Martín Espada’s Floaters has won a National Book Award. What follows are poems from the book — along with an intro and a few echoes — originally posted here last spring.
Snark is a problem for the party of hope. Politics comes down to recruitment and pricks who revel in the comeuppance of strangers are born to lose. Blue meanies, though, are easier to blow off than “goodies”—Emerson’s term for the self-congratulatingly high-minded. Mt. Self-Regard may always seem like a worthy hill to die on. (Not that Ms. Amanda Gorman’s yellow coat wasn’t worth a trip.) Yet people’s poets should be tuned to lower frequencies. Anger is an energy, after all. Writers on the left don’t have to be climbers or fire-fighters or happy warriors. While our politicians must keep cool, poets can sweat it.
Take Martín Espada’s poem in his new collection, Floaters, about a Mexican body puncher’s no in thunder to Lightning Bob Salka—a true lightweight. Espada was sparked by a punchy headline in the Washington Post. (More evidence that paper’s aim in the Trump era was truer than the Times’s.) Let’s go to the videotape:
Boxer Wears America 1rst Shorts in Bout with Mexican, Finishes Second
—Headline in the “Washington Post,” April 18 2018
In the blue corner, weighing 130 pounds, Lightning Rod Salka sheds his robe
to unveil America 1st emblazoned across the waistband, a wall of bricks
in the red, white and blue of the American flag stamped on his shorts.
He pivots and salutes the crowd. In the red corner, weighing 130 pounds,
El Bandido Vargas wears a black cowboy hat with a bandanna across his face.
His trainer slips them off. Eyebrow still healing from the last fight, El Bandido
studies Lightning Rod and his border wall trunks at the casino in Indio,
California. He cannot hear the ring announcer praise, Tecate, the beer of boxing,
snarling: Indio are you ready? The crowd buzzes at the clang of the bell.
Lightning Rod waves his hands in circles like a magician at a birthday party.
El Bandido hooks the belly. Lightning Rod jabs twice at the scarred eyebrow.
El Bandido hooks the belly. Lightning Rod paws and swats at the darkness.
El Bandido hooks the belly. Lightning Rod skips away back against the ropes.
El Bandido hooks the belly. Lightning Rod is quiet in the corner between rounds.
El Bandido hooks the belly. Lightning Rod moans about low blows to the referee.
El Bandido hooks the belly, hooks the head, then snaps the uppercut to jolt
Lightning Rod back to a day when he was ten years old, watching a parakeet
in a pet shop tap a bell with his beak over and over again, and he spins around
in the corner, kneeling on the canvas, gloves on the ropes as if in prayer, as if
he forgets the wisecrack about boxers and God: that only helps if you can fight.
Lightning Rod quits in his corner, the welts stinging his body like red jellyfish,
as the crowd hollers and jeers at the casino in Indio, California. Later,
he says, I’m not bigoted or racist. I hear in my head a jingle on television back
when I was ten years old, sung by a cartoon mustachioed Mexican in a sombrero
to the tune of Cielito Lindo: Ay, ay, ay ay, / I am the Frito Bandito. / I like Fritos Corn Chips, / I want Fritos Corn Chips, / I take them from you.
xxx
Dig the way Espada gets his hooks in you. Those mindful body shots amount to a crafty writer’s nod to the craft of boxing. I’m flashing on a poet, Philip Levine, who dumped the heavy bag for versifying. (It wasn’t a hard choice, though he missed one thing about the game. “Good thing about boxing—unlike poetry—you find out fast if you’re no good. Nobody has to tell you.”) Levine was good at self-deprecation. Laughing at the benighted unless you’re the dummy on parade is iffy morally (see that Blue Stater above), but there are times when humor induced by pathos is human. Espada dares to make you laugh (and cry) when he recalls “Papo who stole a car so he wouldn’t be late for school.” Doubt this reader deserved to chuckle since I was “tardy” 130 times my senior year, and I never shoplifted anything that would put me in the range of a felony charge.
But I stole Floaters. I’d forgotten my bank card, and if I’d’ve gone into my pocket, I wouldn’t have had enough for my weekly Negroni…
I’d need something strong after I drank in Espada’s commemoration of that post-Fenway moment when two Trumpists ran into a Mexican immigrant, Guillermo Rodriguez, dozing in a sleeping bag outside JFK: “They woke him by pissing in his face. He opened his mouth / to scream in Spanish, so his mouth became a urinal at the ballpark.”
They beat him to a bloody pulp because “Donald Trump was right. All these illegals need to be deported.” Espada does a Dante, imagining a big payback where a thousand Guillermos gather around Trump and he can’t escape from a country where they belong:
“…Hell is a country where the man in a hard hat
paving the road to JFK stadium 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
in the desert for the border crossing of the next Guillermo.”
Espada himself becomes the next “José” in this next poem, which opens Floaters, bringing you near the poet’s self-sublating rage.
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 the 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 days 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 the 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 lot of 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
5PM, and 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 ash 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
Theatre 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 ribcages 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.
xxx
Espada’s last line, last week, linked up in my mind with foundational structures upheld by Jamie Raskin as he prosecuted Trump on behalf of “the world’s greatest multiracial, multi-religious, multi-ethnic constitutional democracy.” Another bridge-poem in Floaters brings it all home too, though it ends in Italy:
Standing on the Bridge at Dolceacqua
At forty, I studied the mirror. I poked my mouth to free a trapped grain
of hamburger, and a tooth broke off between my fingers. I felt nothing.
The dentist said: The tooth is dead. The root is dead. The X-rays show signs
of trauma to the lower jaw. What happened here? I said: Donald DeBlasio.
Donald DeBlasio punched me in the mouth. I was fifteen. My lip split,
my skull clanged, and my body smacked the floor like a mannequin
in a store looted by rioters. He stood over me and grinned
as he would grin at me for the rest of my life. Whenever I saw
him, in the hallway at school or on the street, he would pump
his right fist in my face, slowly curling an invisible barbell.
He was a centurion guarding the last outpost of the empire,
another Sicilian or Calabrese fleeing Brooklyn for Valley Stream,
Long Island, escaping the barbarians who sacked Rome, back
from the dead in 1972 to steal their cars, torch their houses,
piss in their swimming pools, stab the boys, and kiss the girls.
I was a barbarian drifting far from his tribe, a Puerto Rican
without a knife in hand or a leather jacket ablaze in gang colors.
Everybody understood, even the teacher who glanced away the day
I was late and sat on the floor, so the front row could take turns
jabbing a shoe at my spine. I refused to worship their gods, Jesus
on the crucifix or the Yankees in the sacred arena of the Stadium,
or the football deity who could bench press 300 pounds and slammed
me into a locker whenever he saw me. He never said a word to me.
I never said a word to him. I learned to swallow blood and words.
For years I would mimic their rooster strut, the sneering lip stuck out
the bellowing battle-cry of bafangool. I rooted against Rocky in all
the Rocky movies, cheering his choreographed pratfalls to the canvas.
When they rushed out the door of the pizza joint to gawk at the booming
car wreck on the corner, leaving my eggplant parm sub to burn black
in the over, I called them goombahs and swore never to return.
I am sixty. The words flow over the wrinkled stone of my brain:
Dolceacqua, sweet water, fresh water, River Nervia in the province
of Imperia, region of Liguria. I stand on the bridge of Dolceacqua,
the same stone arch painted by Monet more than a century ago.
She contemplates the water gushing below the bridge, and I watch
at her shoulder to see the river as she sees the river, poet, teacher,
amati, like amada in Spanish, the world for beloved. Her mother’s name
is Giovio, Calabrese from New Jersey, her grandfather a stone mason
before the beam rammed his head and stroke crippled his right hand,
her great-grandmother a girl sewing buttons onto blouses who escaped
the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, as others leapt, hand in hand, eyes shut,
from the ninth-floor. I can no longer remember the curses in the poetry
of Shakespeare and Donald DeBlasio. She takes my hand and leads me
across the bridge to the ruins of the castle on the other side of the river,
through the labyrinth of stone, up to the jagged battlements, where we
listen to the silence of the builders, and the birds, and the silence again.
xxx
I went for a second Negroni after I crossed that bridge. And I got a higher reward a few pages on: “I touch you sometimes, not in lust but in astonishment, telling / myself I did not imagine you, that you are here, that we will sing.”
Floater’s love poems imply Espada is a permanent romantic with a born outlier’s wonder at intimacy. He sees himself in less than fetching figures—a Kraken or a Galapagos tortoise (though Romeo speaks to him too).
Espada has mused that the range of need in Floaters‘ word-hoard fits under the old rubric of Bread and Roses. He was taking a cue from a friendly labor historian. The poet, though, tends not to go along quietly when others try to “place” his work. Whitman’s influence? He’d cop to it. (The title of one his collections, Vivas to Those Who Have Failed, comes directly from Walt.) But Espada didn’t cite other lords of language in a recent online conversation with Paul Mariani. Nor did he assent when I brought up Levine in an email. (Not that he was defensive.) He’s invoked Jamaican poet Andrew Salkey and he’s often underscored how much he got from Jack Agueros—“Puerto Rican poet, fiction writer, essayist, playwright, translator, community organizer, and director of El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem.” One hard goof in Floaters evokes a confounding dinner at a Chinese restaurant where Agueros couldn’t stop asking for dessert (Can we get some flan?, he said, “Goddamit Jack, I said.”) Agueros’ sudden obsession with flan turned out to be a sign his brain was softening. He’d entered the early stage of Alzheimer’s, though Espada didn’t suss that right away. (Through his poetry, he means to make his friend unforgettable.)
Espada has averred Agueros was like a second father to him. But he doesn’t slight his first one in Floaters. The book ends (perfectly) with…
Letter to My Father
October 2017
You once said: My reward for this life will be a thousand pounds of dirt
shoveled in my face. You were wrong. You are seven pounds of ashes
in a box, a Puerto Rican flag wrapped around you, next to a red brick
from the house in Utuado where you were born, all crammed together
on my bookshelf. You taught me there is no God, no life after this life,
so I know you are not watching me type this letter over my shoulder.
When I was a boy, you were God. I watched from the seventh floor
of the projects as you walked down into the street to stop a public
execution. A big man caught a small man stealing his car, and everyone
in Brooklyn heard the car alarm wail of the condemned: He’s killing me.
At a word from you, the executioner’s hand slipped from the hair
of the thief. The kid was high, was all you said when you came back to us.
When I was a boy, and you were God, we flew to Puerto Rico. You said:
My grandfather was the mayor of Utuado. His name was Buenaventura.
That means good fortune. I believed in your grandfather’s name.
I heard the tree frogs chanting to each other all night. I saw banana
leaf and elephant palm sprouting from the mountain’s belly. I gnawed
the mango’s pit, and the sweet yellow hair stuck between my teeth.
I said to you: You came from another planet. How did you do it?
You said: Every morning, just before I woke up, I saw the mountains.
Every morning, I see the mountains. In Utuado, three sisters,
all in their seventies, all bedridden, all Pentecostales who only left
the house for church, lay sleeping on mattresses spread across the floor
when the hurricane gutted the mountain the way a butcher slices open
a dangled pig, and a rolling wall of mud buried them, leaving the fourth
sister to stagger into the street, screaming like an unheeded prophet
about the end of the world. In Utuado, a man who cultivated a garden
of aguacate and carambola, feeding the avocado and star fruit to his
nieces from New York, saw the trees in his garden beheaded all at once
like the soldiers of a beaten army, and so hanged himself. In Utuado,
a welder and a handyman rigged a pulley with a shopping cart to ferry
rice and beans across the river where the bridge collapsed, witnessed
the cart swaying above so many hands, then raised a sign that told
the helicopters: Campamento los Olvidados: Camp of the Forgotten.
Los olvidados wait seven hours in line for a government meal of Skittles
and Vienna sausage, or a tarp to cover the bones of a house with no roof,
as the fungus grows on their skin from sleeping on mattresses drenched
with the spit of the hurricane. They drink the brown water, waiting
for microscopic monsters in their bellies to visit plagues upon them.
A nurse says: These people are going to have an epidemic. These people
are going to die. The president flips rolls of paper towels to a crowd
at a church in Guaynabo, Zeus lobbing thunderbolts on the locked ward
of his delusions. Down the block, cousin Ricardo, Bernice’s boy, says
that somebody stole his can of diesel. I heard somebody ask you once
what Puerto Rico needed to be free. And you said: Tres pulgadas
de sangre en la calle: Three inches of blood in the street. Now, three
inches of mud flow through the streets of Utuado, and troops patrol
the town, as if guarding the vein of copper in the ground, as if a shovel
digging graves in the backyard might strike the ore below, as if la brigada
swinging machetes to clear the road might remember the last uprising.
I know you are not God. I have the proof: seven pounds of ashes in a box
on my bookshelf. Gods do not die, and yet I want you to be God again.
Stride from the crowd to seize the president’s arm before another roll
of paper towels sails away. Thunder Spanish obscenities in his face.
Banish him to a roofless rainstorm in Utuado, so he unravels, one soaked
sheet after another, till there is nothing left but his cardboard heart.
I promised myself I would stop talking to you, white box of gray grit.
You were deaf even before you died. Hear my promise now: I will take you
to the mountains, where houses lost like ships at sea rise blue and yellow
from the mud. I will open my hands. I will scatter your ashes in Utuado.
xxx
I bought a copy of Floaters for my buddy Rich Torres (whose own father, a serious boxer, might have laughed low and hard at Lightning Rod’s bout with reality). Espada’s promise to head for the mountains, though, reminds me there’s more to be done on a gentle slope in the Berkshires. (Hey pop, we will bury your ashes there along with mom’s under that rock you climbed up on to ride your stallion.)
Notes
H/t to Ben Kessler’s twitter feed where I came upon Fred (Iceman) Harding’s tweet.
H/t to Jules Chametzky for steering First to Martín Espada’s poetry.