Marco
Succession
That
Because of thiswound
the two of us alone
Her
obsession with forgetting his name
fingered,over and over again,
left me
test
touch
Where there were
Anyone butme
response when questioned
was a mania
whose edges never heal
Christ,you went under
for how long
(Are you really here?)(No, you’re not.)
rootdown for hidden memory
I am the end, succeeding
His absence hung aboveeverything refracting
uncles, real andconstructed
would have guessed the plot twistlong ago
when I was four was a terror
ruling like amisplaced star over my house
how could sheask me to fatherinto this world the next?
son-smittenhusband-hungry
and harrowed sothe buried might rise
and back upmore easily
again empty-handed
everything
lacunae into every solid shapeuntil
but I made sure, must have,not to know
I also erased forcibly, repeatedly, a mania.Her need for
That
Because of thisfather who never was
widow-weary
and now?
barely any
who knew
what was
a secret
a secret
I too am
a secret
a secret
a secret
a secret
a secret
a secret
edgewas discernible.His
only that I wasnot theirs
so obvious
bentlight around its darkness
couldunfather memakes me
a fatherwho never was
should be
shuttled round
un-overheard
well-pretended
woven tight
black seed
with
presence addressedjust minutes away,
required effort.
warped floorboardsshut doors
wonder whetherspeaking will
unstringing the net that ties me to the future
only a black beak shove, delight in the violence of
only cotyledon caught eidolon caw tattle on
only the patient curl and drill of root
only scarring lets water in
planted deep
dark moonwhose other face is all light shining
Wherethere wereaunts
where earthquakes simmered.
unmother me.
refusing
only the bloodied fingers of the buried furiously scratching
looking for what
lacks
cracks
nothing
on some other sky.
who whispered,
Any man might beenough
Her grief
ThatI have felt
(because of this)to the lightany surface,
transitiveness; remains after everything else
openness; remains after every peel
(Are you?)parent material
“You’re just like him,”whenno one waslistening
to make meman enough
when she learned I was gay:“I will never have grandchildren.”
like an orphan
flowers into seed
is a shame I carryand will not let go.
but even singularities gleam darkagainst the brighter night.
to be alive
Because of this wound fingered, over and over again,
whose edges never heal, how could she ask me to father into this world
the next? Because of this father who never was I too am a father
who never was, unstringing the net that ties me to the future,
refusing (because of this) to the light any surface,
but even singularities gleam dark against the brighter night.
That obsession with forgetting his name was a mania ruling like a misplaced star over my house. That a secret could unfather me makes me wonder whether speaking will unmother me. That I have felt like an orphan is a shame I carry and will not let go.
the two of us alone left me son-smitten husband-hungry widow-weary a secret should be only the bloodied fingers of the buried furiously scratching
Her response when questioned once when I was four was a terror I also erased forcibly, repeatedly, a mania. Her need for a secret bent light around its darkness, warped floorboards, shut doors where earthquakes simmered. Her grief when she learned I was gay: “I will never have grandchildren.”
test Christ, you went under and harrowed so the buried might rise a secret shuttled round only a black beak shove, delight in the violence of looking for what to be alive
Anyone but me would have guessed the plot twist long ago but I made sure, must have, not to know, what was so obvious required effort. Any man might be enough to make me man enough.
touch for how long and now? a secret un-overheard only cotyledon caught eidolon caw tattle on lacks transitiveness; remains after everything else
Where there were uncles, real and constructed, who knew only that I was not theirs. Where there were aunts who whispered, “You’re just like him,” when no one was listening.
(Are you really here?) (No, you’re not.) a secret well-pretended only the patient curl and drill of root cracks openness; remains after every peel flowers into seed
His absence hung above everything refracting lacunae into every solid shape until barely any edge was discernible. His presence addressed just minutes away, dark moon whose other face is all light shining on some other sky.
root down for hidden memory, and back up more easily a secret woven tight only scarring lets water in
I am the end, succeeding everything with nothing.
again empty handed a secret black seed planted deep (Are you?) parent material
We’d
we’d, you [and you] and I, conditionally
share a common history
acknowledge thatwe createdeach other
forcethe world to reckonwith us
talkabout philosophyand what it coulddo for us
admireflowers together
ornamentour sharedlife
obligateothers to make way
cancel allour debts
make sure the doors were shut at night and open all day long
unrollyarn and knit ourselves intowings
anticipateeach other’s follies
curatemuseums memorializingour deeds
measurethe worldagainstour steps
buildfactories firingour names into the sky
codeour DNA into the weave ofour oh-so-dapper jackets
acclimate to the turbulence ofhourly mergingsystems
correlate the night sky’s brightness with the depth of our shared joy
gratefully thankthe stability of three-legged stools
look from oneto the other, oneto the other, dayafter day
ascertainour longitude bythe meeting of our shadows
nurseeverystray, never uswho are always home
roam the countrysidepulling every bird from kin’s cross
drink maté inthe afternoon in a ritualall our own
cross the needfor compensatoryfetishes off our lists
invite all the familiesfrom all the directionsto our table
tally the treasure
have the luxuryto believe in something
expect the groundto ripen at our approach
transcribeour footprints, dictateour stumbles
loose laughterfrom its leash
occupy ourselvesmore than survival, melancholy, invisibility
feel the sun’s warmth on our facesjust one of many loves
pass the black pebblewarm from one handto another
estimate the weight of lost time,not ever knowingfirsthand
plant a tree over each of our future graves
enjoy each other’s companywithout wondering at an empty chair
remember (grandparents) and anticipate (grandchildren)
be the gravity wellof our ownsolar system
be happy
Coda
Fable: Cenicienta’s Son Tells a Story
“María rotos de sueño (María Landó)”
The truth is I don’t even know if I am a worm or a child or a man or something past all of those, if there are wings on my back or just glancing reflections off the walls of my life. My memory plays tricks on me, and my vision has a habit of doubling, tripling, swimming with ghosts and shadows. Maybe I am the product of another lifetime. If I ask these mirrors what is fair and what is foul, will they answer?
“There was and there wasn’t a time in my life before you were born,” she would tell me the few times I asked as a young child. I learned early to stop asking, before I could articulate rational arguments against her irrational glare and puffs of air through nostrils set hard like stone. This learning sank like sand to the bottom of the ocean and sedimented into ground-truth. She turned and walked away, her wide bare feet falling like receding thunder after a lightning strike that never happened.
She never wore shoes of any kind—not boots or sandals or flats or heels or espadrilles or flip-flops—and so the soles of her feet grew leathery and black, her toes horned and bunioned. Though the other women in her close-knit circle of relatives and old-country acquaintances, all married and shod and respectable, alternately pitied and scorned her naked feet, she took no notice of them. Like the strategy of willful forgetting she employed in the face of her son’s impertinent questions, she waltzed through the family parties and get-togethers, the copetines and the fiestas and the summer afternoon asados, as if she were one of them, daring with her cracked soles and the massive spread of her toes any one of those women to point out her difference. This habit she had of swinging in arcs through any space she crossed made it awkward to be near her, though everyone accommodated it, and so no one ever stood still but the whole room would shiver and sway itself around her.
All of this seemed at once completely normal and unsettlingly wrong. For me “there wasn’t” a time before my birth and so what else could all this be but this world, simply the world? For all of them “there was” a whole world of time before me, and the black kernel of my being was passed in secret handshakes and pass-offs among them in a counterpoint to my mother’s maniacal dancing.
“Ceni! Ceni!” one of my aunts blurted out late one night after too many drinks at a family party. “Ceni, I want you to know that if you ever have to go on welfare, that I am here for you. I will help you, O.K.?” And with that her “sister” managed to simultaneously offer her generosity with one hand and take away my mother’s dignity and delusional pride with the other. She smiled across the table, foolish, drunk, self-satisfied with her catty cleverness. Everyone else tensed up, waiting for the response. My mother’s face turned to stone for a moment, then relaxed as she hefted one foot on to the other leg’s knee and began picking at her thick yellowed toenails right there at the table.
No one was known by their birth names. What does a birth name tell you about a person other than the stupid ill-founded aspirations of their parents? No, a proper nickname bestowed by one’s circle captured the essence and the role of a person. It identified them: not only signified but imbued them with significance. And so “Ceni” was merely a nickname for a nickname, “Cenicienta,” so long hers that no one even remembered her real name. What else could she be, this one who swept the ashes of every previous day out of the oven in the predawn darkness and set the fire she would tend there every day to feed her parents and her six other siblings? She was always covered in that ghastly whiteness, a shade among the living. Maybe that was how she managed to slip through borders and under the eyes of anyone who mattered.
I have no idea because while there was, there also wasn’t. What is this double vision but fiction? As a child, before questions sprouted from my mouth, I would stir the ashes and look through them, illuminated by the cold sun, and try to make out that time before me. Every day it was different but it always slipped away. Now, I think I know more but still it is only ash thrown into the air, a shifting fiction.
There was and there wasn’t a time before, when she was thirty years old and already tired, a dwindling fire drowning in its own ash, and she found herself in a bright land. Every day she assiduously scrubbed herself bright, washed her fiery red hair and ran a comb through its length, strapped her unruly feet into the latest fashions, her toes crushed into points and her heels raised up higher and higher, a small gesture toward the rising tide of hope she had in her own life. She whispered her real name to herself each morning in the steamed-up mirror of her daily cleansing.
“Who is the fairest of them all?” the mirror demanded.
“- - - -,” she would answer.
But in a bright land, if it is to be bright, shadows must be swept, mopped, polished, hefted, folded away. A newcomer like her was there to keep things bright. Each night she returned to her tidy apartment, covered again. It was as if the ashes poured out of each pore in little tumbling falls. “Cenicienta.”
The only thing that burned hotter than her hope for new life in this bright land was her shame at the daily accrual of ash on her body. What to do with all of it? She collected it in a small box, scrubbed it out of the shower stall, and threw those gray-black scales into the white powder, too, ran the comb through her tresses and used a toothpick to strip her teeth of the gray mortar between. The box safely hidden under her bed, she lay down exhausted and dreamed of another, whispering her own name, “- - - -,” into the fire of her hair.
Every day was the same: the rising up, the furious scrubbing and cleaning away of the night’s desire-laden ash, the circuit from shining house to shining house to run away other people’s shadows, the late-night return to the tiny apartment, the hour-long scrubbing and cleaning away of a day’s accumulation of ash into a small box. Funny how the box never filled, always ready to take in more and more over the years.
And then one morning when she slipped the lid off carefully, lest some betraying cinders might spill, she found instead a pair of diamond high-heeled pumps, gleaming in their hardness. What was this? Then she noticed that motes of ash no longer fell from her tumbling hair or sifted in little plumes from her fingertips.
She raced to the mirror and demanded of it this time, “Who is the fairest of them all?”
It answered with her reflection, submissive.
For the first time ever, she took the day off from her appointed rounds. Let someone else tend to shadows. These shoes were bright and would make her bright as well in this bright land. Let her invisibility shift, from shadow to shimmer. She carefully lifted them out of the box. They were light, like the solidification of sunlight pouring through pure air. She slipped them on easily, her once-wild feet tamed over the years by so many other shoes now woefully inadequate in the light of this shining pair.
She took a step.
Glittering pain shot up her leg, a fire in her head. Dizzy, she looked down to see blood flowing freely and refracting through the prismatic glimmer of the shoes. Breathing in and steeling herself, she took another step. Scarlet blossoms of agony erupted. No! This was hers. This was not torture but a miracle. She would make it so.
Out in the light of the streets of the bright land, she walked in practiced, short steps and was surprised to be seen by the inhabitants who had never noticed her before. Women smiled, men paused. One in particular paused, stopped as if he remembered hearing his name a long time ago, and only now the echo of it flooded his brain like diamond light. He grabbed her and threw her into arcs of motion, the sky spinning like a prism, colors shining everywhere. This was everything, this was staring at the sun.
Even amid the waltzing arcs of pleasure, she hatched a plan. If ashes and dreams could coalesce into diamond-hard light, then what could her ferocious will to shine make of diamonds and blood and the tight turns of this man in this bright land? Compacting, compounding, smelting against the anvil of her indignity at so many years of shadow-work, diamonds were ground down, blood thickened and bubbled, light laced itself through in nets.
When she was done, she held in her sweaty self-satisfied arms a little glimmering worm of a life, whose faceless mouth twitched in all directions until she nudged it to her breast. She looked down to find that the diamond shoes were gone, eaten up no doubt by her alchemical work and leaving only bloodied feet, and then looked up to see the counterpoint of her swinging dance let go, horrified by the suckling monster, too-solid product of himself. Does retreating light, like air, breeze past one’s cheek?
Immediately she was in darkness, returned to shadows. She stuffed her glowing grub inside herself, a shadow inside the shadow of her shadow, and ran barefoot home. From then on she returned to sweeping shadows and ashes up for the brighter folk, and though she continued to brush the ashes off her own skin, it was a half-hearted gesture culminating in a dismissive sweep of a broom over the front door’s threshold. Let the wind take the ash away, or not. She no longer cared. Under her skin and under the ash, a dim light glowed, her one and only possession. Two things were banned from her life from that moment on: mirrors and shoes. If she needed to see herself, she preferred to look in the gloom of musty closets or the murk at the bottom of cellar stairs over the pure cruelty of reflected light. And shoes, what need did she have of them? They slowed her down in her work, she concluded, and she had no time for the ridiculousness of her sisters’ petty fashions.
But then the glowing grub grew small teeth and pinprick eyes. It gnawed its way through skin and ash, out of her web of grief and into the world. A slick mewling thing, all mouth, all questions. Now it was no longer the mirror demanding answers from her, but instead this relentlessly growing brightness in her shrine of shadows and cinders.
Her apartment had a little utility closet and so, furious at her child’s insistence on being born out of her body and out of her life, she fitted the closet with a seamless set of mirrors—floor, ceiling, four walls—and a candle, and locked him in. Let him eat light, she thought.
And so I have, all these years. Now it is the walls that demand answers, but all I have is myself. I speak and my speech is wings buffeting the silvered glass. I dance in arcs and don’t even know if I have feet. I look out and I see skin but not my own. I look in and I see a light, these wings aflame, and a plume of ash, swirling.
[Echo: The Sound of My Father]
“There’s no place he doesn’t look
And looking he loses himself”
Just a few years ago I learned from my cousin Elsa that she had heard my never-known father’s voice when she was a child. She mentioned it casually, never registering the devastation that swept across my face. “Oh sure, he used to come by and visit my parents all the time.”
It lives on: some faintest echo still travels through the expanse of her life. Its timbre and cadence, its gravelly bass notes or its clear glass-like pitch or its trills of immigrant r’s rendering homely English into something warmer and stranger—it rolls across her memory even if hidden and forgotten. Did he learn English before he ever left Uruguay, and so at the foot of some teacher tamed his open-mouthed Ríoplatense Spanish into more careful curves of vowels and pursed-lip consonants? Or like my mother, did he learn on the fly from Sunday comics and soap operas? Was his laughter full-throated or merely a chuckle? Did he command a room with a boom or retreat into the background in whispers?
(Notice my slip into the past tense.
My absent invisible soundless father
who is always only a thing of the past
Show me your face before your father spoke.
because not knowing
if he is even alive or dead
it seems safest
to consign him to death. Irretrievable,
I make him irretrievable.)
And if I asked Elsa what he sounded like, she probably wouldn’t be able to tell me. How many sounds of chance encounters litter our lives and we take no notice of what, for another, might sound like the birth of the universe? How poor I am, to need to beg someone else to dredge from the scrap heap of their history some rotting thread of memory. How proud I am, that I will never ask her to tell me, to slip from her mouth the already-chewed and softened, the half-forgotten memory of an echo, and feed me with it.
Old crooked pine tree,
Summer swallows rise in flight:
Who could look away?
That’s what I wrote to him when I was twenty-one, heard his name uttered in my ear for the first time from a mother infuriated that she would be made to speak it, and found his address in the phone book. Marco ______. It was always there, one line among many. Pristine, never smudged off the cheap, pulpy white pages; never touched before. It turned out he lived in the same small town that I grew up in, just a few minutes away. Had I heard him ask for a book of stamps while waiting in the post office? Did his smile and small talk with the checkout girl at the market carry two aisles over to me?
And what’s more, every relative’s home that hosted me had also opened its doors to him, even after he walked out on my mother and me. At parties and cookouts and on casual unimportant afternoons after work, on days when my mother and I were elsewhere, he would pass through their front doors and sit down in their kitchens or their living rooms for a whiskey or a maté. He was friends with all of them. Every substitute mother, every distant uncle, every cousin like a sibling in my life saw his face and heard his voice. Was that the smell of his cigarettes or cologne that lingered in the air by Tí’Bibí’s kerosene stove or on the soft peach walls of Ina’s house? Was that subtle earthquake running through my childhood the echo of his voice?
I drove by the tidy little ranch house listed in the phone book, I wrote my enigmatic poem about pines and swallows and dropped it in the mail, but I never dialed those digits and held the receiver to my ear. Though his old and broken voice might have spun through the copper wires, I am sure nothing would have or could have emerged in my world. Only empty wind, black and obliterating, like the voice of God from a cleft in the mountain, or from a burning bush that, once lit, sets the whole world on fire. Though the small note fell into the open mouth of the mailbox, no answer ever echoed back. Across the barrier of two worlds nothing ever passes.
And then the listing disappeared from subsequent editions of the phonebook. Even silence fled, and there was only one world in this world.
Botanical Notes
p. 67 xylem: the vascular cells of a plant that conduct water up from its roots to its leaves. Their counterpart, phloem, transports sugars from leaves down to roots. What is interesting about xylem cells is that they only become useful in death. They grow in order to construct the rigid cell walls around them. As they die off, the walls on either end of a xylem cell decay away along with the cell’s interior, leaving a row of these empty husks end to end for water to flow through. Water is pulled up these long tubes for anywhere from a few inches to hundreds of feet by the physics of capillary action and the exhalations of water vapor by leaves high up in the sun.
p. 71 One can feed small birds in their cages shreds of madder …: Maude Grieve, in her entry on madder in A Modern Herbal, describes this effect of staining animal bones, especially those “nearest to the heart.”
p. 75 Miles out from anywhere …: Donald Culross Peattie reports in A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America that the pine forests of the eastern seaboard were once so vast that when they released their yellow pollen, great clouds of it would be carried far out to sea and sometimes envelop ships on the Atlantic.
p. 97 Deep in the green, clasped tight in a downward-mouthing cup of matter …: When flowers are pollinated a complex process begins with pollen sending a tube burrowing down the flower’s style to its ovary. Two sperm cells travel down this tube and through the micropyle into the ovule, which is like a cup. Inside, one sperm cell joins with the egg cell and the other merges with what are called the two polar nuclei. These three will form the food source for the zygote created by sperm and egg, eventually being used up entirely.
p. 102 pinnatifid: the shape of leaves that are pinnate-like. Pinnate leaves are compound leaves comprised of several individual leaflets. They are “pinnate,” or feather-like, in that the arrangement of leaflets along a central axis is like the arrangement of individual barbs that together form a bird’s feather. Pinnatifid leaves do not have individual leaflets but are so sharply toothed along their margins that they seem to be pinnate.
p. 107 crucifer: the plant family that includes shepherd’s purse (as well as cabbage, mustard, and others). Plants in this family have four flower petals radiating out in a cross shape.
p. 107 raceme: one of the kinds of inflorescences or groupings of individual flowers on a plant. Racemes, corymbs, umbels, cymes, thyrses, panicles, and glomerules are all different arrangements of groups of flowers on plants.
p. 117 totipotent: “all-powerful.” Plants described as totipotent have the ability to regenerate themselves entirely from a single cell.
p. 126 humus: the smallest remnant of plant matter after the decomposition process. Humus acts as a sponge in soil for attracting and holding nutrients. Incredibly stable, it may remain for thousands of years without further transformation. Humus is the past nourishing the present.
p. 143 succession: the way life inexorably moves from bare rock to lichens and mosses to plants and eventually to mature grasslands or forests. Each form gives way to and is subsumed by and forms the matrix for what follows it. What are the inevitable products of our lives? What are the measures of a life’s success? Is what succeeds us our success?