written at Coney Island at dawn

If you were here, I’d hold
first one foot then the other
in my hand and paint on each toenail
a different rainforest bird.

Afterwards, I’d spread your legs
just a little
and suck your thighs
like a drunk swigging rum straight from a bottle.
If by chance I died then, it still would be the best day of my life, since I would have found
in this world of butterflies whose abdomens are storm drains clogged with whatever squalls can’t swallow,
a few intimate seconds with someone defiant enough to write poems
as if she was carving strips of meat from her thighs
with a knife brighter than the love
in God’s eyes.
All this because you wanted liberation, for yourself and Borinquen, your island.

The cold waters
stare back at me now in Brooklyn.
From this beach
I see you rearrive, a disappearance slipping
back into flesh.
After all these years, you’re still alluring, an immigrant carrying in your suitcase the coarse beauty of the jackfruit’s skin and the parrot’s vanishing wingflap at dusk.
Then one morning you’re dead, sprawled
on a streetcorner, your scraped ankles nestled against
starfish that aren’t there.

The shadows indeed have come to sleep on your solitude, Julia de Burgos.
Yet even dead you are
the triumph of the rice grass’s magnitudes
and the envoy of the sea’s alliance with the gulls that flew over Ponce on the day blood was spilled in its gutters by soldiers under foreign command.
Like everyone else I marvel at your persistence, how you flaunt your nudity without blinking an eye --
one minute you’re the bones of vegetable gardens under petrochemical plants at the edge of where the pelican stalks what’s left of old sagas
and the next
you’re the one whose curled hair distracts unwitting lovers from what you hold between your teeth, a syringe filled with the sky’s unrepentant blue.
You yourself are the freedom you call for, Julia, the sea’s
pounding waves, the endless thunder of actions and words.

How did you do it, my compañera?
Your disappearance is amazing!
I reach out to touch your absence
and when I do
the world fills my hands.

My teachers are gone. All of them.

I followed one past Volker’s farm, another
to the Cherry Island landfill’s
far side, still another
to an empty room in Vancouver, the body
decaying for days, the trumpet
long gone, and then there was the time when . . .

Ssshh, my mother used to say.

When I feel the need, I sometimes
kneel before an altar
of fumigated grasshoppers
and white phosphorous
and pray.
If there’s no holiness anymore, I’ll create it.

My hymn of praise
for the old ones is an unfinished road built by workcrews. After
a hundred miles, and then
jackhammering 30 more yards into a mountain of rock,
they stopped.
“There’s a goddamn
Mohawk burial ground ahead,” one worker noted wisely,
“we ain’t messing with that.”

The dead ones understand. Even
the best art must tread cautiously, never
starting campfires where the brush is too dry
or inviting
highway engineers to ride giant mowers toward
the Queen Ann’s Lace growing everywhere.

It’s the end of the day now. Coolness
creeps into the shadows.
Deer stand alertly behind the old waterworks.

A sad evening? Or joyful?
A covert mood, hidden further west
near hand pumps and silos, dominates everything.
While the card player and midwife fuck under a cottonwood
the moon rises higher
although they don’t see it, but I do.
I’ll tell them about it later.

In spite of not hearing the sound
of missiles in the distance, I know they’re there, soaring
like words whose meanings, programmed
to explode on impact, will leave nothing alive
in villages where delinquents spraypaint messages
in banned vocabularies on the walls.

In a tiny city yard, I look up
years ago
through clotheslines
at a lit apartment window, behind which
my mother and her 5 sisters, crowded
into grandma’s Cedar St. kitchen, make
a soup out of ingredients scrounged
from the rubble found
where the church sexton’s root cellar once stood
in another country long before
any of them were born.

The newborn’s wrinkled face, more aged
than a 56-year-old male prostitute’s. Glaciers

move slowly southward like thoughts afraid
to proceed beyond what they know. This evening

on the back porch I concentrate on one note
in a bird’s song, how the tone expands, a fragment

of an inch at a time, a zero growing
out of nowhere, throbbing as it swells, made

of nerve endings and bloodcells. I love the way
the wind in the trees knows nothing about

the dust on my eyelashes. When I wake
in the wicker rocker late at night, I wonder

what the morning will be like
and why it is that I’m here.

"Americacoma" / graffitti decal / 6" X 4"

Like a dying impulse
the path, littered
with garbage and growing skinnier
as it goes, winds
downhill toward Hindalga.

Up ahead to the right
a woman bends down, grabs
a stone from the bushes, heaves it
at her 6-year-old son
but misses. Still
he starts crying.

The heat.
No relief since early morning.
Not even a breeze.

The early afternoon light
hisses like an iron pressed by an incensed husband
against his wife’s cheek.

The temperature keeps rising.

(revised)

This is where
it begins to arc up

ward, then
at a certain point starts

its descent, although
its trajectory

isn’t yet complete, but
it could be in just

one or two
seconds, see!

Life
passes quickly. Fo

cus. Breathe
quietly while

counting to
a million. Feel it, the call

and response
of history’s flow. You are

a small
crouched animal, stomach

pressed against
dead leaves, eyes

wide open. A ground twig
snaps, you

leap up
run for your life

(revised)

Pilled to sleep. No dreams. Just
the barely audible noise of traffic lights
switching from red to green in the middle of the night.
I awaken. 8:26 a.m. Faded
yellow gladiolas , the wallpaper.
Like Rosa’s aunt
exiting the storefront Pentecostal church, things disappear.
In the apartment next to hers, her sister keeps
a ukulele stuffed in a duffelbag under the bed
and also a memory
of the tiny San Pedrito bird flying
red-goateed from tree to tree in the rainforest
while here in the Baby Site Electronics Emporium
on 34th midtown, the bearded Hasid Jew
in blue trenchcoat buys a boombox. What
nuance of the evening news will he listen for?
I walk away, toward Harlem, toward
something I believe in but can’t explain.
There it is. A smokeshop with a lottery sign announcing
“16 Ways to Win Instant Cash.”
Behind the sign, in the back on the shelf:
piles of Kodak film, some eventually to be transported
in suitcases to India, Somalia, Istanbul.
I buy a bunch of rolls, load one
into my ancient Miranda Sensorex, start
ordering everyone I see to say cheese into the lens

snap: photo of a woman’s vagina
with a terse note inside saying
squirt elsewhere, please

snap: photo of men with shovels on a rivershore;
they’ve unearthed a big coffin that contains
the cherrytree Old Georgie
sure as all hell cut down

snap: photo of people loitering near lemon crates
in front of Rosario’s Market on an island that theoretically still exists further south

snap: photo of a toolbattered hand
opening and closing
slowly in the dark

(revised)

Streets, red lines
in the whites of your eyes.

Street where in 1911
Olof, the carpetmill foreman, choked
to death a seamstress with his free hand
behind a Warburton Ave. barn.
The next morning they found him
gulping milk from a bottle
on a Bear Mountain slope.

Streets like pieces of broken scaffolding
hanging from a skyscraper
after the mind gets what’s coming to it
for climbing too high.

Street lined with trees
on which a child burns her hand
in a rag-pile fire while off to the side
a pagoda door swings open and tiny bells ring.

Streets leading, every day,
to the same jar of horseradish
spooned clean by an immigrant
who never learned to smile brightly
like Dr. Reiniger, the dentist, said he should.

Street on which children rollerskate
in and out of every sex wish your mama ever had.

Street where paper violets
are placed on dead a gardener’s grave.

Street where you live,
street at the end of which everything ends
when you finally open your eyes.

Another fat
cheeked child, eyes
blacker than a monsoon night and a mouth

already
pouting
with distinction. The grandmother

Sundera

smiles
her face turning
each day more spider-web-like.
She holds him

on the evening lane. Her daughter
Holika
the child’s mother
will arrive soon from the city. Night

falls rapidly now. Voices
echo throughout the village while a man

carrying vegetables in a plastic bag

walks rapidly downhill
past rickshaw drivers loitering
in the shadows by the paan shop
on Pipeline Rd.

Late afternoon / Feb. 10