Not Here.

Not Here

for Raul Zurita
Santiago, Chile, July 2004

   The other poets tell me he tried to blind himself,
   taped his eyelids and splashed his face with ammonia.

   What Zurita saw gnawed like a parasite at the muscles in
     his eyes:
   Chile's warships invaded the harbor of Valparaiso
   and subversives staggered at gunpoint
   through the city of hills down to the dock.
   Only the water knows how many
   faded away like black boots tossed into a black sea,
   or dangled from the masts, beaten by knuckles and rain
   into scarecrows the seagulls would pluck.

   September 11, 1973: Zurita's heart
   crashed deep in the ribs of a Navy ship.
   The officer in charge of interrogation
   shook the poet's papers and fumed: This is not poetry.
   The other poets tell me: Electricity was involved.

   Seven years later, Zurita blinked
   to save his eyes, and wrote:
   ... in the name of love let even
   the steel-toed boots
   that kicked us be loved,
   and those who mocking us said
   "Do a little dance for us" and put out their cigarettes
   on our arms so we would dance for them,
   for our love's sake, for that alone,
   let them now dance.

   Today we walk through the courtyard
   of the presidential palace.
   The fountain speaks in the water's tongue;
   the fountain of smoke is gone.
   The bombers that boomed across this sky
   left no fingerprints in the clouds
   when they dropped their rockets,
   twisting the rails of the balcony like licorice.
   Today Allende is white marble outside the palace,
   mute as a martyr, without a hand free to wave
   from the balcony, without a voice to crackle
   his last words in the radio air.
   Zurita says: After the bombing, after the coup,
   no one could stand here to look at the ruins.
   If you did, you were suspect. Did you grieve for Allende?
   They grieved, heads down, hands in pockets, moving along,
   glancing up, a blackened balcony in the corner of the eye.
   Zurita knows what the water knows,
   what the sky will not confess even to the gods
   who switch the electricity on, off, then on again.
   Zurita's beard is forged in gray, the steel of a Navy ship.
   He lights a cigarette for those who would see the ruins
   where the ruins have been swept away.

   I am the one navigating the night without stars.
   On or around the night of September 11, 1973,
   at the age of sixteen,
   I was vandalizing a golf course in the rain,
   fishtailing my car through the mud on the ninth hole
   as beer cans rolled under my feet.
   Ten miles away, at the White House,
   the plotters were pleased; the coup
   was a world in miniature they painted by hand,
   a train with real smoke and bells
   circling the track in the basement.
   The rest of us drank too much, drove too fast,
   as the radio told us what happened
   on the other side of the world
   and the windshield wipers said
   not here, not here, not here.

Martin Espada's most recent book is "Alabanza: New and Selected Poems." He has also released a CD of poems called "Now the Dead Will Dance the Mambo." He is a professor in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.