Floaters
POEMS
Martín Espada
W.W. NORTON & COMPANY
Independent Publishers Since 1923
Dedicated to Lauren Marie Espada
Contents
Acknowledgments
I. Jumping Off the Mystic Tobin Bridge
Jumping Off the Mystic Tobin Bridge
Floaters
Ode to the Soccer Ball Sailing Over a Barbed-Wire Fence
Not for Him the Fiery Lake of the False Prophet
Boxer Wears America 1st Shorts in Bout With Mexican, Finishes Second
Mazen Sleeps With His Foot on the Floor
I Now Pronounce You Dead
II. Asking Questions of the Moon
The Story of How We Came to América
Why I Wait for the Soggy Tarantula of Spinach
The Stoplight at the Corner Where Somebody Had to Die
Death Rides the Elevator in Brooklyn
The Cannon on the Hood of My Father’s Car
Asking Questions of the Moon
Standing on the Bridge at Dolceacqua
III. Love Song of the Kraken
Aubade With Concussion
I Would Steal a Car for You
That We Will Sing
Love Song of the Kraken
Love Song of the Galápagos Tortoise
Love is a Luminous Insect at the Window
Insulting the Prince
The Assassination of the Landlord’s Purple Vintage 1976 Monte Carlo
IV. Morir Soñando
Remake of Me the Sickle for Thy Grain
Be There When They Swarm Me
The Bard Shakes the Snow From the Trees
Flan
Morir Soñando
The Five Horses of Doctor Ramón Emeterio Betances
Letter to My Father
Note on the Cover Photograph
Notes on the Poems
I.
Jumping Off the Mystic Tobin Bridge
Jumping Off the Mystic Tobin Bridge
I close my eyes and see him windmilling his arms as he plummets from
the Mystic Tobin Bridge, to prove me wrong, to show me he was good,
to atone for sins like seeds in the lopsided apple of his heart, but mostly
to escape from me in the back of his cab, a Puerto Rican lawyer in a suit and tie.
I hated the 111 bus, sweltering in my suit and tie with the crowd in the aisle,
waiting to hit a bump on the Mystic Tobin Bridge so my head would finally
burst through the ceiling like a giraffe on a circus train. I hated the 111 bus
after eviction day in Chelsea District Court, translating the landlords and judges
into Spanish so the tenants knew they had to stuff their clothing into garbage
bags and steal away again, away from the 40-watt squint that followed them
everywhere, that followed me because I stood beside them in court. I would
daydream in the humidity of the bus, a basketball hero, flipping the balled-up
pages of the law into the wastebasket at the office as the legal aid lawyers
chanted my name. I hated the 111 bus. I had to take a taxicab that day.
What the hell you doing here? said the driver of the cab to me in my suit
and tie. You gotta be careful in this neighborhood. There’s a lotta Josés
around here. The driver’s great-grandfather staggered off a boat so his
great-grandson could one day drive me across the Mystic Tobin Bridge,
but there was no room in the taxi for chalk and a blackboard. He could
hear the sawing of my breath as I leaned into his ear, past the bulletproof
barricade somehow missing, and said: I’m a José. I could see the 40-watt
squint in his rearview mirror. I’m Puerto Rican, I said. It was exactly
5 PM, and we were stuck in traffic in a taxi on the Mystic Tobin Bridge.
The driver stammered his own West Side Story without the ballet,
how a Puerto Rican gang stole his cousin’s wallet years ago. You think
I’m gonna rob you? I said, in my suit and tie, close enough now to tickle
his ear with the mouth of a revolver. I could hear the sawing of his breath.
He still wanted to know what I was doing there. I’m a lawyer. I go to court
with all the Josés, I said. Stalled traffic steamed around us, the breath
of cattle in the winter air. Where you going for the holidays? the driver said.
I thought about Christmas Eve in court, eviction orders flying from the judge’s
bench when tenants without legal aid lawyers, or children old enough to translate
the English of the summons, did not answer to their names. Every year, the legal
aid lawyers told the joke about The Christmas Defense: Your Honor, it’s Christmas!
I said to the driver: I will be spending Christmas right here with my fellow Josés.
The driver shouted: What do you want me to do? Get out of this cab and jump off
the bridge? We both knew what he meant. We both knew about Chuck Stuart,
the last man to jump off the Mystic Tobin Bridge. Everybody knew how Chuck
drove his wife to Mission Hill after birthing classes, the flash and pop in the dark
when he shot her in the head and himself in the belly. Everybody knew how
he conjured a Black carjacker on the crackling call to 911 the way the Mercury
Theater on the Air conjured Martians in New Jersey on the radio half a century
before. Everybody knew how a hundred cops pounded on door after door
in the projects of Mission Hill, locking a Black man in a cage for the world to see
like the last of his tribe on exhibit at the World’s Fair. Everybody knew how
Chuck would have escaped, cashing the insurance check to drive away with
a new Nissan, but for his brother’s confession, the accomplice throwing
the Gucci bag with makeup, the wedding rings and the gun off the Dizzy Bridge
in Revere. Everybody knew how Chuck parked his new car on the lower deck,
left a note and launched himself deep into the black water, how the cops
hauled his body from the river by lunchtime, when I walked into the office
to tell the secretary: Chuck Stuart just jumped off the Mystic Tobin Bridge.
I said nothing to the driver. I almost nodded yes in the rearview mirror. I confess,
for a flash, I wanted him to jump. The driver, the cops, the landlords, the judges
all wanted us to jump off the Mystic Tobin Bridge, all wanted us to sprout gills
like movie monsters so we could paddle underwater back to the islands, down
into the weeds and mud at the bottom, past the fish-plucked rib cages of the dead,
the rusty revolvers of a thousand crimes unsolved, the wedding rings of marriages
gone bad, till we washed up onshore in a tangle of seaweed, gasping for air.
Last night, still more landed here, clothing stuffed in garbage bags, to flee the god
of hurricanes flinging their houses into the sky or the god of hunger slipping
his knife between the ribs, not a dark tide like the tide of the Mystic River, but
builders of bridges. You can walk across the bridges they build. Or you can jump.
Floaters
Ok, I’m gonna go ahead and ask . . . have ya’ll ever seen floaters this clean. I’m not trying to be an a$$ but I HAVE NEVER SEEN FLOATERS LIKE THIS, could this be another edited photo. We’ve all seen the dems and liberal parties do some pretty sick things. —ANONYMOUS POST, “I’M 10-15” BORDER PATROL FACEBOOK GROUP
Like a beer bottle thr
own into the river by a boy too drunk to cry,
like the shard of a Styrofoam cup drained of coffee brown as the river,
like the plank of a fishing boat broken in half by the river, the dead float.
And the dead have a name: floaters, say the men of the Border Patrol,
keeping watch all night by the river, hearts pumping coffee as they say
the word floaters, soft as a bubble, hard as a shoe as it nudges the body,
to see if it breathes, to see if it moans, to see if it sits up and speaks.
And the dead have names, a feast day parade of names, names that
dress all in red, names that twirl skirts, names that blow whistles,
names that shake rattles, names that sing in praise of the saints:
See how they rise off the tongue, the calling of bird to bird somewhere
in the trees above our heads, trilling in the dark heart of the leaves.
Say what we know of them now they are dead: Óscar slapped dough
for pizza with oven-blistered fingers. Daughter Valeria sang, banging
a toy guitar. He slipped free of the apron he wore in the blast of the oven,
sold the motorcycle he would kick till it sputtered to life, counted off
pesos for the journey across the river, and the last of his twenty-five
years, and the last of her twenty-three months. There is another name
that beats its wings in the heart of the trees: Say Tania Vanessa Ávalos,
Óscar’s wife and Valeria’s mother, the witness stumbling along the river.
Now their names rise off her tongue: Say Óscar y Valeria. He swam
from Matamoros across to Brownsville, the girl slung around his neck,
stood her in the weeds on the Texas side of the river, swore to return
with her mother in hand, turning his back as fathers do who later say:
I turned around and she was gone. In the time it takes for a bird to hop
from branch to branch, Valeria jumped in the river after her father.
Maybe he called out her name as he swept her up from the river;
maybe the river drowned out his voice as the water swept them away.
Tania called out the names of the saints, but the saints drowsed
in the stupor of birds in the dark, their cages covered with blankets.
The men on patrol would never hear their pleas for asylum, watching
for floaters, hearts pumping coffee all night on the Texas side of the river.
No one, they say, had ever seen floaters this clean: Óscar’s black shirt
yanked up to the armpits, Valeria’s arm slung around her father’s
neck even after the light left her eyes, both face down in the weeds,
back on the Mexican side of the river. Another edited photo: See how
her head disappears in his shirt, the waterlogged diaper bunched
in her pants, the blue of the blue cans. The radio warned us about
the crisis actors we see at one school shooting after another; the man
called Óscar will breathe, sit up, speak, tug the black shirt over
his head, shower off the mud and shake hands with the photographer.
Yet, the floaters did not float down the Río Grande like Olympians
showing off the backstroke, nor did their souls float up to Dallas,
land of rumored jobs and a president shot in the head as he waved
from his motorcade. No bubbles rose from their breath in the mud,
light as the iridescent circles of soap that would fascinate a two-year-old.
And the dead still have names, names that sing in praise of the saints,
names that flower in blossoms of white, a cortege of names dressed
all in black, trailing the coffins to the cemetery. Carve their names
in headlines and gravestones they would never know in the kitchens
of this cacophonous world. Enter their names in the book of names.
Say Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez; say Angie Valeria Martínez Ávalos.
Bury them in a corner of the cemetery named for the sainted archbishop
of the poor, shot in the heart saying mass, bullets bought by the taxes
I paid when I worked as a bouncer and fractured my hand forty years
ago, and bumper stickers read: El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam.
When the last bubble of breath escapes the body, may the men
who speak of floaters, who have never seen floaters this clean,
float through the clouds to the heavens, where they paddle the air
as they wait for the saint who flips through the keys on his ring
like a drowsy janitor, till he fingers the key that turns the lock and shuts
the gate on their babble-tongued faces, and they plunge back to earth,
a shower of hailstones pelting the river, the Mexican side of the river.
Ode to the Soccer Ball Sailing Over a Barbed-Wire Fence
Tornillo . . . has become the symbol of what may be the largest U.S. mass detention of children not charged with crimes since the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans.— ROBERT MOORE, TEXAS MONTHLY
Praise Tornillo: word for screw in Spanish, word for jailer in English,
word for three thousand adolescent migrants incarcerated in camp.
Praise the three thousand soccer balls gift-wrapped at Christmas,
as if raindrops in the desert inflated and bounced through the door.
Praise the soccer games rotating with a whistle every twenty minutes,
Praise the boys and girls who walked a thousand miles, blood caked
in their toes, yelling in Spanish and a dozen Mayan tongues on the field.
Praise the first teenager, brain ablaze like chili pepper Christmas lights,
to kick a soccer ball high over the chain-link and barbed-wire fence.
Praise the first teenager to scrawl a name and number on the face
of the ball, then boot it all the way to the dirt road on the other side.
Praise the smirk of teenagers at the jailers scooping up fugitive
soccer balls, jabbering about the ingratitude of teenagers at Christmas.
Praise the soccer ball sailing over the barbed-wire fence, white
and black like the moon, yellow like the sun, blue like the world.
Praise the soccer ball flying to the moon, flying to the sun, flying to other
worlds, flying to Antigua Guatemala, where Starbucks buys coffee beans.
Praise the soccer ball bounding off the lawn at the White House,
thudding off the president’s head as he waves to absolutely no one.
Praise the piñata of the president’s head, jellybeans pouring from his ears,
enough to feed three thousand adolescents incarcerated at Tornillo.
Praise Tornillo: word in Spanish for adolescent migrant internment camp,
abandoned by jailers in the desert, liberated by a blizzard of soccer balls.
Not for Him the Fiery Lake of the False Prophet
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. . . . They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. —DONALD TRUMP, JUNE 16, 2015
They woke him up by pissing in his face. He opened his mouth
to scream in Spanish, so his mouth became a urinal at the ballpark.
Scott and Steve: the Leader brothers, celebrating a night at Fenway,
where the Sox beat the Indians and a rookie named Rodríguez spun
the seams on his changeup to hypnotize the Tribe. Later that night,
Steve urinated on the door of his cell, and Scott told the cops why
they did it: Donald Trump was right. All these illegals need to be deported.
He was a Mexican in a sleeping bag outside JFK station on a night
in August, so they called him a wetback and emptied their bladders
in his hair. In court, the lawyers spoke his name: Guillermo Rodríguez,
immigrant with papers, crop-picker in the fields, trader of bottles
and cans collected in his cart. Two strangers squashed the cartilage
in his nose like a can drained of beer. In dreams, he would remember
the shoes digging into his rib cage, the pole raked repeatedly across
his cheekbones and upraised knuckles, the high-five over his body.
Donald Trump was right, said Scott. And Trump said: The people
that are following me are very passionate. His hands fluttered
as he spoke, a demagogue’s hands, no blood under the fingernails,
no whiff of urine to scrub away. He would orchestrate the chant
of Build that Wall at rally after rally, bellowing till the blood rushed
to his face, red as a demagogue in the grip of masturbatory dreams:
a tribute to the new conquistador, the Wall raised up by Mexican hands,
Mexican hair and fingernails bristling in the brick, Mexican blood
swirling in the cement like raspberry syrup on a vanilla sundae.
On the Cinco de Mayo, he leered over a taco bowl at Trump Tower.
Not for him the fiery lake of the false prophet, reddening
his ruddy face. Not for him the devils of Puritan imagination,
shrieking in a foreign tongue and climbing in the window
like the immigrant demons he conjures for the crowd.
Not even for him ten thousand years of the Leader brothers,
streaming a fountain of piss in his face as he sputters forever.
For him, Hell is a country where the man in a hard hat
paving the road to JFK station sees Guillermo and dials 911;
Hell is a country where EMTs kneel to wrap a blanket around
the shivering shoulders of Guillermo and wipe his face clean;
Hell is a country where the nurse at the emergency room
hangs a morphine drip for Guillermo, so he can go back to sleep.
Two thousand miles away, someone leaves a trail of water bottles