ESPADA, Martin

Here I Am

For José "JoeGo" Gouveia (1964-2014)

He swaggered into the room, a poet at a gathering of poets,

and the drinkers stopped crowding the cash bar, the talkers stopped

their tongues, the music stopped hammering the walls, the way

a saloon falls silent when a gunslinger knocks open the swinging doors:

JoeGo grinning in gray stubble and wraparound shades, leather Harley

vest, shirt yellow as a prospector's hallucination, sleeve buttoned

to hide the bandage on his arm where the IV pumped chemo through

his body a few hours ago. The nurse swabbed the puncture and told him

he could go, and JoeGo would go, gunning his red van from the Cape

to Boston, striding past the cops who guarded the hallways of the grand

convention center, as if to say Here I am: the butcher's son, the Portagee,

the roofer, the carpenter, the cab driver, the biker-poet. This was JoeGo,

who would shout his ode to Evel Knievel in biker bars till the brawlers

rolled in beer and broken glass, who married Josy from Brazil

on the beach after the oncologist told him he had two months to live

two years ago. That's not enough for me, he said, and will say again

when the cancer comes back to coil around his belly and squeeze hard

like a python set free and starving in the swamp. He calls me on his cell

from the hospital, and I can hear him scream when they press the cold

X-ray plates to his belly, but he will not drop the phone. He wants

the surgery today, right now, surrounded by doctors with hands

blood-speckled like the hands of his father the butcher, sawing

through the meat for the family feast. The patient's chart should read:

This is JoeGo: after every crucifixion, he snaps the cross across his back

for firewood. He will roll the stone from the mouth of his tomb and bowl

a strike. On the night he silenced the drinkers chewing ice in my ear,

a voice in my ear said: What the hell is that man doing here?

And I said: That man there? That man will live forever.

The Swimming Pool at Villa Grimaldi

Santiago, Chile

Beyond the gate where the convoys spilled their cargo

of blindfolded prisoners, and the cells too narrow to lie down,

and the rooms where electricity convulsed the body

strapped across the grill until the bones would break,

and the parking lot where interrogators rolled pickup trucks

over the legs of subversives who would not talk,

and the tower where the condemned listened through the wall

for the song of another inmate on the morning of execution,

there is a swimming pool at Villa Grimaldi.

Here the guards and officers would gather families

for barbeques. The interrogator coached his son:

Kick your feet. Turn your head to breathe.

The torturer’s hands braced the belly of his daughter,

learning to float, flailing at her lesson.

Here the splash of children, eyes red

from too much chlorine, would rise to reach

the inmates in the tower. The secret police

paraded women from the cells at poolside,

saying to them: Dance for me. Here the host

served chocolate cookies and Coke on ice

to the prisoner who let the names of comrades

bleed down his chin, and the prisoner

who refused to speak a word stopped breathing

in the water, facedown at the end of a rope.

When a dissident pulled by the hair from a vat

of urine and feces cried out for God, and the cry

pelted the leaves, the swimmers plunged below the surface,

touching the bottom of a soundless blue world.

From the ladder at the edge of the pool they could watch

the prisoners marching blindfolded across the landscape,

one hand on the shoulder of the next, on their way

to the afternoon meal and back again. The neighbors

hung bedsheets on the windows to keep the ghosts away.

There is a swimming pool at the heart of Villa Grimaldi,

white steps, white tiles, where human beings

would dive and paddle till what was human in them

had dissolved forever, vanished like the prisoners

thrown from helicopters into the ocean by the secret police,

their bellies slit so the bodies could not float.

The Playboy Calendar and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

The year I graduated from high school,

my father gave me a Playboy calendar

and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

On the calendar, he wrote:

Enjoy the scenery.

In the book of poems, he wrote:

I introduce you to an old friend.

The Beast was my only friend in high school,

a wrestler who crushed the coach’s nose with his elbow,

fractured the fingers of all his teammates,

could drink half a dozen vanilla milkshakes,

and signed up with the Marines

because his father was a Marine.

I showed the Playboy calendar to The Beast

and he howled like a silverback gorilla

trying to impress an expedition of anthropologists.

I howled too, smitten with the blonde

called Miss January, held high in my simian hand.

Yet, alone at night, I memorized the poet-astronomer

of Persia, his saints and sages bickering about eternity,

his angel looming in the tavern door with a jug of wine,

his battered caravanserai of sultans fading into the dark.

At seventeen, the laws of privacy have been revoked

by the authorities, and the secret police are everywhere:

I learned to hide Khayyám and his beard

inside the folds of the Playboy calendar

in case anyone opened the door without knocking,

my brother with a baseball mitt or a beery Beast.

I last saw The Beast that summer at the Marine base

in Virginia called Quantico. He rubbed his shaven head,

and the sunburn made the stitches from the car crash years ago

stand out like tiny crosses in the field of his face.

I last saw the Playboy calendar in December of that year,

when it could no longer tell me the week or the month.

I last saw Omar Khayyám this morning:

Awake! He said. For Morning in the Bowl of Night

Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight.

Awake! He said. And I awoke.

Bully

In the school auditorium.

the Theodore Roosevelt statue

is nostalgic

for the Spanish-American war,

each fist lonely for a saber

or the reins of anguish-eyed horses,

or a podium to clatter with speeches

glorying in the malaria of conquest.

But now the Roosevelt school

is pronounced Hernandez.

Puerto Rico has invaded Roosevelt

with its army of Spanish-singing children

in the hallways,

brown children devouring

the stockpiles of the cafeteria,

children painting Taino ancestors

that leap naked across murals.

Roosevelt is surrounded

by all the faces

he ever shoved in eugenic spite

and cursed as mongrels, skin of one race,

hair and cheekbones of another.

Once Marines tramped

from the newsreel of his imagination;

now children plot to spray graffiti

in parrot-brilliant colors

across the Victorian mustache

and monocle.

Isabel’s Corrido

Para Isabel

Francisca said: Marry my sister so she can stay in the country.

I had nothing else to do. I was twenty-three and always cold, skidding

in cigarette-coupon boots from lamppost to lamppost through January

in Wisconsin. Francisca and Isabel washed bed sheets at the hotel,

sweating in the humidity of the laundry room, conspiring in Spanish.

I met her the next day. Isabel was nineteen, from a village where the elders

spoke the language of the Aztecs. She would smile whenever the ice pellets

of English clattered around her head. When the justice of the peace said

You may kiss the bride, our lips brushed for the first and only time.

The borrowed ring was too small, jammed into my knuckle.

There were snapshots of the wedding and champagne in plastic cups.

Francisca said: The snapshots will be proof for Immigration.

We heard rumors of the interview: they would ask me the color

of her underwear. They would ask her who rode on top.

We invented answers and rehearsed our lines. We flipped through

Immigration forms at the kitchen table the way other couples

shuffled cards for gin rummy. After every hand, I’d deal again.

Isabel would say: Quiero ver las fotos. She wanted to see the pictures

of a wedding that happened but did not happen, her face inexplicably

happy, me hoisting a green bottle, dizzy after half a cup of champagne.

Francisca said: She can sing corridos, songs of love and revolution

from the land of Zapata. All night Isabel sang corridos in a barroom

where no one understood a word. I was the bouncer and her husband,

so I hushed the squabbling drunks, who blinked like tortoises in the sun.

Her boyfriend and his beer cans never understood why she married me.

Once he kicked the front door down, and the blast shook the house

as if a hand grenade detonated in the hallway. When the cops arrived,

I was the translator, watching the sergeant watching her, the inscrutable

squaw from every Western he had ever seen, bare feet and long black hair.

We lived behind a broken door. We lived in a city hidden from the city.

When her headaches began, no one called a doctor. When she disappeared

for days, no one called the police. When we rehearsed the questions

for Immigration, Isabel would squint and smile. Quiero ver las fotos,

she would say. The interview was canceled, like a play on opening night

shut down when the actors are too drunk to take the stage. After she left,

I found her crayon drawing of a bluebird tacked to the bedroom wall.

I left too, and did not think of Isabel again until the night Francisca called to

say: Your wife is dead. Something was growing in her brain. I imagined my wife

who was not my wife, who never slept beside me, sleeping in the ground,

wondered if my name was carved into the cross above her head, no epitaph

and no corrido, another ghost in a riot of ghosts evaporating from the skin

of dead Mexicans who staggered for days without water through the desert.

Thirty years ago, a girl from the land of Zapata kissed me once

on the lips and died with my name nailed to hers like a broken door.

I kept a snapshot of the wedding; yesterday it washed ashore on my desk.

There was a conspiracy to commit a crime. This is my confession: I’d do it again