Floaters Read online

  in the desert for the border crossing of the next Guillermo.

  We smuggle ourselves across the border of a demagogue’s dreams:

  Confederate generals on horseback tumble one by one into

  the fiery lake of false prophets; into the fiery lake crumbles

  the demolished Wall. Thousands stand, sledgehammers in hand,

  to await the bullhorns and handcuffs, await the trembling revolvers.

  In the full moon of the flashlight, every face interrogates the interrogator.

  In the full moon of the flashlight, every face is the face of Guillermo.

  Boxer Wears America 1st Shorts in Bout With Mexican, Finishes Second

  —HEADLINE IN THE WASHINGTON POST, APRIL 18, 2018

  In the blue corner, weighing 130 pounds, Lightning Rod Salka sheds his robe

  to unveil America 1st emblazoned across the waistband, a wall of bricks

  in the red, white and blue of the American flag stamped on his shorts.

  He pivots and salutes the crowd. In the red corner, weighing 130 pounds,

  El Bandido Vargas wears a black cowboy hat with a bandanna across his face.

  His trainer slips them off. Eyebrow still healing from the last fight, El Bandido

  studies Lightning Rod and his border wall trunks at the casino in Indio,

  California. He cannot hear the ring announcer praise Tecate, the beer of boxing,

  snarling: Indio, are you ready? The crowd buzzes at the clang of the bell.

  Lightning Rod waves his hands in circles like a magician at a birthday party.

  El Bandido hooks the belly. Lightning Rod jabs twice at the scarred eyebrow.

  El Bandido hooks the belly. Lightning Rod paws and swats at the darkness.

  El Bandido hooks the belly. Lightning Rod skips away, back against the ropes.

  El Bandido hooks the belly. Lightning Rod is quiet in the corner between rounds.

  El Bandido hooks the belly. Lightning Rod moans about low blows to the referee.

  El Bandido hooks the belly, hooks the head, then snaps the uppercut to jolt

  Lightning Rod back to a day when he was ten years old, watching a parakeet

  in a pet shop tap a bell with his beak over and over again, and he spins around

  in the corner, kneeling on the canvas, gloves on the ropes as if in prayer, as if

  he forgets the wisecrack about boxers and God: that only helps if you can fight.

  Lightning Rod quits in his corner, the welts stinging his body like red jellyfish,

  as the crowd hollers and jeers at the casino in Indio, California. Later,

  he says: I’m not bigoted or racist. I hear in my head a jingle on television back

  when I was ten years old, sung by a cartoon mustachioed Mexican in a sombrero

  to the tune of Cielito Lindo: Ay, ay, ay ay, / I am the Frito Bandito. / I like Fritos

  Corn Chips, / I love them, I do. / I want Fritos Corn Chips, / I take them from you.

  Mazen Sleeps With His Foot on the Floor

  for Mazen Naous

  Mazen sleeps with his foot on the floor, trailing off the bed.

  He does not dream of dancing in Beirut. He does not hear

  his mother’s oud, hanging on the wall, belly round like a pear

  or fig or tear drop, strings cascading the ancient music.

  Whenever the rockets and the bombs shook the house,

  Mazen and his brother would jump from bed and sprint

  to the basement. The first step could keep the boys one step

  ahead of the ceilings and walls collapsing in dusty clouds

  behind them. Mazen would sleep with his foot on the floor.

  So he slept for fifteen years in the roaring music of Beirut.

  I remember the air raid drills of my boyhood. The bald Russians

  would bomb us. The bearded Cubans would bomb us. We stood

  in the hallways at school, two lines facing the walls, because the bombs

  would fall between us, in the middle of the hallway. The teachers told

  us to be silent, and we were silent, except for the boy who chattered

  at me until the music teacher who loved operettas and forced us

  to listen smacked the boy into the wall. He was the only casualty.

  The civil war in Lebanon is gone, and Mazen gone from Lebanon,

  another teacher walking his dog on campus, navigating between

  the chain-link fences with their cranes and boarded buildings,

  signs everywhere in red warning Danger. At the airport in Boston,

  Mazen’s skin will glow as if saying Danger, and the wands will pass

  over his body, scrutinized by agents who would rather scan his mind

  for the clouds of bombs and rockets he conspires to drop on them.

  Mazen still sleeps with his foot on the floor. He knows what we only

  think we know, the civil war gone but not gone, how the first step

  can save us when the walls dissolve like baking powder, even as we

  block out the rumbling, staring hypnotized by the icy pond of the screen.

  I Now Pronounce You Dead

  for Sacco and Vanzetti, executed August 23, 1927

  On the night of his execution, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, immigrant

  from Italia, fishmonger, anarchist, shook the hand of Warden Hendry

  and thanked him for everything. I wish to forgive some people for what

  they are now doing to me, said Vanzetti, blindfolded, strapped down

  to the chair that would shoot two thousand volts through his body.

  The warden’s eyes were wet. The warden’s mouth was dry. The warden

  heard his own voice croak: Under the law I now pronounce you dead.

  No one could hear him. With the same hand that shook the hand

  of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Warden Hendry of Charlestown Prison

  waved at the executioner, who gripped the switch to yank it down.

  The walls of Charlestown Prison are gone, to ruin, to dust, to mist.

  Where the prison stood there is a school; in the hallways, tongues

  speak the Spanish of the Dominican, the Portuguese of Cabo Verde,

  the Creole of Haiti. No one can hear the last words of Vanzetti,

  or the howl of thousands on Boston Common when they knew.

  After midnight, at the hour of the execution, Warden Hendry

  sits in the cafeteria, his hand shaking as if shocked, rice flying off

  his fork, so he cannot eat no matter how the hunger feeds on him,

  muttering the words that only he can hear: I now pronounce you dead.

  II.

  Asking Questions of the Moon

  The Story of How We Came to América

  I remember the tale of my grandfather the gambler, tipped off

  that the cops would raid his speakeasy, selling the club to another

  gambler, fleeing Puerto Rico before somebody could press a gun

  to his skull and scatter his brains through his white straw hat.

  That is the story of how the Espada family came to América.

  My father once said: That never happened, and besides, you

  should wait till people are dead to tell stories like that.

  Now people are dead, and I am telling stories like that.

  Why I Wait for the Soggy Tarantula of Spinach

  My mother and father met at Vera Scarves, the Brooklyn factory

  in 1951. My mother was a receptionist, my father a shipping clerk.

  She was twenty and would blush at pictures of Gregory Peck in movie

  magazines; he was twenty-one and six foot four, one inch taller than

  Gregory Peck. He asked her on a date to see Captain Horatio Hornblower,

  starring Gregory Peck. They were standing at the corner of 5th Avenue

  and 42nd Street in Times Square, waiting, hand in hand, for the red light

  to glow green, whe
n a soggy ball of spinach fell from the sky, landing

  on my mother’s head. I would say only God knows why, but He doesn’t.

  Maybe Popeye staged a mutiny, pouring his can of spinach overboard

  instead of punching Bluto in the face again for the sake of Olive Oyl.

  Maybe an eight-year-old boy who yearned to pitch for the Yankees

  flipped a screwball of spinach out the window to shock his mother.

  My mother’s meticulously ironed curls wept green down her neck.

  Her eyes wept too. My father was an airplane mechanic in the Air Force.

  He knew what to do when something came plummeting from the sky.

  Go down to the subway toilet, he said, and rinse your hair in the sink.

  I’ll wait for you up here. And so my mother did. She returned from

  the subway toilet with hair wet and spiky, standing up like the crest

  of a startled cockatoo. They went to see Captain Horatio Hornblower,

  sat in the balcony and kissed throughout the movie, missing every line

  of dialogue from Gregory Peck, wooing Virginia Mayo as Lady Barbara.

  Once, I heard a poet deaf with age declaim a poem about seeing Halley’s

  Comet as a boy in 1910. The ball of spinach was my mother’s comet.

  Every day, my eyes scan the heavens, waiting for the soggy tarantula

  of spinach to plummet from the sky and splatter my thinning hair.

  This is my inheritance: not the spinach, but the certainty that spinach

  is hurtling at my head, or maybe a baby grand piano spinning from

  the clouds, and all I can do is wait. Only God knows why, but He doesn’t.

  The Stoplight at the Corner Where Somebody Had to Die

  They won’t put a stoplight on that corner till somebody dies, my father

  would say. Somebody has to die. And my mother would always repeat:

  Somebody has to die. One morning, I saw a boy from school facedown

  in the street, there on the corner where somebody had to die. I saw

  the blood streaming from his head, turning the black asphalt blacker.

  He heard the bells from the ice cream truck and ran across the street,

  somebody in the crowd said. The guy in the car never saw him.

  And somebody in the crowd said: Yeah. The guy never saw him.

  Later, I saw the boy in my gym class, standing in the corner of the gym.

  Maybe he was a ghost, haunting the gym as I would sometimes haunt

  the gym, standing in the corner, or maybe he wasn’t dead at all. They

  never put the stoplight there, at the corner where somebody had to die,

  where the guy in the car never saw him, where the boy heard the bells.

  Death Rides the Elevator in Brooklyn

  On a winter morning in 1968, my father left to walk the picket line.

  He rode the elevator in his black coat, hood over his head in the hour

  before daybreak. On the third floor, the doors opened. A white man

  waiting for the elevator stood there, peered at my father in his black

  coat and hood, in his brown skin, then screamed and fled. The doors closed.

  My father laughed on the picket line that morning. He laughed for years.

  The guy thought I was Death, he would say. Death rides an elevator

  in Brooklyn, mugger Death, militant Death, Puerto Rican Death.

  Listening to the story, as the screaming man screamed louder with every

  telling, I never thought one day my father would be the man standing

  there, waiting for the elevator doors to open. He did not stare or scream

  or run. He stepped into the elevator, and the doors closed behind him.

  The Cannon on the Hood of My Father’s Car

  The football coach taught Driver’s Ed. He would hear a siren pass and say:

  There goes another one. He meant me. I mowed down the rubber cones

  as if they marched at me, an orange army invading from an orange planet.

  My head snapped with every curb I hit, a speed bag for the fist I never saw.

  I failed Driver’s Ed, F like father, F like Frank, my father’s name. My father

  now would have to teach me how to drive. He said: I’d like to mount a cannon

  on the hood of my car, swivel it around, and blast all the bad drivers off the road.

  He meant me. So I learned to drive, one eye on the quaking of his chin, the cords

  in his neck, waiting for him to shred my learner’s permit so it fluttered in my face.

  A taxi dropped him off one morning. You have to drive me back to the city,

  he said. I lost my car. At the age of five or so, I lost my turtle under the bed.

  My father found the creature, crawling on his fingertips, still trying to escape.

  JFK was president in 1962, but my father was the finder of lost turtles.

  I tucked my learner’s permit in my shirt pocket and drove him to the city.

  I read the stubble on his chin. My father, who silenced the room whenever he

  spoke, said nothing, years before the AA meeting where he stood up and said:

  Hello, my name is Frank. We drove around the same block three times before

  I said: There it is. Someone tore the cannon off the hood. That’s why we missed it.

  Asking Questions of the Moon

  Some blind girls

  ask questions of the moon

  and spirals of weeping

  rise through the air.

  —FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA

  As a boy, I stood guard in right field, lazily punching my glove,

  keeping watch over the ballgame and the moon as it rose

  from the infield, asking questions of the moon about the girl

  with long blonde hair in the back of my classroom, who sat with me

  when no one else would, who talked to me when no one else would,

  who laughed at my jokes when no one else would, until the day

  her friend sat beside us and whispered to her behind that long hair,

  and the girl asked me, as softly as she could: Are you a spic?

  And I, with a hive of words in my head, could only think to say:

  Yes, I am. She never spoke to me again, and as I thought of her

  in the outfield, the moon fell from the sky, tore through the webbing

  of my glove, and smacked me in the eye. Blinded, I wept, kicked

  the moon at my feet, and loudly blamed the webbing of my glove.

  Standing on the Bridge at Dolceacqua

  My only love sprung from my only hate!

  —ROMEO AND JULIET, ACT 1, SCENE 5

  At forty, I studied the mirror. I poked my mouth to free a trapped grain

  of hamburger, and a tooth broke off between my fingers. I felt nothing.

  The dentist said: The tooth is dead. The root is dead. The X-rays show signs

  of trauma to the lower jaw. What happened here? I said: Donald DeBlasio.

  Donald DeBlasio punched me in the mouth. I was fifteen. My lip split,

  my skull clanged, and my body smacked the floor like a mannequin

  in a store looted by rioters. He stood over me and grinned

  as he would grin at me for the rest of my life. Whenever I saw

  him, in the hallway at school or on the street, he would pump

  his right fist in my face, slowly curling an invisible barbell.

  He was a centurion guarding the last outpost of the empire,

  another Sicilian or Calabrese fleeing Brooklyn for Valley Stream,

  Long Island, escaping the barbarians who sacked Rome, back

  from the dead in 1972 to steal their cars, torch their houses,

  piss in their swimming pools, stab the boys, and kiss the girls.

  I was a barbarian drifting far from his tribe, a Puerto Rican

  without a knife in hand or a leather jacket
ablaze in gang colors.

  Everybody understood, even the teacher who glanced away the day

  I was late and sat on the floor, so the front row could take turns

  jabbing a shoe in my spine. I refused to worship their gods, Jesus

  on the crucifix or the Yankees in the sacred arena of the Stadium,

  or the football deity who could bench press 300 pounds and slammed

  me into a locker whenever he saw me. He never said a word to me.

  I never said a word to him. I learned to swallow blood and words.

  For years, I would mimic their rooster strut, the sneering lip stuck out,

  the bellowing battle cry of bafangool. I rooted against Rocky in all

  the Rocky movies, cheering his choreographed pratfalls to the canvas.

  When they rushed out the door of the pizza joint to gawk at the booming

  car wreck on the corner, leaving my eggplant parm sub to burn black

  in the oven, I called them goombahs and swore never to return.

  I am sixty. The words flow over the wrinkled stone of my brain:

  Dolceacqua, sweet water, fresh water, River Nervia in the province

  of Imperia, region of Liguria. I stand on the bridge at Dolceacqua,

  the same stone arch painted by Monet more than a century ago.

  She contemplates the water gushing below the bridge, and I watch

  at her shoulder to see the river as she sees the river, poet, teacher,

  amati, like amada in Spanish, the word for beloved. Her mother’s name

  is Giovio, Calabrese from New Jersey, her grandfather a stone mason

  before the beam rammed his head and the stroke crippled his right hand,

  her great-grandmother a girl sewing buttons onto blouses who escaped

  the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, as others leapt, hand in hand, eyes shut,

  from the ninth floor. I can no longer remember the curses in the poetry

  of Shakespeare and Donald DeBlasio. She takes my hand, and leads me

  across the bridge to the ruins of the castle on the other side of the river,

  through the labyrinth of stone, up to the jagged battlements, where we