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Maraca
Excerpt
PROBLEMS WITH HURRICANES
A campesino looked at the air
And told me:
With hurricanes it’s not the wind
or the noise or the water.
I’ll tell you he said:
it’s the mangoes, avocados
Green plantains and bananas
flying into town like projectiles.
How would your family
feel if they had to tell
The generations that you
got killed by a flying
Banana.
Death by drowning has honor
If the wind picked you up
and slammed you
Against a mountain boulder
This would not carry shame
But
to suffer a mango smashing
Your skull
or a plantain hitting your
Temple at 70 miles per hour
is the ultimate disgrace.
The campesino takes off his hat-
As a sign of respect
toward the fury of the wind
And says:
Don’t worry about the noise
Don’t worry about the water
Don’t worry about the wind-
If you are going out
beware of mangoes
And all such beautiful
sweet things.
AN ESSAY ON WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
I love the quality of the
spoken thought
As it happens immediately
uttered into the air
Not held inside and rolled
around for some properly
schemed moment
Not sent to circulate a cane
field
Or on a stroll that would include
the desert and Mecca
Spoken while it happens
Direct and pure
As the art of salutation
of mountain campesinos come to
the plaza
The grasp of the handshake upon
encounter and departure
A gesture unveiling the occult
behind the wooden boards of
your old house
Remarks show no hesitation
to be expressed
The tongue itself carries
the mind
Pure and sure
Sudden and direct
like the appearance
of a green mountain
Overlooking a town.
THE LOWER EAST SIDE OF MANHATTAN
By the East River
of Manhattan Island
Where once the Iroquois
canoed in style-
A clear liquid
caressing another name
for rock,
Now the jumping
Stretch of Avenue D
housing projects
Where Ricans and Afros
Johnny Pacheco/Wilson Pickett
The portable radio night-
Across the Domino sugar
Neon lights of the Brooklyn shore
Window carnival of
megalopolis lights
From Houston Street
Twenty kids take off
On summer bikes
Across the Williamsburg
Bridge
Their hair flying
With bodega bean protein
Below the working class
jumping like frogs-
Parrots with new raincoats
swinging canes of bamboo
Like third legs
Down diddy-bop 6th Street
of the roaring Dragons
Strollers of cool flow
When winter comes they fly
In capes down Delancey
Past the bites of pastrami
Sandwiches in Katz’s
Marching through red bricks
aglow dragging hind leg
Swinging arms
Defying in simalcas
Hebrew prayers inside
metallic containers
Rolled into walls
Tenement relic
Roofs of pigeon airports
Horse-driven carts
arrive with the morning
Slicing through venetian
blinds
Along with a Polish English
Barking peaches and melons
Later the ice man a-cometh
Selling his hard water
cut into blocks
The afternoon a metallic
slide intercourses buildings
Which start to swallow
coals down their basement
Mouths.
Where did the mountains go
The immigrants ask
The place where houses
and objects went back
Into history which guided
Them into nature
Entering the roots of plants
The molasses of fruit
To become eternal again,
Now the plaster of Paris
Are the ears of the walls
The first utterances in Spanish
Recall what was left behind.
People kept arriving
as the cane fields dried
Flying bushes from another
planet
Which had a pineapple for
a moon
Vegetables and tree bark
popping out of luggage
The singers of lament
into the soul of Jacob Riis
Where the prayers Santa Maria
Through remaining fibers
of the Torah
Eldridge Street lelolai
A Spanish never before seen
Inside gypsies.
Once Cordova the cabala
Haberdasheries of Orchard Street
Hecklers riddling bargains
Like in gone bazaars of
Some Warsaw ghetto.
Upward into the economy
Migration continues-
Out of the workers’ quarters
Pieces of accents
On the ascending escalator.
The red Avenue B bus
disappearing down the
Needle holes of the garment
factories-
The drain of a city
The final sewers
Where the waste became antique
The icy winds
Of the river’s edge
Stinging lower Broadway
As hot dogs
Sauerkraut and all
Gush down the pipes
of Canal
After Forsyth Park
is the beginning of Italy
Florence inside Mott
Street windows-
Palermo eyes of Angie
Flipping the big
hole of a 45 record
The Duprees dusting
Like white sugar onto
Fluffed dough-
Crisscrossing
The fire escapes
To arrive at Lourdes’
railroad flat
With knishes
she threw next to
Red beans.
Broome Street Hasidics
with Martian fur hats
With those ultimatum brims
Puerto Ricans supporting
pra-pras
Atop faces with features
Thrown out of some bag
Of universal race stew-
Mississippi rural slang
With Avenue d park view
All in exile from broken
Souths
The horses the cows the
chickens
The daisies of the rural
road
All past tense in the urbanity
that remembers
The pace of mountains
The moods of the fields.
From the guayaba bushels
outside of a town
With an Arowak name
I hear the flute shells
With the I that saw
Andalusian boats
Wash up on the beach
To distribute Moorish
eyes.
The Lower East Side
was faster than the speed
Of light
A tornado of bricks
and fire escapes
In which you had to grab
on to something or take
Off with the wayward winds-
The proletariat stoop voices
Took off like Spauldine
rubber balls
Hit by blue broomsticks
on 12th Street-
Wintertime summertime
Seasons of hallways and roofs
Between pachanga and doo-wop
A generation left
The screaming streets of
passage
Gone from the temporary
station of desire and disaster
I knew Anthony’s
and Carmen
Butchy
Little Man
Eddie
Andrew
Tiny
Pichon
Vigo
Wandy
Juanito
Where are they?
The windows sucked them up
The pavement had mouths that
ate them
Urban vanishment
Illusion
I too
Henry Roth
"Call It Sleep."
IT’S MILLER TIME
I work for the CIA
They pay me with cocaine
and white Miami sports
Jackets
Free tickets to San Juan
Where I make contact
with a certain
Official at the Chase
Manhattan Bank
My contact, a guy named
Pete, asks if I know other
dialects of Spanish
"Can you sound Salvadoran"
They give me pamphlets
along with pornographic mags
They got their hands in the
backdoors of warehouses
If I want a stereo or a cd
That if a vcr
They could bring it all
at half price
Tickets to rock and roll
concerts
Where they drug the people
with lights.
The last assignment
I had was to contact
the pr division
Of a beer company-
Because for u.s. "Hispanics"
it was Miller Time
I contacted the brewery
A certain Miguel Gone-say-less
Invited me to lunch
That to meet him at La Fuente
Plush frijoles
Girls in peasant blouses
serving-
Low-key mariachi birdly
Community program directors
dining their secretaries
Big ol’ bubble of tie knots.
At a back table there he
was
Drinking Dos Equis
and cracklin’ tortilla chips
With him was a Camden, New Jersey,
Cuban who was going through
Town en route to Los Angeles
The lunch was on them-
Señor Gone-say-less
Had credit cards thickly
He had more plastic than Woolworth’s.
They mentioned that the
beer company wanted to sponsor
Salsa dances within the community
Bring in the top commercial
orchestras
. . . and that while this dance was
Going on they wanted to pass
a petition against U.S. involvement
in Central America-
They demonstrated the form of some
organization they invented
Latinos Against Intervention
The petition had space for
the name and address of the
signers
A great list to have and share
among all government agencies.
They gave me a bag with three
thousand dollars in it-
It was my responsibility to
organize the petition circulation.
The Cuban guy tapped me on the
shoulder and said:
"Don’t have any of the mixed drinks.
The bartenders at the dance are
working for us. The chemical people
are experimenting the effects of
a new liquid. Just drink the beer."
The festive event was smashing
people were stuffed into a ballroom
The band smoked
The beer company gave out caps
Ladies dressed like Zsa Zsa Gabor
Romeos thrown back propped for image
Circling the ice of their margaritas-
A full moon gleamed into downtown.
Next week the cia
is flying me back to the
Caribbean
where I will assist in staging
One of the strangest events in
world history,
According to the description we
are going to pull off a mock
Rising of land from beneath
the Caribbean
Which the media will quickly
identify with Atlantis-
Circular buildings made of crystals
are being constructed in Texas
They will be part of the
Espectáculo
Which will have the planet
spellbound
Simultaneous with this event
the Marines will invade the
Countries of Nicaragua and
El Salvador from bases in Puerto Rico.
It will be a month of salsa fests
in San Francisco
An astounding mystical event off
Bimini
The price of cocaine coming through
Miami will drop
Everybody stunned party and
celestial
Glittering frozen and drunk
Circuits jammed with junk and
Information
In a daze of rapid commercial
flight
Colonialism and business
Mark their 500th anniversary
the world is free
It’s Miller Time.
Signed: Double Agent El Lagarto
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