The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer by Wendell Berry

The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer

 

I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my

inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission

to go in at exits and come out at entrances, so be it.

I have planted by the stars in defiance of the experts,

and tilled somewhat by incantation and by singing,

and reaped, as I knew, by luck and Heaven’s favor,

in spite of the best advice. If I have been caught

so often laughing at funerals, that was because

I knew the dead were already slipping away,

preparing a comeback, and can I help it?

And if at weddings I have gritted and gnashed

my teeth, it was because I knew where the bridegroom

had sunk his manhood, and knew it would not

be resurrected by a piece of cake. ‘Dance,’ they told me,

and I stood still, and while they stood

quiet in line at the gate of the Kingdom, I danced.

‘Pray,’ they said, and I laughed, covering myself

in the earth’s brightnesses, and then stole off gray

into the midst of a revel, and prayed like an orphan.

When they said, ‘I know my Redeemer liveth,’

I told them, ‘He’s dead.’ And when they told me

‘God is dead,’ I answered, ‘He goes fishing every day

in the Kentucky River. I see Him often.’

When they asked me would I like to contribute

I said no, and when they had collected

more than they needed, I gave them as much as I had.

When they asked me to join them I wouldn’t,

and then went off by myself and did more

than they would have asked. ‘Well, then,’ they said

‘go and organize the International Brotherhood

of Contraries,’ and I said, ‘Did you finish killing

everybody who was against peace?’ So be it.

Going against men, I have heard at times a deep harmony

thrumming in the mixture, and when they ask me what

I say I don’t know. It is not the only or the easiest

way to come to the truth. It is one way.

Privacy by Ada Limón

Privacy

 

On the black wet branches of the linden,

still clinging to umber leaves of late fall,

two crows land. They say, “Stop,” and still I want

to make them into something they are not.

Odin’s ravens, the bruja’s eyes. What news

are they bringing of our world to the world

of the gods? It can’t be good. More suffering

all around, more stinging nettles and toxic

blades shoved into the scarred parts of us,

the minor ones underneath the trees. Rain

comes while I’m still standing, a trickle of water

from whatever we believe is beyond the sky.

The crows seem enormous but only because

I am watching them too closely. They do not

care to be seen as symbols. A shake of a wing,

and both of them are gone. There was no message

given, no message I was asked to give, only

their great absence and my sad privacy

returning like the bracing, empty wind

on the black wet branches of the linden.

Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem by Matthew Olzmann

Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem

 

So here’s what I’ve got, the reasons why our marriage

might work: Because you wear pink but write poems

about bullets and gravestones. Because you yell

at your keys when you lose them, and laugh,

loudly, at your own jokes. Because you can hold a pistol,

gut a pig. Because you memorize songs, even commercials

from thirty years back and sing them when vacuuming.

You have soft hands. Because when we moved, the contents

of what you packed were written inside the boxes.

Because you think swans are overrated and kind of stupid.

Because you drove me to the train station. You drove me

to Minneapolis. You drove me to Providence.

Because you underline everything you read, and circle

the things you think are important, and put stars next

to the things you think I should think are important,

and write notes in the margins about all the people

you’re mad at and my name almost never appears there.

Because you made that pork recipe you found

in the Frida Kahlo Cookbook. Because when you read

that essay about Rilke, you underlined the whole thing

except the part where Rilke says love means to deny the self

and to be consumed in flames. Because when the lights

are off, the curtains drawn, and an additional sheet is nailed

over the windows, you still believe someone outside

can see you. And one day five summers ago,

when you couldn’t put gas in your car, when your fridge

was so empty—not even leftovers or condiments—

there was a single twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew,

which you paid for with your last damn dime

because you once overheard me say that I liked it.

The Space Heater by Sharon Olds

The Space Heater

 

On the then-below-zero day, it was on,

near the patients' chair, the old heater

kept by the analyst's couch, at the end,

like the infant's headstone that was added near the foot

of my father's grave. And it was hot, with the almost

laughing satire of a fire's heat,

the little coils like hairs in Hell.

And it was making a group of sick noises—

I wanted the doctor to turn it off

but I couldn't seem to ask, so I just

stared, but it did not budge. The doctor

turned his heavy, soft palm

outward, toward me, inviting me to speak, I

said, "If you're cold-are you cold? But if it's on

for me..." He held his palm out toward me,

I tried to ask, but I only muttered,

but he said, "Of course," as if I had asked,

and he stood up and approached the heater, and then

stood on one foot, and threw himself

toward the wall with one hand, and with the other hand

reached down, behind the couch, to pull

the plug out. I looked away,

I had not known he would have to bend

like that. And I was so moved, that he

would act undignified, to help me,

that I cried, not trying to stop, but as if

the moans made sentences which bore

some human message. If he would cast himself toward the

outlet for me, as if bending with me in my old

shame and horror, then I would rest

on his art-and the heater purred, like a creature

or the familiar of a creature, or the child of a familiar,

the father of a child, the spirit of a father,

the healing of a spirit, the vision of healing,

the heat of vision, the power of heat,

the pleasure of power.

Little Spy in My Bedroom by Yusef Komunyakaa

Little Spy in My Bedroom

 

What’s that ticking sound

under the red velvet sofa,

breathing a little click-song

stolen from South Africa,

perched on a windowsill

or lost in a coffin drawer

singing a half-pint of good

luck, aping such big emotion?

Whatever it is, it materialized

up here on the second floor,

as if from my head—the silent

timekeeper’s rasping alarm.

I pace around the room, careful

not to trip on the tiger rug,

to search out the mechanical

night song of a small being.

What good can it bring now

in our highly evolved world

of climate change & hunting

death stars to give the names

of hermit kings & outlaws.

Love, have I always listened

with my whole damn body,

18k. tick of a pocket watch?

I rise, gazing into an inlaid box

of hex signs & cheap rings.

Now I hardly hear the faint

noise, yet know it is here.

I cover my eyes with my left

hand to hear the machine

pulse of a careless heart, &

in a patch of early-morning

sunlight I see a black cricket.

Someone kicks off her shoe

before I can think to say, No,

one of us must show mercy.

 

The Second Slaughter by Lucia Perillo

The Second Slaughter

 

Achilles slays the man who slew his friend, pierces the corpse

behind the heels and drags it

behind his chariot like the cans that trail

a bride and groom. Then he lays out

a banquet for his men, oxen and goats

and pigs and sheep; the soldiers eat

until a greasy moonbeam lights their beards.

 

The first slaughter is for victory, but the second slaughter is for grief—

in the morning more animals must be killed

for burning with the body of the friend. But Achilles finds

no consolation in the hiss and crackle of their fat;

not even heaving four stallions on the pyre

can lift the ballast of his sorrow.

 

And here I turn my back on the epic hero—the one who slits

the throats of his friend’s dogs,

killing what the loved one loved

to reverse the polarity of grief. Let him repent

by vanishing from my concern

after he throws the dogs onto the fire.

The singed fur makes the air too difficult to breathe.

 

When the oil wells of Persia burned I did not weep

until I heard about the birds, the long-legged ones especially

which I imagined to be scarlet, with crests like egrets

and tails like peacocks, covered in tar

weighting the feathers they dragged through black shallows

at the rim of the marsh. But once

 

I told this to a man who said I was inhuman, for giving animals

my first lament. So now I guard

my inhumanity like the jackal

who appears behind the army base at dusk,

come there for scraps with his head lowered

in a posture that looks like appeasement

though it is not.

The Little Box by Vasko Popa

The Little Box

 

The little box gets her first teeth

And her little length

Little width little emptiness

And all the rest she has

 

The little box continues growing

The cupboard that she was inside

Is now inside her

 

And she grows bigger bigger bigger

Now the room is inside her

And the house and the city and the earth

And the world she was in before

 

The little box remembers her childhood

And by a great longing

She becomes a little box again

 

Now in the little box

You have the whole world in miniature

You can easily put in a pocket

Easily steal it lose it

 

Take care of the little box

 

(translated by Charles Simić)

Visiting San Francisco by Vijay Seshadri

Visiting San Francisco

I wanted to curl up
in the comfortable cosmic melancholy of my past,
in the sadness of my past being passed.
I wanted to tour the museum of my antiquities
and look at the sarcophagi there.
I wanted to wallow like a water buffalo in the cool,
sagacious mud of my past,
so I wrote you and said I’d be in town and could we meet.
But you think my past is your present.
You wouldn’t relent, you wouldn’t agree
to dinner or a cup of coffee or even a bag of peanuts
on a bench in North Beach.
You didn’t want to curl up or tour or wallow with me.
You’re still mad, long after the days
have turned into decades, about the ways I let you down.
The four hundred thousand ways.
Maybe I would be, too.
But people have done worse to me.
I don’t think I’m being grotesque when I tell you
I’ve been flayed and slayed and force-fed anguish.
I’ve been a human cataract
plunging through a noose and going to pieces on the rocks.
I’ve been a seagull tethered to Alcatraz.
What can I say, what more can I say, how much more
vulnerable can I be, to persuade you
now that I’ve persuaded myself?
Why can’t you just let it go?
Well, at least I’m in San Francisco.
San Francisco, where the homeless are most at home—
crouching over their tucker bags under your pollarded trees—
because your beauty is as free to them
as to the domiciled in their
dead-bolt domiciles, your beauty is as free to
the innocent as to the guilty.
The fog has burned off.
In a cheap and windy room on Russian Hill
a man on the run unwraps the bandages
swaddling his new face, his reconstructed face,
and looks in the mirror and sees
the face of Humphrey Bogart. Only here
could such a thing happen.
It was really always you, San Francisco,
time won’t ever darken my love for you,
San Francisco.

Skeletons by Deborah Landau

Skeletons

 

So whatever’s the opposite of a Buddhist that’s what I am.

 

Kindhearted, yes, but knee deep in existential gloom,

 

except when the fog smokes the bridges like this—

 

like, instead of being afraid we might juice ourselves up,

 

eh, like, might get kissed again? Dwelling in bones I go straight

 

through life, a sublime abundance—cherries, dog’s breath, the sun, then

 

(ouch) & all of us snuffed out. Dear one, what is waiting for us tonight,

 

nostalgia? the homes of childhood? oblivion? How we hate to go—

 

--

 

Sundays I spend feeling sorry for myself I’ve got a

 

knack for it I’m morbid, make the worst of any season

 

exclamation point       yet levity’s a liquor of sorts,

 

lowers us through life toward the terminus soon

 

extinguished       darling, the comfort is slight,

 

tucked in bed we search each other for some alternative—

 

oh let’s marvel at the world, the stroke and colors of it

 

now, while breathing.

How to be a son by Omar Sakr

How to be a son

 

My father was for the longest time

a plastic smile locked under the bed.

Before that, he was whatever came

out of my mother’s mouth. He was I’ll tell you

when you’re older. He was winding smoke,

a secret name. That fucking Turk.

He was foreign word, distant country.

I gave myself up to her hands which also

fathered; they shaped me into flinch.

Into hesitant crouch, expectant bruise.

Into locked door, CIA black site—

my body unknown and denied to any

but the basest men. I said beat my father

into me please, but he couldn’t be found.

And when he was, I wished he remained

lost. He blamed himself for the men I want.

A father can negate any need he thinks

they are the sum of all desires he thinks

absence has a gender. Listen.

You can’t backdate love, it destroys

history, which is all that I have & so

like any man, want to abandon.

In the absence of time I will invent

roses, a lineage beyond geography,

then all manner of gorgeous people

who rove in desert and olive grove,

in wet kingdoms, on the hunt for villages

where a boy can love a boy & still be

called son

Curl by Diane Seuss

Curl

 

No longer at home in the world

and I imagine

never again at home in the world.

 

Not in cemeteries of bogs

churning with bullfrogs.

Or outside the old pickle shop.

I once make myself

at home on that street,

 

and the street after that,

and the boulevard. The avenue.

I don’t need to explain it to you.

 

It seems wrong

to curl now within the confines

of a poem. You can’t hide f

rom what you made

inside what you made

 

or so I’m told.

 

us by Tory Dent

us

 

in your arms

it was incredibly often

enough to be 

in your arms

careful as we had to be at times

about the I.V. catheter

in my hand,

or my wrist,

or my forearm

which we placed, consciously,

like a Gamboni vase,

the center of attention,

placed, frail identity

as if our someday-newborn

on your chest—

to be secluded, washed over

in your arms

often enough, it was

in that stillness, the only stillness

amidst the fears which wildly collided

and the complexities

of the illness, all the work

we had yet to do, had just done,

the hope, ridiculous amounts of it

we had to pump

from nothing, really,

short-lived consensus

possibility & experiment

to access

from our pinched and tiny minds

just the idea of hope

make it from scratch, air and water

like manufactured snow

a colossal fatigue

the severe concentration

of that, the repetition of that

lifted for a moment

just above your arms

inevitable, pressuring

it weighed down

but remained above

like a cathedral ceiling,

strangely sheltering

while I held tightly 

while there I could

in your arms

only there, the only stillness

remember the will,

allow the pull, tow against inevitable ebb—

you don't need reasons to live

one reason, blinking in the fog,

organically sweet in muddy dark

incredibly often enough

it is, it was

in your arms

 

Jack Johnson Does the Eagle Rock by Cornelius Eady

 Jack Johnson Does the Eagle Rock

 

Perhaps he left the newspaper stand that morning

dazed, a few pennies lighter.

The illustration of the crippled ocean liner

with the berth he had the money

But not the skin to buy

Engraving itself

On that portion of the mind reserved for

lucky breaks.

Perhaps the newsboy, a figure too small to

bring back,

Actually heard his laugh,

As the S.S. Titanic, sans one prize fighter,

Goes down again all over New York,

Watched his body dance

As his arms lift the ship, now a simple millimeter thick,

above his head

In the bustling air, lift it up

As though it was meant to happen.

 

Isn’t There Something by Jean Valentine

Isn’t There Something 

 

Isn’t there something in me

like the dogs I’ve heard at home

who bark all night from hunger? Something

in me like trains leaving,

 

isn’t there something in me

like a gun? I wanted to be

loud squirrels, around the trees’ feet,

bees, coming back & back

 

to the wooden porch,

wanting something—and wooden planks,

wanting something. To go back into

a tree?

 

               I want to go back to you,

who when you were dying said

“There are one or two people you don’t want to

let go of.” Here too, where I don’t let go of you. 

Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me by James Wright

Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me

Relieved, I let the book fall behind a stone.

I climb a slight rise of grass.

I do not want to disturb the ants

Who are walking single file up the fence post,

Carrying small white petals,

Casting shadows so frail that I can see through them.

I close my eyes for a moment and listen.

The old grasshoppers

Are tired, they leap heavily now,

Their thighs are burdened.

I want to hear them, they have clear sounds to make.

Then lovely, far off, a dark cricket begins

In the maple trees. 

little prayer by Danez Smith

little prayer

 

let ruin end here

 

let him find honey

where there was once a slaughter

 

let him enter the lion’s cage

& find a field of lilacs

 

let this be the healing

& if not     let it be

Wait by Adrienne Rich

Wait

 

In paradise every

the desert wind is rising

third thought

in hell there are no thoughts

is of earth

sand screams against your government

issued tent      hell's noise

in your nostrils      crawl

into your ear-shell

wrap yourself in no-thought

wait     no place for the little lyric

wedding-ring glint the reason why

on earth

they never told you

Out of Research Into Reveries by Mai Der Vang

Out of Research Into Reveries

 

                                   Give up      the brain 

        Offer down its clumsy

meditations      its blurred face

                      of fury      its hellbound 

      policies bugged into my throat

        Cough out

that sickled attitude      the ragged shelves

                    downing my ankles      every 

            era of hibernation

It’s all in the performance      the butcher 

      operating on slabs

of my identity      the bereaved dissecting

                      memories of an octopus

                        Lift out      far from of it 

      Careen the elbows      out of murk

                        with wine       taken by

                              the midsummer full 

                              moon

Constantly stoneward

                        hunting toward heartstill

  

Oracle by Ari Banias

Oracle

 

I was wrong it isn’t

suffering that’s easy pleasure that’s difficult

How is it I have been living this way

holding my piss

a mirror scuffed by distant talk, secretly livid

worried what the dead would think?

Someone greets with only the top half of her head

brown curly hair behind a computer monitor

Today for one second a woman is anyone who has a body

and can’t forget it

The tight loops of the office carpet start to unhook

Some men are women too

the way a mountain is land and a harbor is land and a parking lot

Refuse the difference between sameness and difference

The ocean is on fire

green flame on the neck of a god

who is a pile of rocks

not apologizing for themselves

Love Poem by Linda Gregerson

Love Poem

 

1.

 

Once, my very best darling, the sea

  and the land were all one mass

 

and the light was confused and hadn’t found

  a place to rest. And, Megan, love,

 

my sister’s eyes were not yet there to hold it all

  together since she hadn’t yet been born so when

 

the world dropped out from under us and no one,

  not the on-calls with their CAT scans, not

 

the sovereign souls who monitor

  the twilit room where newborns come to die

 

or live, when no one could tell us if you

  would be one of the lucky ones able to

 

walk and speak and only this, the one

  unstinted blessing fate had given us to

 

give you was a sister in whose eyes you were

  the sun and moon, it meant we all no matter

 

what befell us all

  had solid ground.    Pity the part

 

we think we do on purpose.

 

     2.

 

When Karen was dying and books had shut

  their doors to her, she could still make out the

 

puzzle of knit and purl. I’m keeping it simple,

  she said, although the pattern

 

emerging beneath her fine hands did not

  look simple to me. An

 

A. A B. An alphabet. And all in the single

  color, milk. The letters distinguished

 

by only the altered stitchwork so

  the nursery would be beautiful.

 

Whichever of the children has a baby first,

  she said, she loved

 

the future, no matter she wouldn’t be there.

 

     3.

 

Second-born. As fateful as the transit

  to light and air or so you’ve often tried

 

to teach me I will never properly understand.

  But I know

 

how the hair at your temples curls in

  summer when the air is moist. As if

 

she’d been returned to me.

  I must have had some under-the-radar

 

notion even then when we were children how

  that little looseness threw

 

my petty masteries in the shade. And so

  the joy of it was lost on me. Till you.

 

I’m the only person living who

  remembers her childhood curls.

Ghazal (Even the Rain) by Agha Shahid Ali

Ghazal (Even the Rain)

 

What will suffice for a true-love knot? Even the rain?

But he has bought grief’s lottery, bought even the rain. 

 

“our glosses / wanting in this world” “Can you remember?”

Anyone! “when we thought / the poets taught” even the rain? 

 

After we died--That was it!--God left us in the dark.

And as we forgot the dark, we forgot even the rain. 

 

Drought was over. Where was I? Drinks were on the house.

For mixers, my love, you’d poured--what?--even the rain. 

 

Of this pear-shaped orange’s perfumed twist, I will say:

Extract Vermouth from the bergamot, even the rain. 

 

How did the Enemy love you--with earth? air? and fire?

He held just one thing back till he got even: the rain. 

 

This is God’s site for a new house of executions?

You swear by the Bible, Despot, even the rain? 

 

After the bones--those flowers--this was found in the urn:

The lost river, ashes from the ghat, even the rain. 

 

What was I to prophesy if not the end of the world?

A salt pillar for the lonely lot, even the rain. 

 

How the air raged, desperate, streaming the earth with flames—

to help burn down my house, Fire sought even the rain. 

 

He would raze the mountains, he would level the waves,

he would, to smooth his epic plot, even the rain. 

 

New York belongs at daybreak to only me, just me—

to make this claim Memory’s brought even the rain. 

 

They’ve found the knife that killed you, but whose prints are these?

No one has such small hands, Shahid, not even the rain.

D.O.A. by Tim Dlugos

D.O.A.

 

“You knew who I was

when I walked in the door.

You thought that I was dead.

Well, I am dead. A man

can walk and talk and even

breathe and still be dead.”

Edmond O’Brien is perspiring

and chewing up the scenery

in my favorite film noir,

D.O.A. I can’t stop watching,

can’t stop relating. When I walked down

Columbus to Endicott last night

to pick up Tor’s new novel,

I felt the eyes of every

Puerto Rican teen, crackhead,

yuppie couple focus on my cane

and makeup. “You’re dead,”

they seemed to say in chorus.

Somewhere in a dark bar

years ago, I picked up “luminous

poisoning.” My eyes glowed

as I sipped my drink. After that,

there was no cure, no turning back.

I had to find out what was gnawing

at my gut. The hardest part’s

not even the physical effects:

stumbling like a drunk (Edmond

O’Brien was one of Hollywood’s

most active lushes) through

Forties sets, alternating sweats

and fevers, reptilian spots

on face and scalp. It’s having

to say goodbye like the scene

where soundtrack violins go crazy

as O’Brien gives his last embrace

to his girlfriend-cum-Girl

Friday, Paula, played by Pamela

Britton. They’re filmdom’s least

likely lovers—the squat and jowly

alkie and the homely fundamentally

talentless actress who would hit

the height of her fame as the pillhead-

acting landlady on My Favorite Martian

fifteen years in the future. I don’t have

fifteen years, and neither does Edmond

O’Brien. He has just enough time to tell

Paula how much he loves her, then

to drive off in a convertible

for the showdown with his killer.

I’d like to have a showdown too, if I

could figure out which pistol-packing

brilliantined and ruthless villain

in a hound’s-tooth overcoat took

my life. Lust, addiction, being

in the wrong place at the wrong

time? That’s not the whole

story. Absolute fidelity

to the truth of what I felt, open

to the moment, and in every case

a kind of love: all of the above

brought me to this tottering

self-conscious state—pneumonia,

emaciation, grisly cancer,

no future, heart of gold,

passionate engagement with a great

B film, a glorious summer

afternoon in which to pick up

the ripest plum tomatoes of the year

and prosciutto for the feast I’ll cook

tonight for the man I love,

phone calls from my friends

and a walk to the park, ignoring

stares, to clear my head. A day

like any, like no other. Not so bad

for the dead.

 

Virginia Is for Lovers by Nicole Sealey

Virginia Is for Lovers

 

At LaToya’s Pride picnic,

Leonard tells me he and his longtime

love, Pete, broke up.

He says Pete gave him the house

in Virginia. “Great,” I say,

“that’s the least his ass could do.”

I daydream my friend and me

into his new house, sit us in the kitchen

of his three bedroom, two bath

brick colonial outside Hungry Mother Park,

where, legend has it, the Shawnee raided

settlements with the wherewithal

of wild children catching pigeons.

A woman and her androgynous child

escaped, wandering the wilderness,

stuffing their mouths with the bark

of chokecherry root.

Such was the circumstance

under which the woman collapsed.

The child, who could say nothing

except hungry mother, led help

to the mountain where the woman lay,

swelling as wood swells in humid air.

Leonard’s mouth is moving.

Two boys hit a shuttlecock back and forth

across an invisible net.

A toddler struggles to pull her wagon

from a sandbox. “No,” Leonard says,

“It’s not a place where you live.

I got the H In V. H I—”

Before my friend could finish,

and as if he’d been newly ordained,

I took his hands and kissed them.

A Vision of the Garden by James Merrill

A Vision of the Garden

One winter morning as a child

Upon the windowpane’s thin frost I drew

Forehead and eyes and mouth the clear and mild

Features of nobody I knew

 

And then abstracted looking through

This or that wet transparent line

Beyond beheld a winter garden so

Heavy with snow its hedge of pine

 

And sun so brilliant on the snow

I breathed my pleasure out onto the chill pane

Only to see its angel fade in mist.

I was a child, I did not know

 

That what I longed for would resist

Neither what cold lines should my finger trace

On colder grounds before I found anew

In yours the features of that face

 

Whose words whose looks alone undo

Such frosts I lay me down in love in fear

At how they melt become a blossoming pear

Joy outstretched in our bodies’ place. 

Witchgrass by Louise Glück

Witchgrass

 

Something

comes into the world unwelcome

calling disorder, disorder—

 

If you hate me so much

don’t bother to give me

a name: do you need

one more slur

in your language, another

way to blame

one tribe for everything—

 

as we both know,

if you worship

one god, you only need

one enemy—

 

I’m not the enemy.

Only a ruse to ignore

what you see happening

right here in this bed,

a little paradigm

of failure. One of your precious flowers

dies here almost every day

and you can’t rest until

you attack the cause, meaning

whatever is left, whatever

happens to be sturdier

than your personal passion—

 

It was not meant

to last forever in the real world.

But why admit that, when you can go on

doing what you always do,

mourning and laying blame,

always the two together.

 

I don’t need your praise

to survive. I was here first,

before you were here, before you

ever planted a garden.

And I’ll be here when only the sun and moon

are left, and the sea, and the wide field.

 

I will constitute the field. 

Letter to My Father by Martín Espada

Letter to My Father 

 

You once said: My reward for this life will be a thousand pounds of dirt

shoveled in my face. You were wrong. You are seven pounds of ashes

in a box, a Puerto Rican flag wrapped around you, next to a red brick

from the house in Utuado where you were born, all crammed together

on my bookshelf. You taught me there is no God, no life after this life,

so I know you are not watching me type this letter over my shoulder.

 

When I was a boy, you were God. I watched from the seventh floor

of the projects as you walked down into the street to stop a public

execution. A big man caught a small man stealing his car, and everyone

in Brooklyn heard the car alarm wail of the condemned: He’s killing me.

At a word from you, the executioner’s hand slipped from the hair

of the thief. The kid was high, was all you said when you came back to us.

 

When I was a boy, and you were God, we flew to Puerto Rico. You said:

My grandfather was the mayor of Utuado. His name was Buenaventura.

That means good fortune. I believed in your grandfather’s name.

I heard the tree frogs chanting to each other all night. I saw banana

leaf and elephant palm sprouting from the mountain’s belly. I gnawed

the mango’s pit, and the sweet yellow hair stuck between my teeth.

I said to you: You came from another planet. How did you do it?

You said: Every morning, just before I woke up, I saw the mountains.

 

Every morning, I see the mountains. In Utuado, three sisters,

all in their seventies, all bedridden, all Pentecostales who only left

the house for church, lay sleeping on mattresses spread across the floor

when the hurricane gutted the mountain the way a butcher slices open

a dangled pig, and a rolling wall of mud buried them, leaving the fourth

sister to stagger into the street, screaming like an unheeded prophet

about the end of the world. In Utuado, a man who cultivated a garden

of aguacate and carambola, feeding the avocado and star fruit to his

nieces from New York, saw the trees in his garden beheaded all at once

like the soldiers of a beaten army, and so hanged himself. In Utuado,

a welder and a handyman rigged a pulley with a shopping cart to ferry

rice and beans across the river where the bridge collapsed, witnessed

the cart swaying above so many hands, then raised a sign that told

the helicopters: Campamento los Olvidados: Camp of the Forgotten.

 

Los olvidados wait seven hours in line for a government meal of Skittles

and Vienna sausage, or a tarp to cover the bones of a house with no roof,

as the fungus grows on their skin from sleeping on mattresses drenched

with the spit of the hurricane. They drink the brown water, waiting

for microscopic monsters in their bellies to visit plagues upon them.

A nurse says: These people are going to have an epidemic. These people

are going to die. The president flips rolls of paper towels to a crowd

at a church in Guaynabo, Zeus lobbing thunderbolts on the locked ward

of his delusions. Down the block, cousin Ricardo, Bernice’s boy, says

that somebody stole his can of diesel. I heard somebody ask you once

what Puerto Rico needed to be free. And you said: Tres pulgadas

de sangre en la calle: Three inches of blood in the street. Now, three

inches of mud flow through the streets of Utuado, and troops patrol

the town, as if guarding the vein of copper in the ground, as if a shovel

digging graves in the backyard might strike the ore below, as if la brigada

swinging machetes to clear the road might remember the last uprising.

 

I know you are not God. I have the proof: seven pounds of ashes in a box

on my bookshelf. Gods do not die, and yet I want you to be God again.

Stride from the crowd to seize the president’s arm before another roll

of paper towels sails away. Thunder Spanish obscenities in his face.

Banish him to a roofless rainstorm in Utuado, so he unravels, one soaked

sheet after another, till there is nothing left but his cardboard heart.

 

I promised myself I would stop talking to you, white box of gray grit.

You were deaf even before you died. Hear my promise now: I will take you

to the mountains, where houses lost like ships at sea rise blue and yellow

from the mud. I will open my hands. I will scatter your ashes in Utuado.