"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.
 

"Commie Balktalk" as Mask (Every Night Is Halloween, Part V)

I'm not a communist. I'm you.

Believe that? Most voters in Delaware--where early election results show Christine O'Donnell with 39.1% of the vote for U.S. Senator--seem to want more than that in their political discourse (they also appear to want O'Donnell more than they want the poetic discourse found Light in All Directions. How I'd like to sell 39% of the population my book).

It's the second part of O'Donnell's infamous ad ("I'm not a witch") that gets me. If she is I, then she's got to be a communist because that's what people called me when I objected to Contra Aid throughout the 1980s. While it was true that Nicaragua nationalized considerable property following the '79 revolution, it would be incorrect to say that Nicaragua had free enterprise prior to that; likewise it would be incorrect that Nicaragua had a communist economy following the revolution. Unlike the truly communist economy in Cuba, the Sandinista-led government maintained a mixed economy. Ironically, it was the investment interest from Japan and other Pacific Rim countries that probably concerned the Reagan Administration in the 80s. Nicaragua's private sector would've accounted for more of the economy had it not been for the Contra War, which drove the Nicaraguan government to go from spending less than 16% on the military in 1981 to 55% in 1988. But perhaps that was the strategy: destroy the Nicaraguan economy through military spending.

Also killed with Linder were
Sergio Hernández and
Pablo Rosales.

In any case, I've been called a communist on several occasions that had no bearing on economics and nothing to do with a violent overthrow of the government. One memorable example happened after I published a letter in the Los Angeles Times praising a U.S. engineer, Benjamin Linder, who was murdered in Nicaragua by contras who first wounded him with a grenade and then shot him in the head at close range. The engineer was working on a hydroelectric dam at the time. After my letter praising Linder appears, my wife received an anonymous phone calls from people who called me a commie, and one even said he'd "get" me on my way home because he knew where I worked and lived.  

And for the record, I'm not a commie. I'm you, no doubt like Christine O'Donnell in some way. Just imagine the following poem as a Halloween mask someone once put on me:

Commie Backtalk

Being the commie you call me,

I’m taking it all back:

Diamond panes of glass for anyone who came to our front door.

I’m taking back Grampy’s rub-downs after football practice.

You don’t believe me? Sit down, let me massage your shoulders.

The glances at Sara Montoya’s house

whenever I rode past. I’m taking them back.

The shine from her brown hair I’d forgotten until just now,

the boulder that Paradise Creek flows under.

I’m taking them back.

Don’t try to stop me.

Every trail Gary Bates and I ever left through the brush,

we’re rolling them up through the middle of homes,

property rights be damned.

The pisses over the canyon ledge every night,

I’m taking back those nocturnal pleasures

to add all together and hit the new casino on the other side.

Being the commie you call me,

I’m giving you everything I love:

the brown mare who carried me safely through childhood, like a mother;

The wedges of lasagna Grammy stacked just the way I liked them.

Everything I’ve taken, I redistribute.

Here, have a couple of notes I took off Jaco backstage at The Roxy

or a couple of rests I stole from Count Basie one night in Montreux.

They lifted them from America,

and God knows where she got them.

U.S. engineer Ben Linder appears in a mural with others devoted to peace & justice.