Soaring Earth Read online

  could swim, but fear of criticism

  overwhelmed me, and now

  all I have

  is prose.

  So I find the library

  and read instead of writing.

  Jorge Amado, Gabriel García Márquez.

  In books, I find villages lost in time,

  towns that remind me of Trinidad, Cuba.

  When I discover that several

  of my high school friends

  have ended up all living together

  in a rat-infested apartment

  while they study at Columbia,

  I visit, and they let me move in,

  but as soon as he figures out

  that I have help, Actor L.

  shows up again, expecting shelter.

  A junkie moves in with him,

  both of them nodding off,

  sleeping

  the deep

  indifference

  of heroin.

  Actor L. shaves his beard, then his head,

  and joins some sort of militia

  wearing a stern Maoist uniform

  instead of his old Che Guevara costume.

  Dis-couraged, I realize

  that I’ll never know

  if he’s simply acting

  or really crazy,

  maybe truly

  dangerous.

  UPROOTED

  Without a college degree

  I can’t find a job anywhere

  but I finally figure out how to apply

  to the Venceremos Brigade.

  They turn me away

  simply because my mother

  is Cuban.

  Only North Americans with no relatives on the island

  are allowed to chop sugarcane

  swinging a machete.

  My reason for hitchhiking

  all the way to New York

  has vanished.

  Now, each time I step out

  of the crowded apartment,

  I have to dodge cat-size rats

  that scavenge on the dimly lit

  stairway.

  SURVIVAL

  Rent is due, but I’m penniless,

  so I rush into any job I can find,

  lasting only one hour

  as a waitress.

  When I lose my way

  in the complicated subway system,

  I’m chased by gangsters who threaten

  to kill me, but then I’m rescued

  by a young man

  who leads me

  from danger

  to safety.

  Even though he seems

  like a dark-skinned, angelic

  superhero, he’s just a student,

  the bravest

  bookworm.

  NIGHT SHIFT

  The only work I can find

  is plugging wires into a switchboard

  as a telephone operator

  in Greenwich Village,

  trapped in a chair

  until two o’clock each morning, when I ride

  the dreary subway back to a crazy apartment

  where Actor L. and his junkie friend

  sit nodding off on the couch, while the bookworms

  I knew so well in high school

  study, study,

  study. . . .

  Will I ever manage

  to return

  to college?

  Once an opportunity

  has been abandoned,

  can lost hope ever

  be rediscovered?

  USELESS

  Seated at the switchboard, I learn

  that I become numb in emergencies.

  Each time someone calls for police,

  ambulance, or fire assistance, my voice

  falls silent, my hands tremble,

  and I have to turn the urgent

  cry for help

  over to a manager.

  I’m a coward, terrified of making errors.

  It’s the same fear that smothered

  the breath

  of poetry.

  Why do I imagine

  that in order to accomplish anything,

  all my feeble, trial-and-error efforts

  need to be

  perfect?

  WISHING FOR ENCOURAGEMENT

  Encourage.

  En-courage.

  In courage.

  When Actor L. threatens me

  with a bone-handled hunting knife,

  I toss it down the garbage chute,

  but he comes back the next day

  with an array of many blades,

  all the shiny knives

  perfectly

  polished.

  DISTANCE

  During coffee breaks at work

  I’m allowed

  to make free long-distance phone calls.

  I don’t tell my mother about those sharp

  cutting edges

  that haunt my nightmares.

  Instead we talk about family,

  and she warns me to stay away

  from Pepe, my uncle who is now

  a refugee, settled in Elizabeth,

  New Jersey, the second biggest

  Little Havana

  after Miami.

  I didn’t know he was here, so close,

  just across the river from Manhattan.

  A relative.

  Someone loving.

  His laughter.

  A link

  to the past . . .

  but I’ve sacrificed my chance to belong

  anywhere near him, because he can’t risk

  being associated with a Cuban American

  foolish enough to try to volunteer

  for the island’s impossible

  ten-million-ton

  sugarcane

  harvest goal.

  Even though I didn’t get to join

  the Venceremos Brigade, I’m on record

  as someone who tried to travel to the place

  Tío Pepe

  just escaped.

  FACING REALITY

  I know the truth about Actor L. now.

  Crazed and dangerous, not just acting.

  Barefoot and wearing a sheet, he treks

  into Riverside Park late at night, performing

  some sort of imaginary ceremony.

  The line between militias and cults

  is a fine one.

  So I leave

  on a road trip,

  exploring

  quietness.

  IN THE LAND OF TRANSCENDENTALISTS

  Walden Pond, then Cape Cod,

  this peaceful stillness

  beside the wave-embraced rage

  of an ocean.

  I sleep on a sand dune

  hushed

  by the hum

  and roar

  of comforting

  nature.

  ORPHEUS

  The story of an underworld journey

  finally sends me back to that source

  of discouragement—dropping out

  of the university—but this time

  I’ll have to stay in my parents’

  home

  my old

  room

  four

  walls

  just

  enough

  space

  to study.

  I feel as if I’ve ventured too far

  from the loves of my childhood,

  nature

  and poetry.

  It’s time to go back and try to find

  courage.

  Green Earth

  1970–1971

  AFTER THE DRIFTING YEARS

  Back in Los Angeles

  where I started—

  no boyfriends

  or daydreams

  of pleasing guys

  who only crave

  complete

  control.

  I need

  to rediscover

  my original self

  before I share
real life

  with anyone

  else.

  STARTING OVER

  Living in my parents’ house

  is free, and boring jobs bring

  enough money

  for textbooks, while low

  community college fees

  make Berkeley’s high tuition

  seem like a wasted fortune.

  File clerk at a travel agency.

  Post office mail sorter.

  Floater in a department store, moving

  from department to department,

  never knowing enough about anything

  to answer a perplexed customer’s questions.

  I don’t care if these jobs are dull,

  just as long as my mind is free to travel

  back and forth to science classes, learning

  about nature’s orbiting world,

  all my wild movements

  masked

  by gravity.

  MURDERERS

  The south-central campus is so far

  from my parents’ northeast LA home

  that I have to ride two buses each way,

  one hour each, plus waiting for a transfer

  downtown, right in front of the courthouse

  where several Charles Manson girls stand

  in a circle on the sidewalk, eerily

  chanting.

  The madman they worship

  is on trial.

  Some of the girls

  will be convicted too.

  I try not to stare, but our eyes meet,

  and in that instant I know that I could have been

  just like them, if I’d kept drifting, aimlessly

  listening to Actor L. or any other dangerously

  convincing

  liar.

  NOW I ONLY LISTEN TO PROFESSORS

  Geology.

  Geography.

  Meteorology.

  Botany.

  The poetry of science

  flows over me

  like a waterfall,

  flooding my emotions

  with a sense

  of belonging

  on earth.

  Rocks.

  Continents.

  Weather.

  Plants.

  My world is complete,

  once I’ve learned

  the rhythmic names

  of human life’s

  neighbors.

  GEOLOGY FIELD TRIP

  The Grand Canyon.

  Hiking.

  Camping.

  Scrambling

  downward, through layers

  of millennia, and then back up

  to modern times,

  stopping

  at a cinder cone

  on the way home,

  one of those perfectly symmetrical

  ancient volcanoes, way out in the desert

  where silence, wind, and prayer

  all feel like old

  friends.

  TUTORING

  My new job on campus

  is guiding welfare mothers

  as they struggle to understand the difference

  between natural minerals and man-made

  concrete.

  They tell me they’ve never left the city.

  Geology is a subject they enrolled in

  just to meet a requirement, but field trips

  are too far-fetched. Who would tend

  their babies?

  So I sit in a room full of older women,

  passing around samples of granite

  as I point out the tiny, glittering,

  nearly hidden crystals

  of pink feldspar,

  black hornblende,

  smoky quartz.

  Each time my home city of Los Angeles

  erupts in riots, I’ll remember these women

  who grew up without any chance

  to learn

  how to distinguish

  between rigid gray pavement

  and the complex beauty

  of nature.

  I’ll remember that they feel

  such a deep sense

  of belonging

  nowhere.

  GEOGRAPHIC LONELINESS

  Sometimes an island-shaped emptiness

  enters my veins and floats toward my brain,

  surging like a storm tide that makes me wish

  for Cuba.

  Peace

  between my parents’ nations

  seems impossible, so this yearning

  is just as unrealistic as time travel

  across all the light-years

  of memory.

  Do I still have an invisible twin

  left behind on that lost isla, the farm girl

  who knows how it feels to breathe

  enchanted air

  and ride horses?

  METEOROLOGY

  After I complete advanced geology,

  physical geography, cultural geography,

  and the baffling mystery of chemistry,

  I study the science of weather, a field

  so full of subtle air movements

  that guessing is still acceptable

  once all the charts and graphs

  are cleverly sketched.

  Storms mean a drop in barometric pressure,

  the flow of hot and cool aerial currents

  in not-quite-predictable patterns,

  just like my future.

  If I’d known how wide and wild my first

  doomed attempt at college would be,

  I might have started right here

  in a smaller school, where none

  of the professors have Nobel Prizes,

  but oh, how they love

  to teach!

  THE CHEMISTRY OF A PEACEFUL MIND

  Tests.

  Terrifying.

  Too sensitive.

  Care too much.

  Cry too easily.

  Curl up inside, just like el moriviví,

  the sensitive Mimosa plant

  I remember from Cuba, with feathery

  green leaves that snap shut

  when touched,

  then reopen

  oh so slowly,

  unable to trust.

  Some of the guys I meet are attractive,

  but there will be no more wildly drifting

  boyfriends

  for me.

  BETWEEN CLASSES

  Signs, posters, flyers against the war

  and in support of the never-ending

  farmworkers’ struggle

  for justice

  along with a quest

  for ethnic studies courses,

  all the same hopeful

  protests

  as before.

  LA RAZA

  Todos somos primos. We are all cousins.

  All Latinos are related—it’s a phrase

  used by a Chicano organizer

  to let me know I’m welcome

  at Mexican American protests

  even though I’m una cubana,

  too often stereotyped

  as a worm,

  la gusana.

  The difference

  between UC Berkeley

  and LACC

  is poverty.

  Poor people don’t care if I’m a bit different,

  as long as we’re united for the same

  causes.

  FAMILY LIFE

  Short E. is still hospitalized,

  and all my other high school friends

  have moved away, chasing their own

  college dreams, so yes, I’m lonely, but family

  helps.

  My parents have their own spinning worlds.

  Mom works in a Japanese American dentist’s office,

  where she picks up fragments of the language,

  just enough to tell patients when to spit

  or rinse.

  In her free time, she gardens, folds origami paper

  into the shapes of
flowers and animals,

  or stitches quilts, creating northern warmth

  in tropical colors.

  Dad teaches art, paints on canvas,

  and etches intricate scenes onto copper plates

  so he can print them on paper, using a press

  that looks medieval, the wheel he turns

  as heavy as a planet, as he pushes ink

  into the faces of Don Quixote

  and the idealistic knight’s loyal horse,

  Rocinante.

  When I visit my sister in Santa Barbara,

  I discover that she still has her enormous

  pet boa constrictor, and a fluffy dog,

  a surfboard, a boyfriend. . . .

  She works at a pie house

  but never gets fat, and she lives

  in a cottage by the sea, the same little house

  where Aldous Huxley wrote Island, a novel

  about a shipwrecked journalist

  in a tropical paradise where people

  try to prevent the sort of tyranny

  found in Brave New World

  and 1984.

  I envy my big sister.

  Her life is active and friend-filled,

  while mine is quiet, studious, book-wrapped,

  just as it was when we were little, before

  I began to explore

  the meanings

  of the phrases

  “wide air”

  and

  “wild.”

  EARTHQUAKE!

  The jolt is powerful,

  a sideways shock followed by rolling

  movements,

  plates of rock

  shifting

  beneath the bed

  where I lie

  sleepless

  praying

  even though until now

  I wasn’t sure whether I would ever

  really believe

  in God.

  PERPLEXITY

  I understand the Richter scale

  for measuring earthquakes,

  and the classification of clouds

  when discussing storm trends,

  and I even know a bit

  about predictions

  of environmental disaster,

  because I’ve read

  The Population Bomb,

  which shows

  the overwhelming

  mathematics

  of future hunger. . . .

  But I still don’t understand

  what to do with my life

  until Introduction to Botany

  changes

  everything.