Singing at the Gates

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  I kept thinking of that woman named Rita, a Rarámuri Indian, charged with killing her husband in Chihuahua, Mexico. She fled and crossed the desert and was found years later in an alley in Kansas City rummaging in a dumpster for food. I carried her with me on every run. Her intelligence imbued me, shaped my hours, my mind filled with her figure walking in the desert, under the hot Sonoran sun. I tried to feel and sense what she might have felt and sensed as she trekked across the burning sands.

  Once found, she was kept in an asylum for the mentally ill for years until one day a nurse, escorting a new doctor down the hallway, pointed to Rita in a cell and said the woman was insane, babbling in strange tongues, and no one knew who she was or where she came from. And because there was so little known about her, the hospital staff and authorities referred to her as Rita of the Sky. The visiting doctor touring the facility, however, hailed from the same region in Chihuahua, Mexico, and he cried out that it was no nonsensical babble but a language he was fluent in. Through this doctor’s efforts, it was discovered that Rita was not crazy and never had been.

  After legal hearings with court-appointed lawyers petitioning in her behalf Rita was discharged. She was awarded a million dollars in damages but the lawyers kept most of it, giving Rita a paltry sum of one thousand dollars. After her release, old and decrepit, she returned to her village where she spent the rest of her days. In my poem, “Rita Falling from the Sky,” I try to conjure those interminable miles she roamed, over hostile terrain and forbidding landscape, to arrive in Kansas.

  I was hardly able to catch my breath after my expedition into the desert with Rita when Drake reached out to me to write something to accompany a photography exhibit at the Whitney Museum in New York. I dropped every­thing and said Yes. Simplified, the photos were of transvestite prostitutes working in a border cantina. I knew La Frontera well enough, the Ciudad Juárez and Las Cruces border, as I had been going down there since I was a kid, smuggling a load or two of marijuana across that very border.

  The photographs touched a nerve. Chicanos are a hybrid culture, Indio-euro, born when the first Native American woman was raped or loved by the invading marauders from Europe. Thus, the Mestizo was born. I am Indio-euro or, in my own Chicano assignation, Mestizo-Genazaro, and that ethnic split in my heritage and genetic makeup gives me a certain insight into the gender split of these men. Because I am bicultural, the project piqued my intrigue as transvestites also are composed of two opposing parts—­female personalities trapped in male bodies. And while Indio-euro is my bloodline, Chicanismo is my soul and culture. This identity is informed by an American life in general but also by one who has done prison time. And a day after I talked to Drake on the phone, FedEx dropped off a packet stuffed with photographs. They were magnificent.

  This psychic split was a theme I wanted to explore and without wasting a second I spread the photos across the floor and studied them one by one and tried to respond to them. I followed the contours of each erotic body, trying to read their suppressed pain through their attitude, decipher their sexualized eyes and painted faces, and interpret my own feelings about my own mixed ethnic makeup. It went quickly. The lurid and vulgar portraits suggested secrets to reveal. My job was to fling open the portals of their strange and eerie world. Their images—at once vulnerable and defiant as corner prostitutes, the flammable poses and dark features and spiked high heels and sparkle of their cheap lipstick, nail polish, and black fishnet nylons—doused my interest with combustible fuel that exploded in me. They stared at me from the photos as if I was their hostage, gripped by their sorrowful hands and legs. I wrote through the night into the next afternoon, lifting the veil of each male victim dressed as a woman, who would all eventually be murdered or die from drug overdoses. By the end of the following day I was stuffing first-draft poems into a FedEx pack to be over-nighted to Drake.

  My piece was titled “Smoking Mirrors,” and the exhibit was popular enough that the University of Washington published my poem and Drake’s photographs into a book to commemorate our collaboration. The book is entitled Que Linda La Brisa (La Brisa being the name of a transvestite cantina in La Zona, the red-light district in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico).

  After that, and still feeling the injustice done to these people, I was more than willing to lose myself in another project that might absorb me to such an extent that I could separate myself from that bitter reality on the border. I had been depressed for weeks when my friend the photographer Norman Mauskopf walked into my house. This man’s got more balls than a herd of bulls and an eye to capture the essence of his subjects that rides the highest rails of creativity. He asked me to compose a long poem to accompany his photographic history of northern New Mexico Chicano culture.

  The result is “Singing at the Gates.” Whimsical in style, nostalgic, and contemporary in tone, it is a simple celebration of Chicano culture, a sort of pencil drawing of myself in myriad forms, sketched in metaphors and images and lyrical language. More symbolic than practical, here is a personal myth that blows my heart-seed hopes and dreams over the land where I grew up and still inhabit, in freedom and in the ideal faith that I will have a life free from the yoke of oppression and imprisonment I experienced for twenty-five years.

  This poem carries a lot of primal significance for me, a pivotal memorial to my liberation from the shackles of illiteracy by teaching myself to read and write in prison. It is sometimes fierce and compassionate in its commitment to overcome day-to-day ­adversity, an outraged dystopian cry for La Plebe to rise and demand their rights be respected, merging genres to achieve something larger than me.

  To conclude this collection, I include recent poems that connect to the plight of people struggling against the oppression of class, of poverty, of apathy, and the struggles of war. In a way these poems bring us around to the beginning of the collection—where the fight for self, dignity, and meaning rages against man-made boundaries and larger-than-life obstacles.

  The poems collected here express not only the four decades of my journey, but also the journeys of other lives that parallel my own battles, hopes, aspirations, and dreams. From inside the walls that hold us and divide us, language has the means of breaking through into light, love, freedom, and celebration of life. All of us experience conflict with joy and pain. All of us with genuine voices—not scarecrow mimicry that borrows and copies—create a sublime journey to find beauty in what is considered the mundane.

  SINGING

  AT THE GATES

  EXCERPTS FROM THE MARIPOSA

  LETTERS

  22

  I am like the colorful Quetzal Bird

  glowing rich and heavy

  flung wings splattering against early skies

  my cries dripping like red paint on the white horizons

  23

  I handle the glittering diamond-hilt of hate daily

  and decide what to do

  24

  memories tangle up in trees like gigantic cobwebs

  25

  and the winds sputtered their jowls like horses

  wrenching the wretched roots of me

  26

  you walk in robes of the world’s moonlight

  around you like a ghostly nightgown

  you blood-burning witch and queen cat

  purring with your womb lips

  27

  carrying the echoes of our dreams

  that grit their teeth along my bones nightly

  and hammer along my heart for a secret passage

  28

  I realize prison is but another name for a long long night

  in which the one you most love is absent

  *

  35

  This morning

  still half asleep beneath my blankets

  I’d brush your hair with my fingers

  rub your flanks do
wn

  following over your hips

  down sleek firm lengths of your thigh,

  more than this:

  the warmth I’d feel in my heart

  the many things I have done in this life

  all settled now like residue

  asleep in the honey feeling of morning

  as I touched you.

  36

  When leaves spin through the air

  like green diamonds, I have always felt

  the need to put my pants on,

  tie my boots on, don a loose cotton shirt

  and go walking, breathing in and out

  tramping great distances

  on the side of the road

  as cars passed to and from.

  37

  I have begun to speak a new language.

  With you, I touch on words I never knew existed.

  I can’t vocalize them, but within me

  a whole land of people have finally found

  their mother tongue

  and now I feel I belong, finally with meaning

  at the root of each word

  that little red dictionary

  I leaf through hour by hour now

  amazed at the wealth of language

  38

  I feel like a child with you, woman

  learning love, slowly writing out my feelings

  in big letters across the sky

  and able to touch your heart like a leaf

  39

  We are children. And you and I

  always amazed

  by the immeasurable found in flowers

  or the gold in sunny days

  or the kingdoms we see in the moon.

  They say our dreams are not real. They say

  there the real world.

  We look at each other and smile.

  I hug you because your slippers are made

  of mooncloth when you step to kiss me.

  40

  We are like the butterfly and hummingbird;

  we have felt hurt a million times like buckshot in our wings

  41

  My thoughts surface for air

  almost frightened and angry

  then the thoughts return

  swimming upstream to breeding grounds

  to the clear pebbly-blue shallows of my heart.

  42

  I somehow find someone sitting on porch stoops with the same mind

  as mine, and we find laughter, tears, stories

  we each dream a woman, and if that dream is broken,

  each man breaks inside himself, his life becomes a long

  feverish tribal dance, his days haze

  in the flurry of bongo hands

  while his neck and head shake and fling

  to sweet sad music, no longer slow,

  his pulses like piano keys plink and tum

  squeak and ring

  the dream between his jaws

  chewed like cocaine on his long swirling inward journey,

  veins twisting up tight and knotted

  the wrist dangling and wrenched and snapped into clapping

  as the song goes on, of man without woman

  *

  51

  Woman, speaking about when my cock

  enters, plunges the far wells of your womb,

  I will tell what I want,

  what secrets I wish to come forth

  from my questioning cock, nosing deep

  into your still water, rippling the silent blue

  silver, the water surface

  in the jungly jeweled depths of your womb

  struck with my sunlight, quivering with my

  drumming balls

  I want your hips to shake

  like a fish flapping out of water

  your hips slapping and whipping

  from side to side

  as if your womb lips were gills

  sucking feverishly at my oxen-thick cock

  prodding you, your womb unfolding

  like a butterfly from the golden petal of the afternoon,

  to flick wings quickly

  as if dancing on air your buttocks swishing

  grinding trance-like

  not a second still, jiggling the soft loins

  of your legs, lathering love honey between

  our legs, under and down our legs dripping

  explode for me woman in furious waves and lashes

  a thousand times a minute sweep and rip

  your hips, your ass, your pelvis into me

  like a wild mare in a stall of fire

  unleashing your groans and snarls

  your cunt clawing and grabbing

  for more male cock, King Lord of woman’s flesh,

  woman devour and plunder me

  52

  I take your flesh in my hands

  each caress a small delicate string

  I pluck slowly then speed my fingers through

  your legs meander along the bed sheets

  my fingers play expresses to your body

  plucking fast and

  running my fingers across

  your breasts as if they were nights

  your nipples moons and my hands huge wings

  plucking our song

  your whimperings

  my sweet elongated mumbles

  *

  56

  Dressed in peasant skirt, Spanish dancer dress

  Mexican blouse, garters, black panties and stockings,

  perfumes, diamonds, shoes with slender straps, woman!

  you rise for all my needs,

  all I ever wanted in a woman with feathers and beads and paint

  my fingers smoldering embers

  from our night’s fire

  all your coves and caves, all my mountains and plains,

  your coves filled with my flooding waters,

  your caves with my bones and meat, my plains

  with your ploughs and crumbled dirt clods,

  mist everywhere, our bodies move slowly,

  never leaving the other’s touch, filling in and nestled

  in each other’s curves, licking your arms, you kiss and caressing

  with your lips my loins, your beloved man

  as it was meant to be dear woman, woman, woman, woman . . .

  *

  62

  I feel much like a fisherman with his plate

  of hard biscuit and cold fish before him

  63

  How far will a man go and what is he to do

  in the face of truth that doesn’t even look like truth

  but feels hidden inside somewhere

  like wild animals gnawing away on prehistoric bones?

  I’ve hidden deep within me that kind of truth,

  the kind that snarls when you come too close to it.

  *

  77

  Though in prison, though I rage at times at the ignorance

  and stupidity and coarseness and cruelty

  behind bars, at keepers and kept,

  I turn to you filling the air that I breathe

  air churned darkly and heavy with steep systems

  and though I say nothing,

  walking early through prison mornings

  my voice you hear cannot be drowned out

  because by you giving me your great

  spaces of love and filling them with my love,

  my voice cannot be
drowned out

  over flooding the banks or prison

  seeping into its dark dungeon hell-holes

  bursting those hell-holes like dams frothing with light,

  with my unrelenting cry of love and hope,

  with my being in the very air entwining with yours

  like stuff that falls from moon and enchants roots

  like stuff that falls from sun soaking buds to bloom

  that stuff is our love flowing through air

  to cultivate wild the rocky regions of roses burgeoning

  now, this very moment, as I write

  this to you woman.

  *

  85

  Construction men finished the other side

  of the dormitory, and I’m sitting here

  basking in the slamming noise of gates

  and I’m sitting here

  thinking hopefully that the other side of the dormitory

  will be better, it’s painted pale white

  and got new sinks and showers

  and I’m sitting here thinking I’ll get a bunk

  by the window so the morning sun

  will shine in on me

  and maybe the guys won’t blast their tv’s

  and stereos, maybe I won’t have fools living next to me

  at six o’clock in the morning screeching out their icy noise

  and I’m sitting here thinking all this

  when the gate at my back opens,

  a few construction men walk in, hard hatted,

  dusty clothed and they start hooking up this thing,

  slip an old rubber orange hose through a triangle

  cut into the screen that separates us from the guards,

  and they begin to hook this hose up

  ten feet away from me,

  and outside I hear this rumble start up

  and loud sputters pat! pat! spit! spit-pat!

  and the orange hose bloats up like a python

  coupled to this thing of steel

  they clamp a huge chisel

  one hard hatted mug grabs a shovel and stands

  next to his wheelbarrow

  and the other grabs this thing like a gatling gun

  and hell breaks open with loud crunches and blasting

  at the granite floor,