Poetic License: ‘Mama Carmen Suite’
“First Encounters of the Close Kind”
She was less than five feet tall
and plumper than a calabaza,
yet she could touch the floor
with the palm of her hand
and chop a roasted pig
into a hundred pieces
while chewing a cigar stump
and saving the crinkly cuerito
skin ears and tail
as candy for her grandchildren.
I met her when I was four
on the island of Vieques
just before the Navy came
to protect the island
by taking over two thirds
of the land and removing
one third of its population.
She was milking a goat
in the yard behind
the shack of planks
and leftover corrugated iron
that served as home and centerpiece
for her animals and plants;
sent on ahead by my mother
I introduced myself to her
in my best broken Spanish,
and when I asked her what she was doing
and pointed to parts of the goat
she immediately enriched
my Spanish vocabulary with the words
for udders and vagina.
It was love at first sight:
the first americano in the family
became her favorite among
the forty-two grandchildren
whose names she couldn’t always remember
and she moved up instantly to number one
on my list of grown-ups.
“Welcome to the Cold New World”
When four years later
my mother told us she was coming
to live with us in New York City
because the Navy needed the land
on which she had lived all her life,
I could not have been happier.
My memory of her,
ruling and protecting
her ramshackle kingdom
of chickens, goats and pigs
scattered among the makeshift orchards
of orange, banana, avocado, mango
and almond trees was still as fresh and warm
as the rich flow of Spanish language
and expletives that had poured from her.
On a cold winter’s day
we went to the muelles (piers) in Brooklyn
and I watched her shiver
down the gangplank
wearing a burlap brown coat
someone had given her for her journey
to the frozen north of New York City,
but that day the temperature
was fifty degrees colder than
she had ever experienced
in her seventy-two years,
and frightened by seeing her own breath
for the first time
she greeted us with demands
to be returned at once to Vieques,
demands accompanied by descriptions
of the weather and her discomfort
that made my mother, my aunt
and even the crew members blush.
(To be continued.)