Singing at the Gates
Page 9
when
I too recited my first poem. The intensity and radiance of
a child reaffirmed my original reason for writing,
one I’d forgotten along the way.
Suddenly
I knew, keeping the light intact,
not teaching writing, not to mold or direct,
just to keep it burning, blowing on the embers
so hope doesn’t go out,
that was the message El Maestro was bringing me
from the sun.
I WISH MY LIFE
fit the day’s needs
as coal in winter or ice in summer. You never know
when you’re signing for your happiness
you’re not signing your execution papers.
More incredible’s
how folks use faith in God
to ignore the starving, to be
indifferent to the homeless, assume
God will punish those who locked the boxcar
suffocating those Mexicans locked inside
like the human beings who rot in prison.
I’m called spic, wetback, illegal alien
because there is a god.
And if I get paid what I’ve earned, deserve for honest labor,
another law is drafted to keep me a slave
while preferential treatment and advantage are given
to the rich calling the shots.
I don’t mean to be insolent, to sound pontifical,
but I know
nonsense
when I hear it.
Instance:
at UNIversities
where professors are more Uppidee
than a stretch of snowy Kansas field,
rarely do they trust Chicanos or Indios to teach,
only those with rug-burned knees.
Instance:
Governor of Arizona, found GUILTY of a slew of felonies,
airs his grief before a press conference, quoting
from the Bible
how prophets are often considered lepers in their own town.
Now come on, I’m thinking,
this is getting too strange.
Were I to speak out
on the absurdities
like Jordan making more in five-second sound bites
for NIKE
than thousands of rank-and-file workers in a year,
I’d be glared down, accused of race baiting,
diagnosed a danger to myself, committed
to the unspoken
BLACK LIST.
I’ve heard gibberish
from friends living in gorgeous coastal homes,
driving deluxe Beamers,
the bark and arf-arf of their buried-bone bits of beliefs:
You’re a danger to yourself.
Ask the Holy Spirit to heal you.
God is free, independent of all nations,
not funded by the state, not subject to king.
But when I ask them for donations to buy books
for disadvantaged children, they reply:
I give my gift basket at Christmas
through the church.
I guess there’s room for all kinds in this life.
THE JOURNEY HAS ALWAYS BEEN
what we didn’t do or did, how far we’ve come
to a place
where dream fragments smolder:
hot pebbles cooling after a summer rain.
It happens I am a singer of the heart
and took my songs to the gutter to sing them to drunks,
recite them to addicts,
whisper them to thieves and madmen,
outstretch them like my hands
clasping prisoner’s hands
through cell bars.
You see, it’s these people who understand the poem’s magic,
who are not invited into society,
whose opinions we denigrate as useless,
but each unlike Uppidees fight hard for their existence,
battle against armed keepers to speak, stand, and breathe.
They’ve known the blessing light of the poem
on their trampled hearts,
the poem’s respite in a merciless society,
its sensory indulgence in their own severe deprivations,
its love and respect
away from the mockery, ridicule, and shame
that accusers heap on them.
The poem’s words
scrub away the rust on their hearts
drawing out the burnished luster of their dreams,
and radiates a certain light from their bones.
As they roam the murky alleys,
it transforms their suffering into songs of celebration,
strengthening their convictions
to stay when ordered out.
Commanded to sit, they stand.
Asked to speak, they withdraw into silence.
They are, in other words,
true to the poem,
loyal to the heart,
merging the two.
MY DOG BARKS
Come close, listen: at the door a professor from Flagstaff asks
can I participate in a conference on prison writing.
I decline. Conferences are squeamish about truth.
If your words don’t fit their theories,
if you claim that convicts are people,
that writing goes deep in the soul, to memories,
to flesh and blood, that writing has more to do
with cruel guards and torture chambers, isolation cells
and chained beatings, they become squeamish.
I know a man
in Paterson, New Jersey; the guy
wasn’t allowed to write a letter
to his wife after she had their child,
so he hid himself away and wrote
a poem in blood.
I visited the house where Thoreau lived once,
where he wrote of the oppressed and murdered in prison,
how they’re imprisoned because they’re poor,
how they have human rights. He wrote
about humanity, not just about writing
as with those whose work seems detached
from their own hearts, not like the conference types
who believe there is no way to help
the imprisoned, that it’s best to keep them in
while having workshops on prison writing.
I talk back, think individually;
this is strictly a conference on writing
in prison, and if you had writers who’d been cons
it would make the conference a success.
But you don’t want to hear what they’re going through,
you prefer to translate their suffering into MFA papers,
to turn their deaths into metaphors,
to make their real cries and real terror a tone in the text
that people outside can philosophize about;
it’s only about writing, not what would free these men
from their tormentors. Besides, if they weren’t in prison
you wouldn’t be able to have a conference, would you?
Come close, listen: I decline the offer
to pander to suspicions,
decline not to discuss what drives the writing,
what the writing really means,
what it means to be a writer in prison in the first place,
not some yahooing convict with a book
whose fame is built on kissing ass.
And while I’m at it, I decline your myth of censorship,
where every bookstore in the city prints
handouts about some food in Podunk or New York
burning a book: that’s not censorship, that’s bullshit!
The writing conference definition of censorship
will hail the work of some gawkish clown
who’s never been behind bars—portray him as a victim.
Or take that girl born into uppercrust, tsst-tsst
murmurings. After doing a book on the border,
right away she’s a heroine of the underclass,
jailed entirely for symbolic purposes.
O how they offer their wrists to the cop!
Come close, listen: the real definition of censorship
is when they keep you locked in the hole
for ninety days without light or exercise
so you have to compose your poems in your head
and remember them. The real definition
of a prison writing program
is when a prisoner has to write
a poem in blood.
ANOTHER POET I’VE KNOWN
This woman I honor, respect, am blessed to have as friend,
who picked me up at O’Hare Airport in Chicago,
who’d been through everything
unimaginable, enduring it,
growing like a blueberry tree, more leafy
grace in her gestures, her rotund
laughter, heady
with mysterious gaiety in her eyes.
Raped once by four policemen,
her man murdered by the FBI,
she retreated
into deep, green mountains with her daughter
to retrieve
that crystalline innocence
of the dewdrop in her tears,
to douse the flames of her agony.
Yes, I’ve known a woman
who took me from Chicago to Milwaukee, who I thanked
for picking me up,
who drove three hours late at night, renting a new truck
because her car was too old and might break down,
who worked ten times harder than any tenured professor
while getting paid half her worth, half
what her male counterparts made.
I remember her at the table
with students of every race, color,
seeing how they respected her, how she lavished
attention on them.
Not one award,
no plaque of distinction, not one NEA
grant adorning her walls, a commoner
of the sort who make the real world habitable.
Her spirit splendor mists my loneliness,
the kind of luminosity I see hovering
at the river’s banks, burning away at sunrise
disclosing landscaped fields, bright streams, mountains.
She was that for me, this poet living
in her small apartment with her doves, parakeets, and plants,
Christmas lights nailed above the kitchen doorway,
rising early to make tortillas for students, guests,
creating cards to send to friends
splendid and elaborate as Diego Rivera, collages
sprouting in her hands like seeds
in soil moist as farmers’ field rows.
Blessed I am
to have known this woman, blessed
I am to be her friend, this angel
who said of her life:
It’s a Chicago thing.
Frida Kahlo’s brow, her eyes,
lush hair, sensual hips and breasts.
Paintings hang in every room,
stations of the cross she recorded
on her journey
from hell to the mountain peak,
cherished faces of the people she loved
in the center of her bleeding heart.
I’m awed by her healing, like magic
that deep, raucous laughter bordering each day,
her life a pine forest
abundant with eagles, fragile creeks,
a solace to weary travelers like me.
Just a woman,
mother, painter, and teacher,
another poet I’ve known.
WITH PAZ BY THE FIRE
LAST NIGHT
We talk about the warrior’s journey
when suddenly he looks up, and says:
It’s the rage I have trouble with.
I wake and have my coffee, write,
go to the mesas to walk in canyons.
I admire the layered clouds, winter light in sage,
find a campsite littered with shotgun-shell casings,
plastic bottles and canisters riddled with buckshot
an outlaw hangout for gun lovers.
I cut and floor the pedal
bouncing out on the dirt road
and see a couple walking their dog,
realizing how life keeps reminding me
I’m doing what I should be.
A phone call from a woman needing help,
a reading by an ex-con who memorized my Crying Poem,
a small speech I gave for the New York premiere of
a new documentary on adult literacy,
a benefit for Leonard Peltier’s defense fund,
a meeting with Fortune Society members
to talk about making it on the streets—
the soul is what matters, how drugs infest the soul
with diseased, cancerous muck
that must be scraped away, cleaned off with prayer,
the sheer work of living healthy.
Tutoring barrio families to read and write,
volunteering my services with joy,
always rushed and exhausted, I move into winter light
that invigorates my resilience
to endure the betrayals of haughty, Ivory Tower
intellectuals, academics with all that
musky ineffectualness hunkered down in booklined offices
trading the classroom in for festivals in the park.
I cry into the mike for commitment,
avoiding journalists, TV reporters, interviews or articles;
calling Guadalupe in the mountains
to deliver wood to impoverished families
whose only source of heat is fire.
At dawn I tread rocky trails
breathing in cold air, absorbed
in the phosphorescent brilliance
of dew and cold on sage stems.
The winter light remains
a written testimony on my journey
to clouds and light and shadows
always moving, rearranging, rushing
into canyon crevices.
The phone is ringing, the letters stack up,
bills need to be paid, my children attended,
a novel and various manuscripts edited.
Sensitive friends drop by with booze and drugs
to shock to life their own dead systems.
I note the signs every day
that I’m moving forth
alone into winter light,
into a place where flowers grow in snow
and tears are made in flames.
Looking back on a broken marriage
and substance abuse, I see it as a time
<
br /> when locusts swarmed across my heart
eating away the nurturing marrow of green life
and leaving a wake of dust-bowl bleakness,
a shadow of a man holding his brimmed hat on his head
fiercely leaning into howling gusts,
roadless, mapless, stung and pelleted,
a shriveled, gaunt, life-starved skeleton,
each day’s casket closed, submerged in oblivion.
I find myself meandering a coastline
observing the gulls ride waves gracefully,
shimmery feathers tucked into their sides;
in the distance fog wraps mountain peaks
and coves quell in peaceful slumber;
my footfalls leave deep imprints in moist sand
where I see tides sucked in and vanish.
I imagine grief goes that way,
that change comes like the ebb,
a playground teeter-totter
or windblown, child’s swing at dusk.
The wind rides the swings,
lifts and drops the teeter-totter.
Amid screaming divorcees
and lung-cancer patients,
a lone gull alights on a log
left after the flood
that hurled refrigerators a mile downstream,
backfilled rooms to ceilings with mud,
juggled and tossed entire homes
to smithereens against cliff banks.
I see how fragile plants endure,
how they bulk with weighty blossoms,
and I understand the beauty of gulls
in winter light, riding cold waves,
taking no provisions for their journey,
no map or army or money,
no crude baggage from the past.
They dive into a blue, ethereal reef-world
and the sea caresses them
like a loving hand behind a dog’s ear,
who shakes awake and barks to go outside
where dewy frost burns off in sunlight
that warms the bones of travelers,
who long ago lost their dreams and now have only stories
of loneliness and love, danger and courage,
to tell around the fire beneath the stars.
SET THIS BOOK ON FIRE!
Rising
in the glow of the embers,
and even in the ashes, I want to tell you:
I’ve spent years
studying stark cries in the cancerous marrow
of inner-city streets. I’ve gone to
Uppidee districts to witness poets