Duke Ellington,
Santa Ana, El Salvador, 1974

He paces the cool, dusty classroom,
hands in his pockets, rows of chairs,
sixth-grade children looking straight
at him, watching his big-band walk.

At the blackboard, he turns
and breaks the silence.
“Instead of crossing an Oriental garden,
picture a desert under a devil sun.”

He snaps his fingers two plus one
as if to say one more time.
We shout back a demented version of Caravan,
crashing cymbals, drums, bent horns -
muffled rhythms from a line of saxophones.

Edwin Martínez gets on his feet, leans over
the music stand and tortures the trumpet,
pouring all his memories of Egypt from history class.
Douglas Díaz slaps the bongos
exactly the same way he beats on
cans of coffee and milk at home.

Señor Ellington claps his hands along,
dancing a two-step blues, stomping
in the center of everyone like a traffic cop
conducting a busy city street.
Before break he will tell us
stories of a smoky blue spot
called the Cotton Club.
We will learn all the Harlem rhapsodies
from the Latin Quarter up to 125th Street.
He will swing the piano keys, a syncopated phrase
and we will listen: no need to study war no more.

He could be my grandfather,
black boy from Chalatenango -
indigo-blue family
from the Caribbean through Honduras.
He could be the one to write
a tone parallel to Sonsonate,
a trombone to roll to the wheels
of a cart, the wrinkled man,
toothless, pulling his corn.

More than a Congo drum in a cabaret,
more than a top hat and tails before a piano,
I want him to come back,
his orchestra to pound the doors
of a ballroom by the side of a lake.
I want the cracked paint to peel off the walls,
lights to go dim, floors to disappear,
a trumpet to growl,
my country to listen.



published in Rattle

Whitman

For evening walks in the city, I carry a book in my pocket
- dusty pages of bark set out in the sun.

The avenues run with the traffic grind, clang of cable cars
pulling downtown, smoke scattered everywhere.

The boy at the newsstand packs to go home; he’s dog-tired
from shouting all day into the air, “He was seen by the waters.”

Shoe-shine boy sitting next to him folds his newspaper
like a map, tells me, “It’s all true.”

From the moon-café, a piano rolls out into the street,
finger bones of a black man hover over the keys.

At the end of the street, atop the entrance of a black skyscraper,
a neon sign flickers in green: What is the grass?

On the stained walls of an alley, someone has painted
with long, red strokes, thick letters, “He was here.”

What if all this is true? Who is the old man with a white beard
sitting on the bench, smoking a cigar?

What if the mechanics, firemen, ferryboat pilots,
workers of the streets, all knew him?

On blue-cold streets, we meet strangers,
turn our eyes away into the smoke or passing cars.

We spend hours drawn out by the ticking clock,
living inside our skin, away from words raised in sunlight,

away from the tapping sound of heat, handful clap of dirt,
between curled fingers, a snap of leaves.

But I still see him, his echo deepening in the shade, leaves blue,
wet with rain. I hear him in the woman in rags,

she’s pushing a cart, butcher sharpening knives, farmer
picking grapes, his brown arched back rising like a tired sun.

You can’t tell me the immigrant reciting lines on the bus,
standing next to the driver, doesn’t have his voice of soil, roots.

Night stretches over rooftops. The machinery has stopped.
The multitude goes home, but it’s a silent walk.


 published in The Los Angeles Review

Page 3

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