Floaters Read online

he loosened his cravat at meeting after meeting in the sweatshops.

  Remake of me the sickle for thy grain; remake of me the oven for thy bread.

  A century gone, the mills gone, the union gone, the books gone, the poet

  faded as poets fade, like fountain pen, bedridden in a tenement room,

  paralysis of the legs bewildering the doctor with his black bag, the bottle

  of wine always by the bed, yet the iron in the bars of the cage still prays:

  Remake of me the sickle for thy grain; remake of me the oven for thy bread.

  Remake of me the sickle for thy grain; remake of me the oven for thy bread.

  Be There When They Swarm Me

  for Paul Mariani

  You were once the boy of the big shoulders, hauling cartons

  of Campbell’s Soup at the A&P in 1959, yearning to brain

  the boss with a wrench. You were the poet of the great handshake

  and all the stories, squeezing my arm to tell me about Hart Crane,

  who leapt from a ship to drown at sea: Did he struggle

  to regain the surface, suddenly sobered by what he’d done?

  I wandered lonely as a Puerto Rican in an English

  Department, and you found me in the hallway,

  calling me brother as my own brother never would,

  calling me poet as if that word had never drowned at sea.

  Once, I was a boy with big shoulders too, plotting

  to shrink-wrap the foreman’s head the night of the layoffs.

  Not for you the poet learning to smoke like a poet,

  bursting into tears at the sight of a mayonnaise jar

  because he loves the letter M, locking himself

  in the bathroom because his haiku is too short.

  Now, you tell tales of the hospital bed, your spine a wreck,

  your wobbling brain. Now, you write of scrubbing the deck

  when hornets sting and zoom into your eyes, as one winged fiend

  multiplies by twenty, and you win but know you cannot win,

  and so you pray: Be there when they swarm me.

  I wear a leg brace up to the knee. The surgeons

  opened my belly like curious children inspecting

  the pendulum of a grandfather clock. My insurance

  will not pay for my hearing aids. At the airport,

  they stop me because my beard is a suspect.

  And yet, I will be there when they swarm you.

  I will arm myself against the hornets with natural

  insecticides, the eucalyptus oil, the citronella,

  the spray of chrysanthemum flower tea, and then

  the baseball bat, since I was born in Brooklyn,

  where people used baseball bats to smash burglars,

  cars, television screens, anything but baseballs.

  We will win, though we know we cannot win.

  You called me brother in the hallway as my brother

  never would, spoke the word poet like a benediction,

  and so we wait together for the next wave

  of winged demons. Be there when they swarm me.

  The Bard Shakes the Snow From the Trees

  for Donald Hall (1928–2018)

  Eagle Pond Farm, Wilmot, NH

  Nearing ninety, the poet

  in a Red Sox T-shirt

  snarls the invocation

  of the muse in ancient Greek,

  digging the false teeth

  from his jaw so the song

  of the Iliad will escape

  his beard and fly

  up the chimney,

  the roar of the bard

  shaking the snow

  from the trees

  on Ragged Mountain.

  Flan

  for Jack Agüeros (1934–2014)

  I was eight when the blackout struck and the lights died all across the city

  like a massacre of fireflies. In the projects of Brooklyn, I steered myself

  to 14F, fingers spread against the cool tiles of the hallway, past the concrete

  and chicken-wire terrace where I once burnt ants with a magnifying glass.

  Many years later, at the Chinese restaurant uptown, Jack said: They got

  any flan here? He was my first poet. I had seen the fireflies in his sonnets

  blink and float away: Fulano the philosopher in the unemployment line;

  Blanco the painter, painting in the madhouse; Monterosa the dealer killed

  by shotgun in a bar on Avenue A; his mother the seamstress and the quick

  needle of her sewing machine; Jack the moving man, his hands sliced raw.

  He stacked his apartment with dictionaries in three languages. I knew

  the raconteur’s grin with every tale: Raúl Juliá is a friend of mine:

  a Puerto Rican playing Macbeth. He took 14 curtain calls on opening night.

  Maybe he would tell me now that flan was not Puerto Rican, or Mexican,

  or Spanish, but Chinese, invented by a trembling cook to satisfy the palate

  of an emperor in the Ming Dynasty. No flan, Jack, I said. This is a Chinese

  restaurant. Two minutes later, he said: They got any flan? I showed him

  the dog-eared and fingerprinted menu. No flan, I said. When the waiter

  unfurled his pad, Jack said to him: You got flan? He sang this song for an hour.

  The egg roll was not flan. The fried rice was not flan. The fortune cookie

  was not flan. Can we get some flan? he said. Goddammit, Jack, I said.

  The poets crowded into the bar, striding to the mike. Jack stood with poem

  in hand, read the title, tilted his head and said it again, studied the page

  as if the words shriveled up like ants burnt under a magnifying glass,

  then sat down. I witnessed the massacre of fireflies. A few of us clapped,

  not knowing what to do with our hands, staring at the sonneteer who lost

  all his quatrains and couplets in the denim jacket he left on the subway,

  the words of Fulano still waiting on the unemployment line: The faster

  you spin, the stiller you look. / There’s something to learn in that, but what?

  After the diagnosis, I handed Jack a book of poems. He dangled the book

  upside down like a stiff mouse by the tail, something we would sniff behind

  the refrigerator. I wanted sonnets. Jack kept singing the chorus of a song:

  Get me to the church. Get me to the church. Get me to the church on time.

  At the end, I leaned over Jack’s bed to read his own poem in his ear, but some

  words come home after the blackout, fingers crawling on the wall. I know

  what I should have said at the Chinese restaurant: Jack, let’s get some flan.

  We should have braved the subway at rush hour, straphangers rocking

  all the way to 14th Street and 8th Avenue, to La Taza de Oro, gone now

  like Jack, for rice and beans, squid in its own ink, café con leche y flan,

  Jack: a spoonful of flan for you after all the years of sonnets and bread

  for me, the steam rising when your hands cracked the crust at the table.

  Morir Soñando

  for Luis Garden Acosta (1945–2019)

  Brooklyn, New York

  I saw the empty cross atop the empty church on South 4th Street, as if Jesus

  flapped his arms and flew away, spooked by one ambulance siren too many.

  I saw the stained-glass windows I wanted to break with a brick, the mural

  of Saint Mary and the Angels hovering innocent as spies over the congregation,

  and wanted to know why you brought me here, the son of a man punched

  in the face by a priest for questioning the Trinity, who punched him back.

  This is El Puente, you said. The Bridge. I knew about the Williamsburg Bridge,

  eight lanes of traffic and the subway stampeding in the open windows of the barrio
>
  all summer. You spread your arms in that abandoned church and saw the spinning

  of a carousel better than any wooden horses pumping up and down at Coney Island:

  here the ESL classes for the neighbors cursed with swollen tongues in English;

  there the clinics on contraception, the pestilence in the veins of the unsuspecting;

  here the karate lessons, feet spearing the air to keep schoolyard demons away;

  there the dancers in white, swirling their skirts to the drumming of bomba;

  here the workshops on Puerto Rican history, La Masacre de Ponce where your

  mother’s beloved painted his last words on the street with a fingertip of blood.

  I was a law student, first year, memorizing law school Latin, listening to classical

  guitar on my boom box as I studied the rules of property: It’s mine. It’s not yours.

  I saw only what could be proven by a preponderance of the evidence: the church

  abandoned by the church, the cross atop the church abandoned by the Son of God.

  My belly empty as Saint Mary of the Angels, I told you I was hungry, and we left.

  I wanted Chinese food, but you told me about the Chinese takeout down the block

  where you stood behind a man who shrieked about the price of wonton soup,

  left and returned with a can of gasoline, splashed it on the floor and pulled a box

  of kitchen matches from his pocket. Will you wait till I pick up my egg roll and pork

  fried rice? you said, with a high school teacher’s exasperated authority, so he did.

  You could talk an arsonist into postponing his inferno till you left with lunch,

  but you couldn’t raise the dead in the ER at Greenpoint Hospital, even in your suit

  and tie. You couldn’t convince the girl called Sugar to rise from the gurney after

  the gunshot drained the blood from her body. You couldn’t persuade the doctor who

  peeled his gloves and shook his head to bring her back to life, telling him do it again,

  an arsonist in medical scrubs trying to strike a wet match. You couldn’t jump-start

  the calliope in her heart so the carousel of horses would rise and fall and rise again.

  Whenever you saw the gutted church, you would see the sheets of the gurney

  dipped in red, all the gurneys rolling into the ER with a sacrifice of adolescents.

  We walked to the luncheonette on Havemeyer Street. A red awning announced

  Morir Soñando. To Die Dreaming, you said, from the DR, my father’s island.

  The boy at the counter who spoke no English, brown as my father, called Martín

  like me, grinned the way you grinned at El Puente, once Saint Mary of the Angels.

  He squeezed the oranges into a drizzle of juice with evaporated milk, cane sugar

  and ice, shook the elixir and poured it till the froth spilled over the lip of the glass.

  Foam freckled my snout as I raised my hand for another. Intoxicated by morir

  soñando number three and the prophet gently rocking at my table, I had a vision:

  ESL classes healing the jaws wired shut by English, clinics full of adolescents

  studying the secrets of the body unspeakable in the kitchen or the confessional,

  karate students landing bare feet on the mat with a thump and grunt in unison,

  bomba dancers twirling to a song in praise of Yoruba gods abolished by the priests,

  the words of Puerto Rican rebels painted on the walls by brushes dipped in every

  color, pressed in the pages of notebooks by a generation condemned to amnesia.

  Morir soñando: Luis, I know you died dreaming of South 4th Street, the banners

  that said no to the toxic waste plant down the block or the Navy bombarding

  an island of fishermen for target practice thousands of miles away. Morir soñando:

  I know you died dreaming of vejigantes, carnival máscaras bristling with horns

  that dangled with the angels at El Puente. Morir soñando: I know you died dreaming

  of the next El Puente. Morir soñando: I know you died dreaming of the hammer’s claw,

  the drill whining to the screw, the dust like snow in a globe, then the shy genius

  raising her hand in the back of the room. Morir soñando: I know you died dreaming

  of the poets who stank of weed in the parking lot, then stood before the mike

  you electrified for them and rubbed their eyes when the faces in their poems

  gathered there, waiting for the first word, so we could all die dreaming, morir

  soñando, intoxicated by the elixir of the tongue, oh rocking prophet at my table.

  The Five Horses of Doctor Ramón Emeterio Betances

  MAYAGÜEZ, PUERTO RICO, 1856

  I. The First Horse

  Cholera swarmed unseen through the water, lurking in wells and fountains,

  squirming in garbage and excrement, infinitesimal worms drilling the intestines,

  till all the water and salt would pour from the body, till the body became a worm,

  shriveling and writhing, a slug in salt, till the skin burned blue as flame, the skin

  of the peasant and the skin of the slave gone blue, the skin in the slave barracks blue,

  the skin of ten thousand slaves blue. The Blue Death, face hidden in a bandanna,

  dug graves with the gravediggers, who fell into holes they shoveled for the dead.

  The doctors died too, seeing the signs in the mirror, the hand with the razor shaking.

  II. The Second Horse

  Doctor Betances stepped off the boat, back from Paris, the humidity of the plague

  glistening in his beard. He saw the stepmother who fed him sink into a mound

  of dirt, her body empty as the husk of a locust in drought. He toweled off his hands.

  In the quarantine tents, there was laudanum by the bitter spoonful, the lemonade

  and broth; in the dim of the kerosene lamps there was the compress cool against

  the forehead, the elixir of the bark from the cinchona tree. For peasants and slaves

  moaning to their gods, the doctor prescribed chilled champagne to soothe the belly.

  For the commander of the Spanish garrison, there was silence bitter as the spoon.

  III. The Third Horse

  At every hacienda, at every plantation, as the bodies of slaves rolled one by one

  into ditches all hipbones and ribs, drained of water and salt, stripped of names,

  Doctor Betances commanded the torch for the barracks where the bodies would

  tangle together, stacked up as if they never left the ship that sailed from Africa,

  kept awake by the ravenous worms of the plague feasting upon them. Watching

  the blue flames blacken the wood, the doctor and the slaves saw another plague

  burning away, the plague of manacles scraping the skin from hands that cut

  the cane, the plague of the collar with four spikes for the runaways brought back.

  IV. The Fourth Horse

  The pestilence of the masters, stirred by spoons into the coffee of the world,

  spread first at the marketplace, at auction, the coins passing from hand to hand.

  So Doctor Betances began, at church, with twenty-five pesos in pieces of eight,

  pirate coins dropped into the hands of slaves to drop into the hands of masters,

  buying their own infants at the baptismal font. The secret society of abolitionists

  shoved rowboats full of runaways off the docks in the bluest hour of the blue night,

  off to islands without masters. Even the doctor would strangle in the executioner’s

  garrote, spittle in his beard, if the soldiers on watch woke up from the opiate of empire.

  V. The Fifth Horse

  The governor circled his name in the name of empire, so Doctor Betances

  sailed away to
exile, the island drowning in his sight, but a vision stung

  his eyes like salt in the wind: in the world after the plague, no more

  plague of manacles; after the pestilence, no more pestilence of masters;

  after the cemeteries of cholera, no more collar of spikes or executioners.

  In his eye burned the blue of the rebel flag and the rising of his island.

  The legend calls him the doctor who exhausted five horses, sleepless

  as he chased invisible armies into the night. Listen for the horses.

  Letter to My Father

  October 2017

  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