Immigrants in Our Own Land & Selected Early Poems by Jimmy Santiago Baca

Author:Jimmy Santiago Baca [Baca, Jimmy Santiago]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2331-7
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2013-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

I Ask Myself, Should I Cry? Or Laugh?

I am like a glossy green leaf, sticking out

in midnight moon, waxy drum-skin the moon pounds with wind….

Guilt itches my heart, as though a grasshopper,

chewing half, or a thick lazy caterpillar spinning silk nets,

hanging blue raindrops, baskets that carry invisible rocks,

that crack their stomachs, making wings of my eyelids.

Should I cry or laugh, thinking of you,

you?

An old woman on bent legs and burning green eyes,

what did you do on Saturday afternoons, in your small trailer?

Like a whitening sandbar, as the days took more and more

of your dark healthy grains, pressing against the current

of age, your tongue printed in sand washed over silently

by water, malevolent water, a ripple washing your

thunder-jeweled life, under, under, sweet pearl of mine.

Mother of my mother, after being moved away,

a small child clutching pennies you gave me from a purse

hidden and hooked with a pin, next to your breasts….

You showed me a picture of my mother, said

she was a good woman, and pictures of my uncles, killed

in wars, their airplanes hut-hut-hut-hutting out,

hurtling down the blue gray sky in a crying fire.

I saw their pictures, all of them,

but when you showed the one of my mother, a white flare of love

exploded in me, cascading down my naked soul,

as though a waterfall, in which I bathed.

But you? Your trailer in a weedy lot,

crocheting tableclothes rich as butterfly wings, pillowcases

designed as sun spreading on dawn-colored silk,

thick-fingered frontiering heart in your wild loneliness,

bad-mouthing my father’s drunkenness softly,

in your little trailer, with a toaster, cloth

potholder, tiny-windowed low-ceilinged box, a jewel case

to you, where your memories sang from each night….

I wanted to stay with you forever! To find

the truth, to ask and ask and ask, an orphan boy! Swirling

with stallion storms in me!

I could not ride, set free into your wood-wind

throat, that sang me calm in your great box-canyon, dripping

water, and silence that shone in our eyes;

our love, our confusion, our fears, tumbled

like massive boulders down our red-veined hearts,

thousand and thousand of years old,

covering the shards and death skulls of your life,

holding the ocean of my future, my prehistoric hunger

for gods and demons unleashed, satiated by you, weaver woman.

You died while I was in prison,

This poem is for you, my one.

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