"Where Was Fidel When I Needed Him?"

The story Fidelito cracked The Castro Monolith for me. The separation of father and son and the quest for reunification. I envied Fidelito.

More recently, the poem took on renewed meaning during the separation of parents and children at the U.S.-Mexico border. I was giving a themed reading with other writers on Goldfinger and spying. My father’s friends joked that he was in the CIA. Whoever he really was/is, I didn’t know him well enough to blow any cover he might have had.

I included the poem in the Backstory reading at The Victory Theater because I realized that in the masculinity vacuum left by my father, James Bond was one of the bad examples who filled the space. Here's the poem from Driven into the Shade.

Where Was Fidel When I Needed Him?  

to Elían Gonzalez

Because your father looked nervous during his interview with the INS,
your granduncle’s attorneys don't believe you should go home,
they say your father doesn't really want you,
that Fidel is making him say such things.

When I was six, my father was across the ocean, too.
Divorced from my mother before I turned a year old,
in arrears for child support, hiding from the court,
he'd gone to Vietnam to research how the communists
brainwashed people out of the comforts of exporting rubber.

When I turned 16, I met him. He took me
to a Baja bar where I listened to his voice
as I tunneled beneath our wasteland of memory,
trying to resupply our love, but
the tunnel didn't lead that way.

Throughout the afternoon, he uncoiled his story
how my mother and grandparents hid me from him.
Later his story wound back on itself like a python,
how he drank in Saigon, drank at San Diego State,
drove around Berkeley with a Marine friend
yelling "faggots" out the window at the longhairs.
I could not hear myself in his voice.

He said we were alike because we played football,
but despite the distance between us,
he'd never thrown one pass to me, nor
had I been close enough to hit him with a block
and feel him hit back.

How I wish Fidel had walked into the bar,
taken my father at gunpoint,
locked him in Cuba's darkest prison
without rum and brainwashed him,
electrified the genitals I came from,
made him scream that he wanted me with him.
Where was Fidel as my grampy sang me too sleep,
where was Fidel as my father bought Saigon Tea
for the mothers of dust?

 

Fidel Castro and his son Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart at the Havana Book Fair, 2002

Place Poems, Part I: "Poem in Black and White"

As Califonia's snowpack returns, the poem "Poem in Black & White" comes to mind. It begins with an epigraph from Roget's Thesaurus:

The ... classification of colours does not entirely accord with the theories of modern science: Complete lists of shades are beyond the scope of this work.




On a December afternoon so cold it would snow
if the sky over Palomar weren't so dry,
we move around to keep ourselves warm:
run the mower back and forth over the umber grass
and believe that it will grow back. But for today
we natives want snow, while the snowbirds from
Montreal and Kansas City tell us, “You don't know
what you're asking for.”

                                      We want snow to fall on

last Spring's ferns and hush their rustling,
to cover the autumn montage of leaves from
white oaks and sycamores that pile high,
to hold the pages still and whiteout all
but the wet, black trunks that stand up,
through the heavy white.

                                     We want the snow to fall and

cushion the rocks and gorse bushes and
leave nothing but the reaching trees. But the
snowbirds tell us, "Only fools wish for snow."

Why would we want a black and white movie, when
under the blue sky we have the florid fallen leaves,
and beneath Palomar, green fairways?

We try to describe snowy light cooling our eyes,

and the click of stones in our dry summers,
dry like Chicago doesn't understand.

We seem to have a drought of words

to make them hear how we need the water, and
how our sunny weather can sustain only so many streams, only
so many towns where the chief joy is not having to shovel snow,
how subtly ceanothus fades from purple to gray in March, and
that gray is a color.

Click to here Drought Buoy perform this poem.
 

Light in All Directions: Wins SDBA

My second full-length book of poems received a San Diego Book Award, so in honor of Light in All Directions, I'm beginning this blog. With the words "all directions" in the title, I have a lot of leeway.

Light in All Directions is my second book of poems from Poetic Matrix Press in Madera, California. Back in 2001, Poetic Matrix had a chapbook contest to which I submitted a manuscript titled "Liquid Monolith," my twist on 2001: A Space Odyssey. The contest was focused on the new millennium. Since I think trauma has an incredible shelf-life, my poems were about how we wouldn't escape the past in the future. Not the festive tome Poetic Matrix Press was looking for.

Still Poetic Matrix gave my chapbook an honorable mention (It would later be published by Oak Grove Press as "River Murmurs"). About a year later, an editor of Poetic Matrix Press called to say that he wanted to publish a book with "duende." Did I have a full manuscript like "Liquid Monolith" and, if so, did I have a better title?

"What's a duende?" I asked.

"It's an earthiness that transcends into the metaphysical, giving rise to a dark music," John Peterson of Poetic Matrix told me. "And there's also a touch the demonic to it."

"Then I'm your man," I said and then sent in Driven into the Shade. Poetic Matrix published the book in 2003 and 100 copies of it included a CD of musical performances of the vocalese poems in the book. Where those CDs went, I don't remember.


Now I'm back with a new book and at least three people beside my mother like it. Any questions? Yes, the man with the beard in the back.

What concord can light have with darkness? What's the relationship between Light in All Directions and Driven into the Shade?

Good question. Very Biblical. The concord of light and darkness is shadow. Aesthetically, shadows represent the ineffable that poetry implies. Driven into the Shade was perhaps a bit more reactive than Light in All Directions. For example, in the poem "Fireworks," the persona is a bit passive in his relationship to fire, whereas in "Fire Mind" from the second book shows someone who's more reactive. I'd like to think the second book is the kind of book someone with a little more experience would write. Yes, the woman with the scowl in the front row.

At key points this book gets political. Don't you think poetry should avoid politics?

Two things, first, if I were dealing with theoretical politics, you're correct. I should just write op-ed columns. But I tried to write about moments when policy intersected with someone's life. Perhaps I pushed the metonomy or allegory at points, but I tried to keep physical contact with the world we live in. Second, politics can't be avoided. To quote the late, great Lucille Clifton, "The decision to go out your front door is political." Yes, last question to the man in the third row wearing the double-breasted pin-striped suit that I wish I had.

The voice in Light in All Directions is inconsistent. In some poems there's a strong narrative and in other poems you leave the reader floating in a dark void and bumping up against random words. Where's the light in that?

Well, the truth is, sometimes there appears to be no light. I know some of the poems in the middle section are difficult, but by the time readers make their way to the "Radiate" section of the book, their poetical eyes will have adjusted to dark so they can see.

Now, I want to thank you all for coming. You're invited to join me for a special reading of Light in All Directions at Winston's Beach Club in Ocean Beach, California, on July 12, 2010. The reading will be hosted by Chris Vannoy of the Drunk Poets' Society. The reading begins at 6 p.m. and there is no cover. Winston's is at 1921 Bacon Street.