pulled above the knee. Here the patient sleeping,
his head at rest in his hand. Beatific, he looks as if
he’ll wake from a dream. On the floor
beside the bed, a dead Moor—hands crossed at the groin,
the swapped limb white and rotting, fused in place.
And in the corner, a question: poised as if to speak
the syntax of sloughing, a snake’s curved form.
It emerges from the mouth of a boy like a tongue—slippery
and rooted in the body as knowledge. For centuries
this is how the myth repeats: the miracle—in words
or wood or paint—is a record of thought.
3
See how the story changes: in one painting
the Ethiop is merely a body, featureless in a coffin,
so black he has no face. In another, the patient—
at the top of the frame—seems to writhe in pain,
the black leg grafted to his thigh. Below him
a mirror of suffering: the blackamoor—
his body a fragment—arched across the doctor’s lap
as if dying from his wound. If not immanence,
the soul’s bright anchor, blood passed from one
to the other, what knowledge haunts each body—
what history, what phantom ache? One man always
low, in a grave or on the ground, the other
up high, closer to heaven; one man always diseased,
the other a body in service, plundered.
4
Both men are alive in Villoldo’s carving.
In twinned relief, they hold the same posture,
the same pained face, each man reaching to touch
his left leg. The black man, on the floor,
holds his stump. Above him, the doctor restrains
the patient’s arm as if to prevent him touching
the dark amendment of flesh. How not to see it—
the men bound one to the other, symbiotic—
one man rendered expendable, the other worthy
of this sacrifice? In version after version, even
when the Ethiopian isn’t there, the leg is a stand-in,
a black modifier against the white body,
a piece cut off—as in the origin of the word comma:
caesura in a story that’s still being written.
The Americans
1. Dr. Samuel Adolphus Cartwright on Dissecting the White Negro, 1851
To strip from the flesh
the specious skin; to weigh
in the brainpan
seeds of white
pepper; to find in the body
its own diminishment—
blood-deep
and definite; to measure the heft
of lack; to make of the work of faith
the work of science, evidence
the word of God: Canaan
be the servant of servants; thus
to know the truth
of this: (this derelict
corpus, a dark compendium, this
atavistic assemblage—flatter
feet, bowed legs, a shorter neck) so
deep the tincture
—see it!—
we still know white from not.
2. Blood
AFTER GEORGE FULLER’S The Quadroon, 1880
It must be the gaze of a benevolent viewer
upon her, framed as she is in the painting’s
romantic glow, her melancholic beauty
meant to show the pathos of her condition:
black blood—that she cannot transcend it.
In the foreground she is shown at rest, seated,
her basket empty and overturned beside her
as though she would cast down the drudgery
to which she was born. A gleaner, hopeless
undine—the bucolic backdrop a dim aura
around her—she looks out toward us as if
to bridge the distance between. Mezzo,
intermediate, how different she’s rendered
from the dark kin working the fields behind her.
If not for the ray of light appearing as if from beyond
the canvas, we might miss them—three figures
in the near distance, small as afterthought.
3. Help, 1968
AFTER A PHOTOGRAPH FROM The Americans BY ROBERT FRANK
When I see Frank’s photograph
of a white infant in the dark arms
of a woman who must be the maid,
I think of my mother and the year
we spent alone—my father at sea.
The woman stands in profile, back
against a wall, holding her charge,
their faces side by side—the look
on the child’s face strangely prescient,
a tiny furrow in the space
between her brows. Neither of them
looks toward the camera; nor
do they look at each other. That year,
when my mother took me for walks,
she was mistaken again and again
for my maid. Years later she told me
she’d say I was her daughter, and each time
strangers would stare in disbelief, then
empty the change from their pockets. Now
I think of the betrayals of flesh, how
she must have tried to make of her face
an inscrutable mask and hold it there
as they made their small offerings—
pressing coins into my hands. How
like the woman in the photograph
she must have seemed, carrying me
each day—white in her arms—as if
she were a prop: a black backdrop,
the dark foil in this American story.
Taxonomy
AFTER A SERIES OF casta PAINTINGS BY JUAN RODRíGUEZ JUáREZ, C. 1715
1. De Español y de India Produce Mestiso
The canvas is a leaden sky
behind them, heavy
with words, gold letters inscribing
an equation of blood—
this plus this equals this—as if
a contract with nature, or
a museum label,
ethnographic, precise. See
how the father’s hand, beneath
its crown of lace,
curls around his daughter’s head;
she’s nearly fair
as he is—calidad. See it
in the brooch at her collar,
the lace framing her face.
An infant, she is borne
over the servant’s left shoulder,
bound to him
by a sling, the plain blue cloth
knotted at his throat.
If the father, his hand
on her skull, divines—
as the physiognomist does—
the mysteries
of her character, discursive,
legible on her light flesh,
in the soft curl of her hair,
we cannot know it: so gentle
the eye he turns toward her.
The mother, glancing
sideways toward him—
the scarf on her head
white as his face,
his powdered wig—gestures
with one hand a shape
like the letter C. See,
she seems to say,
what we have made.
The servant, still a child, cranes
his neck, turns his face
up toward all of them. He is dark
as history, origin of the word
native: the weight of blood,
a pale mistress on his back,
heavier every year.
2. De Español y Negra Produce Mulato
Still, the centuries have not dulled
the sullenness of the child’s expression.
If there is light inside h
im, it does not shine
through the paint that holds his face
in profile—his domed forehead, eyes
nearly closed beneath a heavy brow.
Though inside, the boy’s father stands
in his cloak and hat. It’s as if he’s just come in,
or that he’s leaving. We see him
transient, rolling a cigarette, myopic—
his eyelids drawn against the child
passing before him. At the stove,
the boy’s mother contorts, watchful,
her neck twisting on its spine, red beads
yoked at her throat like a necklace of blood,
her face so black she nearly disappears
into the canvas, the dark wall upon which
we see the words that name them.
What should we make of any of this?
Remove the words above their heads,
put something else in place of the child—
a table, perhaps, upon which the man might set
his hat, or a dog upon which to bestow
the blessing of his touch—and the story
changes. The boy is a palimpsest of paint—
layers of color, history rendering him
that precise shade of in-between.
Before this he was nothing: blank
canvas—before image or word, before
a last brush stroke fixed him in his place.
3. De Español y Mestiza Produce Castiza
How not to see
in this gesture
the mind
of the colony?
In the mother’s arms,
the child, hinged
at her womb—
dark cradle
of mixed blood
(call it Mexico)—
turns toward the father,
reaching to him
as if back to Spain,
to the promise of blood
alchemy—three easy steps
to purity:
from a Spaniard and an Indian,
a mestizo;
from a mestizo and a Spaniard,
a castizo;
from a castizo and a Spaniard,
a Spaniard.
We see her here—
one generation away—
nearly slipping
her mother’s careful grip.
4. The Book of Castas
Call it the catalog
of mixed bloods, or
the book of naught:
not Spaniard, not white, but
mulatto-returning-backwards (or
hold-yourself-in-midair) and
the morisca, the lobo, the chino,
sambo, albino, and
the no-te-entiendo—the
I don’t understand you.
Guidebook to the colony,
record of each crossed birth,
it is the typology of taint,
of stain: blemish: sullying spot:
that which can be purified,
that which cannot—Canaan’s
black fate. How like a dirty joke
it seems: What do you call
that space between
the dark geographies of sex?
Call it the taint—as in
T’aint one and t’aint the other—
illicit and yet naming still
what is between. Between
her parents, the child,
mulatto-returning-backwards,
cannot slip their hold,
the triptych their bodies make
in paint, in blood: her name
written down in the Book
of Castas—all her kind
in thrall to a word.
Thrall
JUAN DE PAREJA, 1670
He was not my father
though he might have been
I came to him
the mulatto son
of a slave woman
just that
as if it took only my mother
to make me
a mulatto
meaning
any white man
could be my father
❖
In his shop bound
to the muller
I ground his colors
my hands dusted black
with fired bone stained
blue and flecked
with glass my nails
edged vermilion as if
my fingertips bled
In this way just as
I’d turned the pages
of his books
I meant to touch
everything he did
❖
With Velázquez in Rome
a divination
At market I lingered to touch
the bright hulls of lemons
closed my eyes until
the scent was oil
and thinner yellow ocher
in my head
And once
the sudden taste of iron
a glimpse of red
like a wound opening
the robes of the pope
at portrait
that bright shade of blood
before it darkens
purpling nearly to black
❖
Because he said
painting was not
labor was
the province of free men
I could only
watch Such beauty
in the work of his hands
his quick strokes
a divine language I learned
over his shoulder
my own hands
tracing the air
in his wake Forbidden
to answer in paint
I kept my canvases secret
hidden until
Velázquez decreed
unto me
myself Free
my master still
❖
How intently at times
could he fix his keen eye
upon me
though only once
did he fix me in paint
my color a study
my eyes wide
as I faced him
a lace collar at my shoulders
as though I’d been born
noble
the yoke of my birth
gone from my neck
In his hand a long brush
to keep him far
from the canvas
far from it as I was
the distance between us
doubled that
he could observe me
twice stand closer
to what he made
For years I looked to it
as one looks into a mirror
❖
And so
in The Calling of Saint Matthew
I painted my own
likeness a freeman
in the House of Customs
waiting to pay
my duty In my hand
an answer a slip of paper
my signature on it
Juan de Pareja 1661
Velázquez one year gone
Behind me
upright on a shelf
a forged platter luminous
as an aureole
just beyond my head
my face turned
to look out from the scene
a self portrait
To make it
I looked at how
my master saw me then
I narrowed my eyes
❖
Now
at the bright edge
of sleep mother
She comes back to me
as sound
her voice
in the echo of birdcall
a single syllable
again
and again my name
Juan Juan Ju
an
or a bit of song that
waking
I cannot grasp
Calling
MEXICO, 1969
Why not make a fiction
of the mind’s fictions? I want to say
it begins like this: the trip
a pilgrimage, my mother
kneeling at the altar of the Black Virgin,
enthralled—light streaming in
a window, the sun
at her back, holy water
in a bowl she must have touched.
What’s left is palimpsest—one memory
bleeding into another, overwriting it.
How else to explain
what remains? The sound
of water in a basin I know is white,
the sun behind her, light streaming in,
her face—
as if she were already dead—blurred
as it will become.
I want to imagine her before
the altar, rising to meet us, my father
lifting me
toward her outstretched arms.
What else to make
of the mind’s slick confabulations?
What comes back
is the sun’s dazzle on a pool’s surface,
light filtered through water
closing over my head, my mother—her body
between me and the high sun, a corona of light
around her face. Why not call it
a vision? What I know is this:
I was drowning and saw a dark Madonna;
someone pulled me through
the water’s bright ceiling
and I rose, initiate,
from one life into another.
Bird in the House