Anaya, the other Pancho from West 108th Street,
the day the three of us took the court against the unknown men
who swaggered up the driveway, who hooted at the two-handed
set shots, the ball sailing from another century, till it plopped
through the net. The Shamrocks flipped the ball behind the back,
twirling layups in the air as I set picks, speared by the shoulders
of the invaders. We won, and my fingers traced the bruises on my chest.
My father was a Puerto Rican Shamrock, the only atheist in a Catholic
neighborhood, debating the miracles of the saints with the baffled
Irish boys on the team. Now, his ashes sit in a white box on a chair
by my desk, an altar without saints or candles or holy cards. Atop
the box there is a snapshot of the Shamrocks, the Maloney twins,
Fitzgerald, Anaya and Espada, in suits and ties for Christmas dinner
on West 108th Street. When I had to sign for the box at the doorstep,
ball-handler that I am, I dropped it. I ask for forgiveness at the altar.
In the photograph, my father kneels. His hand spreads to grip the grain
of a basketball on the floor. He is the center of the team. He is seventeen.
EL MORIVIVÍ
In Memoriam Frank Espada (1930–2014)
The Spanish means: I died, I lived. In Puerto Rico, the leaves
of el moriviví close in the dark and open at first light.
The fronds curl at a finger’s touch and then unfurl again.
My father, a mountain born of mountains, the tallest
Puerto Rican in New York, who scraped doorways,
who could crack the walls with the rumble of his voice,
kept a moriviví growing in his ribs. He would die, then live.
My father spoke in the tongue of el moriviví, teaching me
the parable of Joe Fleming, who screwed his lit cigarette
into the arms of the spics he caught, flapping like fish.
My father was a bony boy, the nerves in his back
crushed by the Aiello Coal and Ice Company, the load
he lifted up too many flights of stairs. Three times
they would meet to brawl for a crowd after school.
The first time, my father opened his eyes to gravel
and the shoes of his enemy. The second time, he rose
and dug his arm up to the elbow in the monster’s belly,
so badly did he want to tear out the heart and eat it.
The third time, Fleming did not show up, and the boys
with cigarette burns clapped their spindly champion
become a cop, fired for breaking bones in too many faces.
He died smoking in bed, a sheet of flame up to his chin.
There was a moriviví sprouting in my father’s chest. He would die,
then live. He spat obscenities like sunflower seeds at the driver
who told him to sit at the back of the bus in Mississippi, then
slipped his cap over his eyes and fell asleep. He spent a week in jail,
called it the best week of his life, strode through the jailhouse door
and sat behind the driver of the bus on the way out of town,
his Air Force uniform all that kept the noose from his neck.
He would come to know the jailhouse again, among hundreds
of demonstrators ferried by police to Hart Island on the East River,
where the City of New York stacks the coffins of anonymous
and stillborn bodies. Here, Confederate prisoners once wept
for the Stars and Bars; now, the prisoners sang Freedom Songs.
The jailers outlawed phone calls, so we were sure my father must be
a body like the bodies rolling waterlogged in the East River, till he came
back from the island of the dead, black hair combed meticulously.
When the riots burned in Brooklyn night after night, my father
was a peacemaker on the corner with a megaphone. A fiery
chunk of concrete fell from the sky and missed his head by inches.
My mother would tell me: Your father is out dodging bullets.
He spoke at a rally with Malcolm X, incantatory words
billowing through the bundled crowd, lifting hands and faces.
Teach, they cried. My father clicked a photograph of Malcolm
as he bent to hear a question, finger pressed against the chin.
Two months later, the assassins stampeded the crowd
to shoot Malcolm, blood leaping from his chest as he fell.
My father would die too, but then he would live again,
after every riot, every rally, every arrest, every night in jail,
the change from his pockets landing hard on the dresser
at 4 AM every time I swore he was gone for good.
My father knew the secrets of el moriviví, that he would die,
then live. He drifted off at the wheel, drove into a guardrail,
shook his head and walked away without a web of scars
or fractures. He passed out from the heat in the subway,
toppled onto the tracks and somehow missed the third rail.
He tied a white apron across his waist to open a grocery store,
pulled a revolver from the counter to startle the gangsters
demanding protection, then put up signs for a clearance sale
as soon as they backed out the door with their hands in the air.
When the family finally took a vacation in the mountains
of the Hudson Valley, a hotel with waiters in white jackets
and white paint peeling in the room, the roof exploded
in flame, as if the ghost of Joe Fleming and his cigarette
trailed us everywhere, and it was then that my father
appeared in the smoke, like a general leading the charge
in battle, shouting commands at the volunteer fire company,
steering the water from
the hoses, since he was immune
to death by fire or water, as if he wore the crumbled leaves
of el moriviví in an amulet slung around his neck.
My brother called to say el moriviví was gone. My father tore
at the wires, the electrodes, the IV, saying that he wanted
to go home. The hospital was a jailhouse in Mississippi.
The furious pulse that fired his heart in every fight flooded
the chambers of his heart. The doctors scrutinized the film,
the grainy shadows and the light, but could never see: my father
was a moriviví. I died. I lived. He died. He lived. He dies. He lives.
Notes on the Poems
Vivas to Those Who Have Failed: The Paterson Silk Strike, 1913: “Vivas to those who have fail’d! . . .” The title of this sonnet cycle and the epigraph by Walt Whitman come from section 18 of “Song of Myself.” The Paterson Silk Strike (February–July 1913) was one of the most significant strikes in United States history. Led by labor organizers from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), more than twenty-five thousand mostly immigrant workers walked out, shutting down three hundred mills in Paterson, New Jersey. Over three thousand people were arrested. The strike was defeated, but the key demand—for an eight-hour day—would transform American labor.
The Red Flag: “The red flag of anarchy . . .” The first stanza quotes “To the City Authorities, the Silk Manufacturers, and the Forces of Law and Order in Paterson,” an editorial in the Paterson Daily Press, March 10, 1913. The first stanza also derives in part from “The Rip in the Silk Industry” by William D. “Big Bill” Haywood in the International Socialist Review, May 1913. Haywood was a major figure in the labor movement, a cofounder and leader of the IWW.
The River Floods the Avenue: On April 17, 1913, Joseph Cutherton of the O’Brien Detective Agency, hired by the Weidmann Silk Dyeing Company, shot and killed bystander Modestino Valentino in the presence of numerous witnesses. He was never indicted. The second stanza quotes Carlo Tresca’s “blood for blood” eulogy. Tresca was an Italian anarchist, editor, orator, labor organizer and leader of the IWW. The first stanza relies in part on “Modestino Valentino Remembered, 100 Years Later” in the Paterson Times, April 22, 2013, and The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike, 1913 (Temple University Press, 1988) by Steve Golin. The second stanza relies in part on Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel (AK Press, 2010) by Nunzio Pernicone.