from a trip to France, an advanced degree
by the family intellectual,
or the announcement of religious vows
by the plain cousin (pobrecita!)
with the faint mustache and the heart of gold—
a gathering of the tribe, two dozen strong,
scrubbed, perfumed, permed, coifed, and gussied up,
a command performance at my grandparents’ house,
while he, dressed cheaply in a faded suit,
sweat beading his brow, struggled to record
that unforgettable day, posing us
in perfect order, faces to the sun,
jokes cracked for smiles, cowlicks patted down,
sashes and bows retied, the boys’ flies checked:
a perfect tableau for posterity,
hereditary gods and goddesses—
but every time he was about to snap,
a giggling bout attacked the children’s row
or Tío sneezed or Abuelita burped
or someone who wouldn’t fess up farted,
and the portrait was ruined! He’d poke out
his mournful face from under his black hood,
glancing around at his marred masterpiece,
his passion trivialized, his art abused—
pobrecito! Now I know how he felt
struggling to get all that life on paper.
THE RED PICKUP
The wish I always made in childhood
before the blazing candles or when asked
what gift I wanted the Three Kings to bring
was a red pickup, which Mami vetoed
as inappropriate. And so I improvised,
trading in speed for a pair of cowboy boots,
bright red with rawhide tassels that would swing
when I swaggered into my fourth-grade class
asking for an exemption from homework
from my strict teacher, Mrs. Brown from Maine.
She called my mother weekly to complain
of my misbehaviors, among them
a tendency to daydream instead of
finding the common denominator.
(But what had I in common with fractions?
I wanted the bigger, undivided world!)
She was one more woman in a series
of dissuaders against that red pickup
in all its transformations, which at root
was a driving desire to be a part
of something bigger than a pretty girl,
the wild, exciting world reserved for boys:
guns that shot noisy hellos! in the air
and left crimson roses on clean, white shirts;
firecrackers with scarlet explosions
that made even my deaf grandfather jump.
I wanted what God wanted when He made
the world, to be a driving force, a creator.
And that red pickup was my only ride
out of the common denominator.
SPIC
U.S.A., 1960
Out in the playground, kids were shouting Spic!
lifting my sister’s skirt, yanking her slip.
Younger, less sexy, I was held and stripped
of coat and bookbag. Homework tumbled out
into oncoming traffic on the street.
Irregular verbs crumpled under tires
of frantic taxis, blew against the grates
of uptown buses we would later take
when school let out, trailed by cries of Spic!
What did they want, these American kids?
That night when we asked Mami, she explained:
our classmates had been asking us to speak,
not to be so unfriendly, running off
without a word. “This is America!
The anthem here invites its citizens
to speak up. Oh see, can you say,” she sang,
proving her point, making us sing along.
She winked at Papi, who had not joined in
but bowed his head, speaking to God instead:
“Protect my daughters in América.”
I took her at her word: I raised my hand,
speaking up during classes, recess time.
The boys got meaner. Spic ball! they called out,
tossing off my school beanie, playing catch
while I ran boy to boy to get it back.
They sacked my stolen lunch box for their snacks,
dumping the foreign things in the garbage bin,
Spic trash! But I kept talking, telling them
I’d say what I’d seen in America.
ALL-AMERICAN GIRL
I wanted stockings, makeup, store-bought clothes;
I wanted to look like an American girl;
to speak my English so you couldn’t tell
I’d come from somewhere else. I locked myself
in the bathroom, trying to match my face
with words in my new language: grimace, leer,
disgust, disdain—feelings I had yet to feel
in English. (And would tristeza even feel
the same as sadness with its Saxon sound?
Would pity look as soulful as piedad?)
I didn’t know if I could ever show
genuine feeling in a borrowed tongue.
If cortesía would be misunderstood
as brown-nosing or cries of alegría
translate as terror. So, mirror in hand,
I practiced foreign faces, Anglo grins,
repressing a native Latin fluency
for the cooler mask of English ironies.
I wanted the world and words to match again
as when I had lived solely in Spanish.
But my face wouldn’t obey—like a tide
it was pulled back by my lunatic heart
to its old habits of showing feelings.
Long after I’d lost my heavy accent,
my face showed I had come from somewhere else.
I couldn’t keep the southern continent
out of the northern vista of my eyes,
or cut my cara off to spite my face.
I couldn’t look like anybody else
but who I was: an all-American girl.
BELLEVUE
My mother used to say that she’d end up
at Bellevue if we didn’t all behave.
In the old country when we disobeyed,
she’d drop us off at the cloistered Carmelites
and ring the bell and drive away. We sobbed
until the little lay nun led us in
to where a waiting sister, whose veiled face
we never saw, spoke to us through a grate
about the fourth commandment, telling us
how Jesus obeyed His mother and He was God.
In New York, Mami changed her tack and used
the threat of a mental breakdown to control
four runaway tempers, four strong-willed girls,
four of her own unruly selves who grew
unrulier in this land of the free.
I still remember how she would pretend
to call admissions, pack her suitcase up
with nothing but a toothbrush, showercap.
“I’m going to Bellevue, do what you want!”
She’d bang the front door, rush out to the car.
Who knows where she went on her hour off?
She needed to get away from her crazy girls,
who wanted lives she had raised them not to want.
So many tempting things in this new world,
so many young girls on their own, so many boys
with hands where hands did not belong.
Of course, she wanted to go to Bellevue,
where the world was safe, the grates familiar,
the howling not unlike her stifled sobs
as she drove around and around our block.
ABBOT ACA
DEMY
Fall 1964
Mami sent me to Abbot where they tamed
wild girls—or so she’d heard—into ladies,
who knew to hold their skirts down in a breeze
and say “Excuse me” if compelled to speak;
ladies who married well, had lovely kids,
then inexplicably went mad and had
gin and tonics or the gardener for breakfast—
that part my mother hadn’t heard; ladies
who learned to act like blondes even if they
were dark-haired, olive-skinned, spic-chicks like me.
And so that fall, with everything checked off
the master list—3 tea dresses, 2 pairs
of brown oxfords, white gloves, 4 cardigans—
I was deposited at Draper Hall
to have my edges rounded off, my roots
repotted in American soil.
I bit my nails, cracked my knuckles hard,
habits the handbook termed unladylike—
(sins, the nuns called them back at Catholic school).
I said my first prayer in months that night.
“Ay Dios,” I begged, “help me survive this place.”
And for the first time in America,
He listened: the next day for English class
I was assigned to Miss Ruth Stevenson
who closed the classroom door and said, “Ladies,
let’s have ourselves a hell of a good time!”
And we did, reading Austen, Dickinson,
Eliot, Woolf, until we understood
we’d come to train—not tame—the wild girls
into the women who would run the world.
BY ACCIDENT
Sometimes I think I became the woman
I am by accident, nothing prepared
the way, not a dramatic, wayward aunt,
or moody mother who read Middlemarch,
or godmother who whispered, “You can be
whatever you want!” and by doing so
performed the god-like function of breathing
grit into me. Even my own sisters
were more concerned with hairdryers and boys
than with the poems I recited ad nauseam
in our shared bedrooms when the lights were out.
“You’re making me sick!” my sisters would say
as I ranted on, Whitman’s “Song of Myself”
not the best lullaby, I now admit,
or Chaucer in Middle English which caused
many a nightmare fight. “Mami!” they’d called,
“She’s doing it again!” Slap of slippers
in the hall, door clicks, and lights snapped on.
“Why can’t you be considerate for once?”
“I am,” I pleaded, “these are sounds, sweet airs
that give delight and—” “Keep it to yourself!”
my mother said, which more than anything
anyone in my childhood advised
turned me to this paper solitude
where I both keep things secret and broadcast
my heart for all the world to read. And so,
through many drafts, I became the woman
I kept to myself as I lay awake
in that dark bedroom with the lonesome sound
of their soft breathing as my sisters slept.
VAIN DOUBTS
Years ago now—a breezy, bygone day,
walking a city street, my hair tossing,
feeling the beauty of my young body,
that animal friskiness triggered by spring,
I glanced admiringly at my reflection
in a storefront window, tossing my head
to watch that mirrored waving of a mane
I thought my best feature—when a young man
coming in my direction barred my way.
Glaring at me, he uttered, “Vanity!”
And I was stopped in my mindless moment
of physical joy, shamed to associate
that deadly sin with the upsurge of life
and self-love I’d been feeling, never doubting
my urban prophet had been right. Vanity—
so this was what that ugly sin felt like!
In his disgust, I heard the click of keys
in convents, harems, attics, marriages,
down the generations, doors closing on
bodies that could give both pleasure and life.
Now that the years have granted me release
from such vain doubts, I’d like to post myself
at slumber parties, bathrooms, dressing rooms,
wherever young girls gather, frowning at
their wrong-size figures, blah hair, blemished skin—
already taught to find fault or disguise
joy in their bodies. I’d like to be the voice
that drowns out their self-doubt, singing in praise
of what I couldn’t see when I was young:
we’re simply beautiful, just as we are.
FIRST MUSE
When I heard the famous poet pronounce
“One can only write poems in the tongue
in which one first said Mother,” I was stunned.
Lately arrived in English, I slipped down
into my seat and fought back tears, thinking
of all those notebooks filled with bogus poems
I’d have to burn, thinking maybe there was
a little loophole, maybe just maybe
Mami had sung me lullabies she’d learned
from wives stationed at the embassy,
thinking maybe she’d left the radio on
beside my crib tuned to the BBC
or Voice of America, maybe her friend
from boarding school had sent a talking doll
who spoke in English? Maybe I could be
the one exception to this writing rule?
For months I suffered from bad writer’s-block,
which I envisioned, not as a blank page,
but as a literary border guard
turning me back to Spanish on each line.
I gave up writing, watched lots of TV,
and you know how it happens that advice
comes from unlikely quarters? She came on,
sassy, olive-skinned, hula-hooping her hips,
a basket of bananas on her head,
her lilting accent so full of feeling
it seemed the way the heart would speak English
if it could speak. I touched the screen and sang
my own heart out with my new muse, I am
Chiquita Banana and I’m here to say . . .
LUNCH HOUR, 1971
It was the autumn of my discontent
in New York City. I was twenty-one
with nothing to show but a resumé
of thin successes: sundry summer jobs,
a college-writing prize, four published poems
in a small journal edited by friends.
I got a job on 42nd Street
with Special Reports, Incorporated,
a series of newsletters that went out
to schools and libraries on hot topics.
I was put in charge of Special Reports:
Ecology and the new Women’s Issues,
which I manned from the tiny broom closet
called my office, from which I could see—
once the leaves fell—two lions reclining
before the public library. That fall
our bestseller, Special Reports: The World,
was full of news about the Vietnam war.
The blood-red oak leaves falling in the park
outside my window seemed sad mementos
of mounting casualties a world away,
and closer in the choices I had made.
Each day at noon, I’d race down to the street,
past protestors handing out peace buttons
and stale leaflets I’d prete
nd to read.
I ate a quick snack sitting on the steps
between the lions, wiped my greasy hands
on their stony manes, and still hungry,
I spent my lunch hour in the library,
feeding the poet starving inside me.
HEARTLAND
Those heartsick days living in the heartland.
Those hard days that I thought would never end.
Houses so homey they seemed appliquéd
on the landscape, hedges and trees in place
as if they had been rented for each lawn
along with picket fences, pastel mums,
and politically incorrect lawn ornaments:
Mexicans sleeping with sombreros on,
black footmen with their faces painted white
out of some vague respect for civil rights.
My landlady had a lady on our lawn,
bent over so her frilly panties showed.
I’d look out at her and my heart would sink.
Depression is always in the details.
Homesick and lovesick, I kept mental lists
of objects that seemed sentient with advice:
churches like thumbtacks stuck in every block
to hold down what might otherwise rise up,
drapes drawn at dusk, tunafish casseroles
no one back east was making anymore—
back east . . . where the man I was obsessed with
was living on the verge of his divorce
—or so he wrote in passionate letters
utterly discredited in this setting.
Is this true love? I kept asking myself.
Desperate for answers, I applied to her:
What would you do to bypass this impasse?
But she just mooned me (with her panties on)
as if to say, My dear, don’t be an ass.
Honestly, what a tiresome question!
BAD-WEATHER FRI ENDS
Old friends from my other, less successful lives
who put up with me, how grateful I am
to each of you for how you saved the day
when all my days were dark nights of the soul.
I must have been one of those sad cases
you see on late-night movies, thirty-plus,
insomniac, twice divorced, unsettled, poor,