Vivas to Those Who Have Failed Read online

  at his feet; Corin clutches a pillow in the bedroom, eyes like the eyes

  of a praying mantis, left alone by Rosalind to watch a DVD of The Crucible,

  moaning: How does it end? They can’t do this! They can’t hang these people!

  At 5 AM, the director rises in the kitchen to announce that she

  will fly everyone to Paris, and the grand gesture of her arm

  sweeps Touchstone’s sushi plate to the floor, smashing it to shards.

  Actors dangle from couches and chairs. They may not be breathing.

  A stranger with a Great Dane forages through bottles in the backyard.

  The beast whines and sniffs the air; the Forest of Arden is burning.

  I am fifty years old. I am hiding. I lock myself in the room where

  I write, surrounded by the smoke-damaged books of poets long

  gone to oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

  THE MAN IN THE DUCK SUIT

  for Todd Godwin (1957–2011)

  He wore a duck suit for my Super 8 movie,

  back in the days when I wanted to make movies,

  before I found out that I couldn’t buy

  cameras or film with food stamps. I borrowed

  a camera and a shotgun, then rented a duck costume

  for the star of my crime thriller, In Cold Duck.

  In between takes, he would pull the duck’s head off

  and tuck it underneath his arm, half-human, half-waterfowl,

  curly beard and bright yellow feathers, a creature from the mythology

  of ancient Assyria pontificating in a New Jersey British accent

  about the art of improvisation. After the last take,

  he wandered out onto my porch in full duck regalia,

  waving the shotgun at passing cars on Johnson Street.

  Thirty years later, the hunters of Wisconsin still shiver in the reeds

  as they recall the Monster Duck who hunted humans. I know

  he was only a man in a duck suit, a secret I can now reveal.

  He was my Bigfoot, glimpsed on grainy film, the camera shaking.

  FLOWERS AND BULLETS

  Cuba and Puerto Rico

  are two wings of the same bird:

  they receive flowers and bullets

  in the same heart.

  —Lola Rodríguez de Tió, 1889

  Tattoo the Puerto Rican flag on my shoulder.

  Stain the skin red, white and blue, not the colors

  that snap over holiday parades or sag over the graves

  of veterans in the States, but the colors of Cuba reversed:

  a flag for the rebels in the hills of Puerto Rico, dreamt up

  by Puerto Rican exiles in the Cuban Revolutionary Party,

  bearded and bespectacled in the sleet of New York,

  Wise Men lost on their way to Bethlehem. That

  was 1895, the same year José Martí would die,

  poet shot from a white horse in his first battle.

  Tattoo the Puerto Rican flag on my shoulder,

  so if I close my eyes forever in the cold

  and the doctors cannot tell the cause of death,

  you will know that I died like José Martí,

  with flowers and bullets in my heart.

  A MILLION ANTS SWARMING THROUGH HIS BODY

  for José “Chegüí” Torres (1936–2009)

  There is no storyteller like a storyteller with a broken nose.

  Chegüí would jab my chest before he told the tale, and I would listen.

  He was Puerto Rican, like me, and used to be the champion of the world.

  He learned his English at the Army base in Baltimore, cracking

  the sergeant’s ribs and jaw with a double left hook, body and head,

  after the Black boys in the barracks taught him what the sergeant

  meant by saying: Get up nigger. Get up spic. Years later,

  the sergeant would ask, Do you remember me? and thank him.

  The same left hook knifed the liver of Willie Pastrano at the Garden,

  and he sank to the ropes, a million ants swarming through his body.

  Three rounds later, the referee would tell him: You have nothing left.

  The Puerto Ricans at the Garden sang and punched the air for Chegüí

  de Playa Ponce, el campeón, a savior without nails hammered in his hands.

  The next day, Chegüí awoke with swollen knuckles. He spoke

  from a fire escape at Lexington and 110th Street in El Barrio

  to the Puerto Ricans who gathered in the thousands, roaring

  at every word, janitors and dishwashers ready to march

  and burn down the mayor’s mansion at his command.

  I won the title for all of us, he shouted, and the fire escape

  shuddered beneath his feet, demon rust loosening the bolts.

  One night at the Garden he would fall, legs gone, a million ants

  swarming through his body. When he fell, two men in the crowd

  had heart attacks and one of them died. Chegüí would somehow

  rise and swing, leave Devil Green facedown on the canvas, stumble

  to his corner and tell himself: You have nothing left. He used to be

  the champion of the world; now, he was a storyteller with a broken nose.

  There is no storyteller like a storyteller with a broken nose, but even

  he was not immune to diabetes, the Puerto Rican plague merciless

  as rust. The scaffold of the fire escape would drop beneath him,

  champion of the world and Spanish Harlem, savior of the janitors,

  dishwashers and poets, as it does for all champions and saviors,

  as it does for all of us in the happy crowd, singing and punching the air.

  THE DISCOVERY OF ARCHAEOPTERYX

  My grandfather’s hands raised the rooster up for all the boys to see.

  I was a Brooklyn boy lost in the Puerto Rico of my grandfather,

  carsick from backseat journeys through the mountains that dipped

  and rolled like a green serpent undulating through the sea.

  I had never seen a rooster. Once, I saw a cow in a pen at Beachcomber Bill’s

  in Coney Island, and climbed the rail to stroke the huge head between

  the eyes. My shirttails hung out and the cow began to chew the cloth.

  The cow kept chewing till my father yanked me by the arm.

  At last, Puerto Rico stopped dipping and rolling through the sea.

  Here was Archaeopteryx, the feathered reptile, the dinosaur bird,

  the fossil made flesh, risen screeching from the rock. I was dumbstruck

  by the blackness of the tail, the beak and spurs that kept my fingers away.

  My grandfather’s hands calmed the ticking of the rooster’s heart, the same

  brown hands that beckoned me with blessings in Spanish at Christmas.

  My first word was hat, and my grandfather’s straw fedora was the first hat,

  the same hat shading his eyes the day he showed me the first rooster.

  As a boy, my father learned about roosters. He saw my grandfather

  guide the bird into the pit, the wagers change hands, the gallos de pelea

  whirl and slash the eyes till a blinded rooster bled into the sand.

  My father ran where no one could see, spat up yesterday’s rice and beans.

  My grandfather’s winnings paid for the rice and beans, the straw fedora,

  the baseball glove in a box left behind by the Kings on the Día de Reyes.

  A Brooklyn boy, I knew nothing of roosters, how the spurs of gamecocks

  cut throats for sport, how a hammer strikes a cow between the eyes.

  I was a big and hungry boy who only knew the taste of flesh was good.

  OF THE THREADS THAT CONNECT THE STARS

  for Klemente

  Did you ever see stars? asked my father with a cackle. He was not
/>   speaking of the heavens, but the white flash in his head when a fist burst

  between his eyes. In Brooklyn, this would cause men and boys to slap

  the table with glee; this might be the only heavenly light we’d ever see.

  I never saw stars. The sky in Brooklyn was a tide of smoke rolling over us

  from the factory across the avenue, the mattresses burning in the junkyard,

  the ruins where squatters would sleep, the riots of 1966 that kept me

  locked in my room like a suspect. My father talked truce on the streets.

  My son can see the stars through the tall barrel of a telescope.

  He names the galaxies with the numbers and letters of astronomy.

  I cannot see what he sees in the telescope, no matter how many eyes I shut.

  I understand a smoking mattress better than the language of galaxies.

  My father saw stars. My son sees stars. The earth rolls beneath

  our feet. We lurch ahead, and one day we have walked this far.

  THE GODDAMNED CRUCIFIX

  New York City, 1972

  My father wandered through a dust storm in San Antonio

  called diphtheria. By the time he stepped off the plane

  in New York, his windpipe was closing. The doctors in the city

  could not recognize a disease dead as polio, killed off

  by vaccination years ago. In the emergency room, they said

  Drink this, and my father almost drowned in a glass of water.

  Now, many visitors came to pay homage on the ward

  in the Catholic hospital, where the nurses and the crucifix

  hovered over the bed. He did not want me there: Don’t let

  him see me like this, he said. I saw him: his black hair was white;

  his brown skin was red; his ribs spread and his chest sank

  with every rasping breath. He was skinny as a rubber chicken.

  I leaned close to hear his last words, the dying wish I would

  honor as his son for the rest of my life. And my father whispered:

  Get that goddamned crucifix away from me. Honor thy father,

  the Bible says, so I lifted Jesus off the nail on the wall

  and hid Him in the drawer next to the bed, stuffed

  back down into the darkness before the resurrection.

  Only then did the miracle come to pass: my father lived.

  HAUNT ME

  for my father

  I am the archaeologist. I sift the shards of you: cufflinks, passport photos,

  a button from the March on Washington with a black hand shaking

  a white hand, letters in Spanish, your birth certificate from a town high

  in the mountains. I cup your silence, and the silence melts like ice in a cup.

  I search for you in two yellow Kodak boxes marked Puerto Rico,

  Noche Buena, Diciembre 1968. In the 8-millimeter silence, the Espadas

  gather, elders born before the Spanish-American War, my grandfather

  on crutches after fracturing his fossil hip, his blind brother on a cane.

  You greet the elders and they call you Tato, the name they call you there.

  Uncles and cousins sing in a chorus of tongues without sound, vibration

  of guitar strings stilled by an unseen hand, maracas shaking empty

  of seeds. The camera wobbles from the singers to the television

  and the astronauts sending pictures of the moon back to earth.

  Down by the river, women still pound laundry on the rocks.

  I am eleven again, a boy from the faraway city of ice that felled

  my grandfather, startled after the blind man with the cane stroked

  my face with his hand dry as straw, crying out Bendito. At the table,

  I hear only the silence that rises like the river in my big ears.

  You sit next to me, clowning for the camera, tugging the lapels

  on your jacket, slicking back your black hair, brown skin darker

  from days in the sun. You slide your arm around my shoulder,

  your good right arm, your pitching arm, and my moon face radiates,

  and the mountain song of my uncles and cousins plays in my head.

  Watching you now, my face stings as it stung when my blind great-uncle

  brushed my cheekbones, searching for his own face. When you died,

  Tato, I took a razor to the movie looping in my head, cutting the scenes

  where you curled an arm around my shoulder, all the times you would

  squeeze the silence out of me so I could hear the cries and songs again.

  When you died, I heard only the silences between us, the shouts belling

  the air before the phone went dead, all the words melting like ice in a cup.

  That way I could set my jaw and take my mother’s hand at the mortuary,

  greet the elders in my suit and tie at the memorial, say all the right words.

  Yet, my face stings at last. I rewind and watch your arm drape across

  my shoulder, over and over. A year ago, you pressed a Kodak slide

  of my grandfather into my hand and said: Next time, stay longer.

  Now, in the silence that is never silent, I push the chair away

  from the table and say to you: Sit down. Tell me everything. Haunt me.

  THE BEATING HEART OF THE WRISTWATCH

  My father worked as a mechanic in the Air Force,

  the engines of the planes howling in his ears all day.

  One morning, the wristwatch his father gave him was gone.

  The next day, he saw another soldier wearing the watch.

  There was nothing he could say: no one would believe

  the greaser airplane mechanic at the Air Force base

  in San Antonio. Instead, one howling night he got drunk

  and tore up the planks of an empty barracks for firewood.

  There was no way for him to tell time locked in the brig.

  When he died, I stole my father’s wristwatch.

  I listened to the beating heart of the watch.

  The heart of the watch kept beating long after

  my father’s heart stopped beating. Somewhere,

  the son of the man who stole my father’s wristwatch

  in the Air Force holds the watch to his ear and listens

  to the heart of the watch beating. He keeps the watch

  in a sacred place where no one else will hear it.

  So the son tries to resurrect the father. The Bible

  tells the story wrong. We try to resurrect the father.

  We listen for the heartbeat and hear the howling.

  ON THE HOVERING OF SOULS AND BALLOON ANIMALS

  for my father

  We arrive at the Chapel by the Sea,

  sign chipped away by winds off the Pacific.

  As I steer my mother’s hand from signature

  to signature on the contracts and forms,

  the woman at the mortuary, plump and rosy

  as a balloon animal, files paperwork and chatters

  on about the disposition of your cremains.

  I want to rise, tear the check into fluttering gulls,

  shout, That’s not a word, and listen as my words

  rattle like beads in the urn of her head. The urns

  for sale circle us to eavesdrop on the negotiations.

  I stifle a snort when she asks about your honorable

  discharge from the Air Force, then offers us

  an American flag, free to the families of veterans

  with every white takeout box of cremains.

  Before I can pour my glass of water on the contracts

  and forms, my mother speaks: He hated the Air Force.

  And he used to tell everyone he wasn’t an American.

  Then together, a mother-and-son vaudeville act,

  we croon in chorus: Can we get a Puerto Rican flag?

  The woman at the mortuary
turns red and says,

  Oh no. I wouldn’t have any idea where to get one,

  as if we demanded the flag planted on the moon

  by the astronauts. I want to pop her with my pen

  so she sails around the room like a balloon animal,

  the way your soul would hover over my head

  for eternity if I said yes to the flag of empire

  folded in a triangle with your cremains, oh soul

  of rebel flags shredded by hurricanes a world away.

  BILLS TO PAY

  for my mother

  The night after my father died, I climbed the stairs

  to tell my mother goodnight. I saw the left side of the bed

  stacked with magazine clippings, newspapers, letters,

  folders, unpaid bills, a Bible. I slept with him for sixty-two years,

  she said. I had to fill up his side of the bed. I said the words

  to her I should have said many times before. There were

  words we still had time to say, and unpaid bills to pay.

  AFTER THE GOOSE THAT ROSE LIKE THE GOD OF GEESE

  Everything that lives is Holy.

  —William Blake

  After the phone call about my father far away,

  after the next-day flight canceled by the blizzard,

  after the last words left unsaid between us,

  after the harvest of the organs at the morgue,

  after the mortuary and cremation of the body,

  after the box of ashes shipped to my door by mail,

  after the memorial service for him in Brooklyn,