Soaring Earth Read online

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Earthbound

  Wide Air

  Wild Air

  Drifting

  Green Earth

  Enchanted Earth

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  for dreamers whose dreams seem impossible

  ¡Volar sin alas donde todo es cielo!

  Anota este jocundo

  pensamiento: Parar, parar el mundo

  entre las puntas de los pies,

  y luego darle cuerda del revés

  para verlo girar en el vacío . . .

  To fly without wings where all is sky!

  Note this cheerful

  thought: To stop, to stop the world

  between the tips of your feet,

  and then spin it in reverse

  to watch it twirl through space . . .

  —Antonio Machado, “Poema 53”

  EARTHBOUND

  Summer visits to the enchanted air of Trinidad de Cuba are

  illegal now, transforming my mother’s hometown into

  a mystery of impossibility, no longer reachable

  in real life.

  My roaming dreams can only ramble through the library,

  dancing on flat, shiny pages, across all the countries of

  National Geographic magazine, choosing villages

  with brilliant sunlight, bright parrots, green jungles,

  tropical heat.

  I’ve endured enough of being in between—too young for

  solitary trips, but more than old enough for motionless

  teenage

  isolation.

  Yes, I feel ready to grow up and seize the first job that promises

  a nomadic life . . .

  but before I can finish college and become independent,

  I have to start

  high school.

  Wide Air

  1966–1968

  TRAVEL DREAMS

  Destinations sweep over me

  from colors in dazzling photos,

  a warm, inviting quality seen only in the light

  of tropical air.

  I’ll save piles of babysitting money

  and make my escape from Los Angeles.

  No more smog, just a rain forest, peaceful

  beneath sky so intense that each breath

  must be enchanted like Cuba’s aire,

  floating birdlike and wild above jungles

  and farms, green between two

  shades of blue,

  sea and heaven,

  half wave-washed memory,

  half soaring daydream.

  Where should I travel?

  Peru, Borneo, India?

  The brightness of photos is dimmed

  only by my age, too young for solitary

  journeys, too old for imaginary

  horse-friends.

  REALITY

  India sounds perfect,

  but my travel dreams

  have to wait.

  High school starts right after

  my fourteenth birthday, the halls

  a

  whirlwind

  of

  strangers . . .

  but I’m pretty good at starting over

  because I have plenty of practice saying goodbye

  to the past, so after school, I sit on a rigid wall

  wishing for the future, waiting to be older,

  my current age a hybrid

  half riddle,

  half puzzle.

  THE GEOGRAPHY OF A WALL

  The wall is a barrier that separates

  John Marshall High School from the street,

  a dry imitation of my seawall memory,

  that coral stone Malecón in Havana.

  This wall is designed to separate waves of

  raucous students

  from dangerous riptides

  of traffic.

  Or is it just meant to keep rich kids and regular ones

  apart? The wealthy have cars that zoom away

  while the rest of us wait for a bus or a parent,

  the wall dividing cascades of us into tide pools,

  settled groups of relaxed kids who met in kindergarten,

  and seaweed-like strays, those of us who transferred

  from out of the district, and arrived knowing

  no one.

  Cool kids.

  Loners.

  Stoners.

  Will I ever wash ashore in a swirling

  puddle

  of friendship?

  With my wide Cuban hips

  and frizzy black hair,

  I’ll never belong

  with blond surfers

  or elegant “socials,”

  so I just have to hope

  that sooner or later,

  other drifting

  bookworms

  will find me.

  ARMY M.

  It doesn’t take too many weeks on the wall

  for one of the short-haired, military ROTC boys

  to start flirting with me.

  I’m Cuban American.

  He’s Mexican American.

  Close enough.

  But his army hair worries me.

  How long will it be until he ends up in Vietnam,

  killing

  dying

  or both?

  I belong to a family of pacifists, always marching

  to protest, because the Cold War has already sliced

  our familia in half, so just imagine how much worse

  it must be in southeast Asia, where US bombs

  and chemical napalm flames

  burn villagers alive

  on the news

  every night.

  DATING

  No war can last forever, so sooner or later

  M.’s army world and my peace dove wishes

  will surely meet in the middle.

  Won’t they?

  Suddenly my plan to spend weekends babysitting

  in order to save money for tropical expeditions

  no longer seems as urgent as Friday nights

  cruising around in a low-rider car,

  my fourteen-year-old freshman mind

  so imperfectly matched

  with an almost-eighteen senior,

  mi novio,

  my boyfriend.

  His older pals/carnales in the backseat

  have already dropped out of school,

  joined the army, fought in Vietnam,

  and returned with tattoos

  and all sorts of other

  scars.

  A WHIRLWIND OF MONTHS

  Time

  t

  w

  i

  s

  t

  s

  and

  tangles,

  spinning me

  far away

  from unrealistic

  travel dreams.

  Classwork.

  Homework.

  Research papers.

  Friday nights cruising.

  Saturday mornings at the Arroyo Seco Library

  followed by babysitting jobs, my money stashed

  and slowly growing toward some remote corner

  of Bengal or Kashmir.

  BOOKWORM

  I can’t stop, even though M.’s friends

  make fun of me for studying hard

  and reading travel tales in my spare time,

  the places they’ve seen on their way to the war

  so mysterious and adventurous to me,

  a too-young girl who understands nothing

  about battles.

  Peace freak.

  Flower child.

  Hippie.

  Army M.’s friends say it’s e
asy to protest

  against violence, when you’re not the one

  who will get arrested if you don’t register

  for the draft.

  They’re right—in wartime, life

  is so much shorter for boys, since girls

  aren’t forced—or even allowed—to fight.

  Bookworm. It’s the creature name I’ve been called

  all my life, but in Cuba

  gusano/worm means maggot,

  an insult used by revolutionaries for chasing away

  anyone who wants to join relatives

  exiled in the US.

  Abuelita, my grandma,

  is probably being mocked as a gusana right now

  along with all the others who dream of fleeing

  their wave-cradled isle and reaching

  this hard, rocky shore.

  Bookworm.

  There are so many ways of looking

  at the winged future of a crawling caterpillar.

  But I’m finally identified and claimed

  by an eager group of studious readers

  who are mostly mixed-together half this,

  half that, tolerant of everyone else,

  hyphenated Americans, all our hyphens

  equally

  winged.

  Japan, Korea, China, Poland, Holland,

  Mexico, Cuba, the homelands

  of our immigrant parents

  don’t really matter here

  on the wall, where science

  and poetry

  are the passions

  that unite us.

  Some of my new friends have already

  chosen career goals that require degrees

  from the best Ivy League colleges,

  so they load their after-school schedules

  with extracurricular activities:

  music, debate, theater, sports.

  But the only club I would ever dare to hope for

  is one made of girls who don’t belong anywhere,

  so a state university will have to be good enough,

  with fancy-school admission reserved for others

  who are courageous enough

  to perform

  or compete.

  DAYDREAMER

  After those childhood summers in Cuba,

  when my two-winged freedom to travel

  was lost on both sides of the ocean,

  I learned to imagine wholeness

  by settling

  into the weight

  of motionless

  earth.

  But the world isn’t heavy, not really,

  it flies

  through the galaxy

  orbiting around the sun, spinning

  on an invisible axis and soaring far away

  all at the same time, while floating people pretend

  that we feel safely

  rooted.

  So that’s what I do, live two lives

  awake and asleep, cruising or reading,

  studying

  dreaming . . .

  I spend time with Army M.

  and then my bookworm friends.

  Night

  and day.

  I know how to balance

  two spinning planets,

  one in each hand,

  like a juggler.

  Don’t I?

  SPANISH CLASS

  This quieter Mexican rhythm is natural

  in a city where everyone says mira—look

  instead of Cuba’s oye—listen.

  Perhaps this sense of language loss

  is because our familia was so huge on the island

  where relatives chattered, laughed, and shouted

  at the same time, no one ever pausing

  long enough to listen,

  so that ¡oye!

  was the only way

  to get anyone’s

  ¡atención!

  Now all those noisy, friendly cousins

  might as well be living in another universe.

  No travel, no summer visits, as if childhood

  has been transformed into a fictional character’s

  imaginary wish.

  When a Chinese American bookworm friend

  who plans to be a Spanish teacher someday

  accuses me of rolling my rr

  in an exaggerated way

  that’s too long and trilling

  like a cricket, I remember

  how I was taught

  by my cubana mother

  who made me recite

  over and over:

  rr con rr guitarra

  rr con rr barril

  rápido corren

  los carros

  llevando las cañas

  al ferrocarril.

  Rr with rr guitar

  rr with rr barrel

  rapidly run the cars

  carrying sugarcane

  to the railroad.

  Swiftly, with the rat-a-tat rhythm

  of urgent island voices, that’s the way

  Mami said rr should always

  race.

  But I’ve been away from Cuba for so long

  that my faith in what I know begins to fade

  and I end up silently resentful, instead of

  defending my own real

  memories.

  Will I forget Spanish

  if I fail to travel

  and practice?

  Chichen Itzá en México,

  Machu Picchu en el Perú.

  Tikal en Guatemala.

  Which ancient ruins

  of magnificent cities

  should I plan to visit

  first?

  MORE WHIRLWINDS

  Wherever my mind wanders, history follows,

  spinning and twirling—Vietnam War, Cold War,

  military offense, self-defense,

  Communist or anticommunist

  conspiracy.

  All these phrases I hear on the news every day

  make me wonder why the US keeps trying to bully

  this entire world, bombing countries

  so far away.

  My bookworm friends and I can’t stop

  those fierce overseas battles, so instead we protest

  our school’s dress code: let the boys grow long hair

  and allow girls to wear jeans to class

  instead of skirts.

  We lose, of course, but at least we tried,

  and the effort makes changing the spinning world’s

  direction

  seem possible.

  In the meantime, guys drop out of school

  just so they can grow ponytails.

  All the long-haired boys run away

  to San Francisco.

  Los Angeles begins to feel like a land

  of abandoned girls.

  It takes me a while to figure out

  that the boys with shaggy heads

  are imitating rock stars—the musicians

  who mimic bearded revolutionaries

  like my uncles and cousins

  on the island.

  For such a small place,

  Cuba seems to have a way

  of gripping the whole world’s

  atención.

  TIME TRAVEL

  At night, my mind spins

  through flying dreams

  as I rise and soar

  superhero-style

  arms reaching

  forward

  seeking

  peace.

  In dreams, I reject reality

  and return to the blue-green-blue

  isle of ocean-surrounded childhood,

  a sliver of memory

  treasured.

  My only limitation is time.

  Sooner or later, I’ll have to wake up

  and return to my motionless teenage self.

  When I was younger, I imagined an invisible twin

  left behind on the island, and now I wonder, was she

  a dream, or
is this sleeping self the real me?

  IDENTITY

  Even though I can’t feel

  like a real cubanita anymore,

  I still fill my room with colors from the tropics,

  a red piñata and a female canary, caged and songless

  just like me.

  In English class, I write a short story about Abuelita,

  who was bold enough to be the first divorced woman

  in Trinidad de Cuba, our town on the belly

  of the long-lost, crocodile-shaped island.

  My grandfather had epilepsy at a time when morphine

  was the only cure. He tried Cantonese herbs,

  Congolese Santería, and indigenous curanderismo,

  but he ended up growing violent, and eventually

  he died of an overdose.

  The priest blamed divorce.

  No wonder Mom still resents the Catholic Church.

  She limits her faith to reading Quaker newsletters

  that help weave the peace movement

  deeply and firmly

  inside my mind.

  Dad says he’s agnostic and also Jewish,

  but he listens to a Hindu guru on the radio,

  and when we go for a Sunday drive, he sits

  beside a mountain stream and explains

  that he’s trying to communicate with nature

  as he brushes swirls of watercolor

  across a sheet of blank paper

  that turns out to be

  a magical sort of mirror

  that can show peaceful trees

  exactly the way they are

  while leaving out man-made

  roads and fences, returning

  a patch of wounded forest

  to its natural

  wholeness.

  Someday, maybe my poetry and stories

  will learn how to alter language, creating

  a timescape where past and future

  can meet.

  NOT LIKE ROMEO AND JULIET

  When Army M. turns eighteen

  I help his huge family throw a lively party

  even though his tattooed buddies

  make fun of me for wearing bell-bottom

  hippie pants

  instead of a shimmery

  ruffled dress.

  Army M. and I don’t really break up.

  He just leaves, and when he reaches

  basic training, he sends me a photo

  of his locker, with my school picture

  taped up inside, smiling and wearing

  sunflower yellow, a color that makes me look

  like a stranger, because lately all I ever crave

  is blue-green tie-dyed cloth, like Joan Baez,

  the beautiful Mexican American Quaker,