could swim, but fear of criticism
overwhelmed me, and now
all I have
is prose.
So I find the library
and read instead of writing.
Jorge Amado, Gabriel García Márquez.
In books, I find villages lost in time,
towns that remind me of Trinidad, Cuba.
When I discover that several
of my high school friends
have ended up all living together
in a rat-infested apartment
while they study at Columbia,
I visit, and they let me move in,
but as soon as he figures out
that I have help, Actor L.
shows up again, expecting shelter.
A junkie moves in with him,
both of them nodding off,
sleeping
the deep
indifference
of heroin.
Actor L. shaves his beard, then his head,
and joins some sort of militia
wearing a stern Maoist uniform
instead of his old Che Guevara costume.
Dis-couraged, I realize
that I’ll never know
if he’s simply acting
or really crazy,
maybe truly
dangerous.
UPROOTED
Without a college degree
I can’t find a job anywhere
but I finally figure out how to apply
to the Venceremos Brigade.
They turn me away
simply because my mother
is Cuban.
Only North Americans with no relatives on the island
are allowed to chop sugarcane
swinging a machete.
My reason for hitchhiking
all the way to New York
has vanished.
Now, each time I step out
of the crowded apartment,
I have to dodge cat-size rats
that scavenge on the dimly lit
stairway.
SURVIVAL
Rent is due, but I’m penniless,
so I rush into any job I can find,
lasting only one hour
as a waitress.
When I lose my way
in the complicated subway system,
I’m chased by gangsters who threaten
to kill me, but then I’m rescued
by a young man
who leads me
from danger
to safety.
Even though he seems
like a dark-skinned, angelic
superhero, he’s just a student,
the bravest
bookworm.
NIGHT SHIFT
The only work I can find
is plugging wires into a switchboard
as a telephone operator
in Greenwich Village,
trapped in a chair
until two o’clock each morning, when I ride
the dreary subway back to a crazy apartment
where Actor L. and his junkie friend
sit nodding off on the couch, while the bookworms
I knew so well in high school
study, study,
study. . . .
Will I ever manage
to return
to college?
Once an opportunity
has been abandoned,
can lost hope ever
be rediscovered?
USELESS
Seated at the switchboard, I learn
that I become numb in emergencies.
Each time someone calls for police,
ambulance, or fire assistance, my voice
falls silent, my hands tremble,
and I have to turn the urgent
cry for help
over to a manager.
I’m a coward, terrified of making errors.
It’s the same fear that smothered
the breath
of poetry.
Why do I imagine
that in order to accomplish anything,
all my feeble, trial-and-error efforts
need to be
perfect?
WISHING FOR ENCOURAGEMENT
Encourage.
En-courage.
In courage.
When Actor L. threatens me
with a bone-handled hunting knife,
I toss it down the garbage chute,
but he comes back the next day
with an array of many blades,
all the shiny knives
perfectly
polished.
DISTANCE
During coffee breaks at work
I’m allowed
to make free long-distance phone calls.
I don’t tell my mother about those sharp
cutting edges
that haunt my nightmares.
Instead we talk about family,
and she warns me to stay away
from Pepe, my uncle who is now
a refugee, settled in Elizabeth,
New Jersey, the second biggest
Little Havana
after Miami.
I didn’t know he was here, so close,
just across the river from Manhattan.
A relative.
Someone loving.
His laughter.
A link
to the past . . .
but I’ve sacrificed my chance to belong
anywhere near him, because he can’t risk
being associated with a Cuban American
foolish enough to try to volunteer
for the island’s impossible
ten-million-ton
sugarcane
harvest goal.
Even though I didn’t get to join
the Venceremos Brigade, I’m on record
as someone who tried to travel to the place
Tío Pepe
just escaped.
FACING REALITY
I know the truth about Actor L. now.
Crazed and dangerous, not just acting.
Barefoot and wearing a sheet, he treks
into Riverside Park late at night, performing
some sort of imaginary ceremony.
The line between militias and cults
is a fine one.
So I leave
on a road trip,
exploring
quietness.
IN THE LAND OF TRANSCENDENTALISTS
Walden Pond, then Cape Cod,
this peaceful stillness
beside the wave-embraced rage
of an ocean.
I sleep on a sand dune
hushed
by the hum
and roar
of comforting
nature.
ORPHEUS
The story of an underworld journey
finally sends me back to that source
of discouragement—dropping out
of the university—but this time
I’ll have to stay in my parents’
home
my old
room
four
walls
just
enough
space
to study.
I feel as if I’ve ventured too far
from the loves of my childhood,
nature
and poetry.
It’s time to go back and try to find
courage.
Green Earth
1970–1971
AFTER THE DRIFTING YEARS
Back in Los Angeles
where I started—
no boyfriends
or daydreams
of pleasing guys
who only crave
complete
control.
I need
to rediscover
my original self
before I share
real life
with anyone
else.
STARTING OVER
Living in my parents’ house
is free, and boring jobs bring
enough money
for textbooks, while low
community college fees
make Berkeley’s high tuition
seem like a wasted fortune.
File clerk at a travel agency.
Post office mail sorter.
Floater in a department store, moving
from department to department,
never knowing enough about anything
to answer a perplexed customer’s questions.
I don’t care if these jobs are dull,
just as long as my mind is free to travel
back and forth to science classes, learning
about nature’s orbiting world,
all my wild movements
masked
by gravity.
MURDERERS
The south-central campus is so far
from my parents’ northeast LA home
that I have to ride two buses each way,
one hour each, plus waiting for a transfer
downtown, right in front of the courthouse
where several Charles Manson girls stand
in a circle on the sidewalk, eerily
chanting.
The madman they worship
is on trial.
Some of the girls
will be convicted too.
I try not to stare, but our eyes meet,
and in that instant I know that I could have been
just like them, if I’d kept drifting, aimlessly
listening to Actor L. or any other dangerously
convincing
liar.
NOW I ONLY LISTEN TO PROFESSORS
Geology.
Geography.
Meteorology.
Botany.
The poetry of science
flows over me
like a waterfall,
flooding my emotions
with a sense
of belonging
on earth.
Rocks.
Continents.
Weather.
Plants.
My world is complete,
once I’ve learned
the rhythmic names
of human life’s
neighbors.
GEOLOGY FIELD TRIP
The Grand Canyon.
Hiking.
Camping.
Scrambling
downward, through layers
of millennia, and then back up
to modern times,
stopping
at a cinder cone
on the way home,
one of those perfectly symmetrical
ancient volcanoes, way out in the desert
where silence, wind, and prayer
all feel like old
friends.
TUTORING
My new job on campus
is guiding welfare mothers
as they struggle to understand the difference
between natural minerals and man-made
concrete.
They tell me they’ve never left the city.
Geology is a subject they enrolled in
just to meet a requirement, but field trips
are too far-fetched. Who would tend
their babies?
So I sit in a room full of older women,
passing around samples of granite
as I point out the tiny, glittering,
nearly hidden crystals
of pink feldspar,
black hornblende,
smoky quartz.
Each time my home city of Los Angeles
erupts in riots, I’ll remember these women
who grew up without any chance
to learn
how to distinguish
between rigid gray pavement
and the complex beauty
of nature.
I’ll remember that they feel
such a deep sense
of belonging
nowhere.
GEOGRAPHIC LONELINESS
Sometimes an island-shaped emptiness
enters my veins and floats toward my brain,
surging like a storm tide that makes me wish
for Cuba.
Peace
between my parents’ nations
seems impossible, so this yearning
is just as unrealistic as time travel
across all the light-years
of memory.
Do I still have an invisible twin
left behind on that lost isla, the farm girl
who knows how it feels to breathe
enchanted air
and ride horses?
METEOROLOGY
After I complete advanced geology,
physical geography, cultural geography,
and the baffling mystery of chemistry,
I study the science of weather, a field
so full of subtle air movements
that guessing is still acceptable
once all the charts and graphs
are cleverly sketched.
Storms mean a drop in barometric pressure,
the flow of hot and cool aerial currents
in not-quite-predictable patterns,
just like my future.
If I’d known how wide and wild my first
doomed attempt at college would be,
I might have started right here
in a smaller school, where none
of the professors have Nobel Prizes,
but oh, how they love
to teach!
THE CHEMISTRY OF A PEACEFUL MIND
Tests.
Terrifying.
Too sensitive.
Care too much.
Curl up inside, just like el moriviví,
the sensitive Mimosa plant
I remember from Cuba, with feathery
green leaves that snap shut
when touched,
then reopen
oh so slowly,
unable to trust.
Some of the guys I meet are attractive,
but there will be no more wildly drifting
boyfriends
for me.
BETWEEN CLASSES
Signs, posters, flyers against the war
and in support of the never-ending
farmworkers’ struggle
for justice
along with a quest
for ethnic studies courses,
all the same hopeful
protests
as before.
LA RAZA
Todos somos primos. We are all cousins.
All Latinos are related—it’s a phrase
used by a Chicano organizer
to let me know I’m welcome
at Mexican American protests
even though I’m una cubana,
too often stereotyped
as a worm,
la gusana.
The difference
between UC Berkeley
and LACC
is poverty.
Poor people don’t care if I’m a bit different,
as long as we’re united for the same
causes.
FAMILY LIFE
Short E. is still hospitalized,
and all my other high school friends
have moved away, chasing their own
college dreams, so yes, I’m lonely, but family
helps.
My parents have their own spinning worlds.
Mom works in a Japanese American dentist’s office,
where she picks up fragments of the language,
just enough to tell patients when to spit
or rinse.
In her free time, she gardens, folds origami paper
into the shapes of
flowers and animals,
or stitches quilts, creating northern warmth
in tropical colors.
Dad teaches art, paints on canvas,
and etches intricate scenes onto copper plates
so he can print them on paper, using a press
that looks medieval, the wheel he turns
as heavy as a planet, as he pushes ink
into the faces of Don Quixote
and the idealistic knight’s loyal horse,
Rocinante.
When I visit my sister in Santa Barbara,
I discover that she still has her enormous
pet boa constrictor, and a fluffy dog,
a surfboard, a boyfriend. . . .
She works at a pie house
but never gets fat, and she lives
in a cottage by the sea, the same little house
where Aldous Huxley wrote Island, a novel
about a shipwrecked journalist
in a tropical paradise where people
try to prevent the sort of tyranny
found in Brave New World
and 1984.
I envy my big sister.
Her life is active and friend-filled,
while mine is quiet, studious, book-wrapped,
just as it was when we were little, before
I began to explore
the meanings
of the phrases
“wide air”
and
“wild.”
EARTHQUAKE!
The jolt is powerful,
a sideways shock followed by rolling
movements,
plates of rock
shifting
beneath the bed
where I lie
sleepless
praying
even though until now
I wasn’t sure whether I would ever
really believe
in God.
PERPLEXITY
I understand the Richter scale
for measuring earthquakes,
and the classification of clouds
when discussing storm trends,
and I even know a bit
about predictions
of environmental disaster,
because I’ve read
The Population Bomb,
which shows
the overwhelming
mathematics
of future hunger. . . .
But I still don’t understand
what to do with my life
until Introduction to Botany
changes
everything.