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Now the Dead Will Dance the Mambo
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Achill Island, Ireland, June 2000
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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from "Alabanza: New & Selected Poems"
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