Now the Dead...

		Now the Dead Will Dance the Mambo Achill Island, Ireland, June 2000 Last night the shadow of a cloud rolled off the bare mountain like a shawl slipping from the shoulder of a giant. Shirts on the clothesline sagged in rain. We burned turf, fists of earth blackening in the fireplace, room full of poets' books leaning rumpled, half-asleep. All night a radio sang in Irish, tongues sod-hard with lament or celebration. Then the BBC news, and the announcer's lips pinching the name: Tito Puente, The Mambo King, dead in New York. I would listen to Tito's records and see my father years ago: black hair shiny as the spinning disk, combed slick before the dance. I learned to spy on his mambo step, drummed the pots and kitchen tables of Brooklyn. I saw Tito Puente too, hammering timbales on the Jazzboat in Boston Harbor, brandishing drumsticks overhead to scatter the malevolent spirits that grabbed at his hair. Guadalupe pushed backstage to return with Tito's drumstick, splintered from repeating, always repeating the beat of slaves. Here, on this island, I rehearse the Irish word for drum: bodhrán, gripped by hand like the pandereta, circle of skin and wood for the grandchildren of slaves to thump as they sang the news in Ponce, Puerto Rico. Again today the rain grays the graying stones. We shake away drizzle in the pub dwarfed by mountains. In brown Guinness light we squint to see the posters of their Easter dead: James Connolly bellowing insurrection to the Citizen Army, the year 1916 ablaze above his head, numbers torched like the pillars of an empire's monuments to itself. The bartender says Connolly eyed the firing squad strapped to a chair in the stonebreakers' yard, gangrene feasting on his wound so he could not stand. I tell the bartender that Puerto Rico has its Easter dead: a march on Palm Sunday, colonial police intoxicated by the incense of gunsmoke, Cadets of the Republic painting slogans on the street in their belly-blood. That was Ponce in 1937, and Rafael still says: My mother left in a white dress and came home in a red dress. Tito Puente is dead, and we are in a pub on Achill Island plundering the jukebox, flipping between the Wolfe Tones and the Dubliners till we discover Tito's Oye Como Va. The beat is a hand slapping the bar, heads nodding as if their ears funneled a chant of yes-yes, yes-yes, and when we shoot a game of pool in his memory the table becomes a dance floor at the Palladium, cue ball spinning through a crowd of red and green. Now James Connolly could dance the mambo, gangrene forever banished from his leg. from "Alabanza: New & Selected Poems"