|
|
The Face on the Envelope
For Julia de Burgos (1914-1953)
- Julia was tall, so
tall, the whispers said,
- the undertakers
amputated her legs at the knee
- to squeeze her body
into the city coffin
- for burial at
Potter’s Field.
-
- Dead on a street in
East Harlem:
- She had no
discharge papers
- from Goldwater
Memorial Hospital,
- no letters from
Puerto Rico, no poems.
- Without her name,
three words
- like three pennies
stolen from her purse
- while she slept off
the last bottle of rum,
- Julia’s coffin
sailed to a harbor
- where the dead
stand in the rain
- patient as
forgotten umbrellas.
-
- All her poems
flowed river-blue, river-brown, river-red.
- Her Río Grande de
Loíza was a fallen blue piece of sky;
- her river was a
bloody stripe whenever the torrent
- burst and the hills
would vomit mud.
-
- A monument rose at
the cemetery in her hometown.
- There were parks
and schools. She was memorized.
- Yet only the
nameless, names plucked as their faces
- turned away in
labor or sleep, could return Julia’s name to her
- with the grace of a
beggar offering back a stranger’s wallet.
-
- Years later, a
nameless man from Puerto Rico,
- jailed in a city
called Hartford, would read her poem
- about the great
river of Loíza till the river gushed
- through the faucet
in his cell and sprayed his neck.
- Slowly, every
night, as fluorescent light grew weary
- and threatened to
quit, he would paint Julia’s face
- on an envelope: her
hair in waves of black, her lips red,
- her eyelids so
delicate they almost trembled. Finally,
- meticulous as a
thief, he inscribed the words: Julia de Burgos.
-
- He could never keep
such treasure under his pillow,
- so he slipped a
letter into the envelope
- and mailed it all
away, flying through the dark
- to find my
astonished hands.
-
from
The Republic of Poetry |
|
