The trouble was not about finding acceptance.
Acceptance was available in the depths of the mind
And among like people. The trouble was the look into the canyon
Which had come a long time earlier
And spent many years being forgotten.
The fine garments and rows of strong shoes,
The pantry stocked with good grains and butter —
Everything could be earned by producing right answers.
Answers were important, the canyon said,
But the answers were not the solution.
Once, I tried to banish them all from my writing.
This was America, after all, where everyone’ s at liberty
To remake her person, her place, or her poetry,
And I lived in a town a long way from everything —
Where discussions of “diversity”
Centered mainly on sexuality.
My policy, born of exhaustion with talk about race
And the quintessentially American wish for antecedents,
Eliminated most of my family, starting with the grandparents,
So by sixteen we move in packs
learn to strut and slide
in deliberate lowdown rhythm
talk in a syn/co/pa/ted beat
because we want so bad
to be cool, never to be mistaken
for white, even when we leave
these rowdier L. A. streets —
remember how we paint our eyes
like gangsters
flash our legs in nylons
sassy black high heels
or two inch zippered boots
stack them by the door at night
next to Daddy’ s muddy gardening shoes.
Through darkness they came,
covered in ash, scarred by depths
and distance, they bore salt and fire, breath steaming
at edges of decks, hands clutching
railings, their bodies dizzied by the lurching vessel,
trunks pulled by hand, Where are you from? I unwrapped
my legacy from cloth, the marble Buddha
from my grandfather, ancient
as the sea-stained covers of his sutras, the briny odor
The fields flame with it, endless, blue
as cobra poison. It has entered our blood
and pulses up our veins
like night. There is no other color.
The planter’ s whip
splits open the flesh of our faces,
a blue liquid light trickles
through the fingers. Blue dyes the lungs
when we breathe. Only the obstinate eyes
Ignoring the local reliquiae —
neoclassical arches in ruin,
courtyards, their fountains toppled,
prados flourishing in prickle-weed, esplanades
no longer level enough to collect rainwater,
much less respect for the Imperio de España
tarnished by an islander’ s mock-British accent —
two fisherman returned at sundown.
Antiquaries themselves, these fishermen
schooled in the currents, the tide,
the tunneled limestone of the coral reefs,
preferred the graceful curves of the £.
The fallen Latte is the sign. It is from within the row of Latte that
we feel our strength. It is the severed capstone that gives us Their
message, "Ti monhayon I che'cho." We will not rest until the
Latte is whole.
— Cecilia C. T. Perez from "Signs of Being: A Chamoru
Spiritual Journey" (1997)
~
i haligi
a pillar
i tasa
a capstone
i tataotao
a body
~
his hands —
husk coconut —
cooks and
feeds [us] —
stories — this
raised house —
at quarry
outline forms
If a tree falls in a forest,
does it make a sound?
If a rifle fires a shot in the woods,
whose body first hits the ground?
If a group of angry hunters
surrounds, curses at, and accosts you
for wandering onto their land
If you apologize for being lost,
inform you saw no posted signs, swallow
their chinks this and gooks taking over that;
are walking away over mud and fallen leaves when a loud
crack far behind you kicks up black earth
Hope
The political contributions of whatever he creates are coincidental
and, in any event, irrelevant. The musician may not be relying on
mathematical acoustics in his calculations. He may be performing
for auditoriums; thus, his physical realities change as he travels. Music
seems inevitable. Every question entails some notion of what is being asked.
The motley nature is not alien. Certain sounds guide the vulgar mind
to notions not anticipated by those creating the sounds. A bartender
