POEM
Rodriguez, Aleida
POEM Aleida Rodriguez |\nimals seem to till their skins, trees their bark, ^ivers their banks, so beautifully, that we cannot yielp but see in their wildness a perfect at-homeness. —Scot!...
...surrounded by a moat filled with glare...
...Her poetr\ and prose ave appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies...
...She was one of mure than I5JHHI children sent •ithout their parents to the United States via Operation Peter Pan in the early sixties...
...There is no way the brightly lit film of childhood's cerulean sky, fat with meringue clouds, can plav out its reel unbroken bv the hypnotist's snap: )'ou will not remember this...
...where the downy woodpecker teletypes a greeting on the light post and the overripe sapotes fall with a squishy thud...
...translating the voices of my early trees along the ground...
...Gone are the ciruelas, naranjas ugrius...
...Currently, she works free/am e as an editor and translator...
...where the lemon, pointillistically studded with fruit, glows like a celebration...
...Illinois, she later ¦loved to Los Angeles, where she has lived for the past twenty-eight years...
...There is no way [ can make that Pan American plane fly backward, halt the tanks of the Cuban revolution, grow old in Guines...
...Russell Sunders Lexicon of Exile There is no way I can crank a dial...
...scroll hack the scenery, perch sinsotttcs outside my windows instead of scrub jays and mockingbirds and linnets...
...The trees fingering their dresses outside my windows now are live oak...
...There is no way I can pull the harsh tongue from my mouth, replace it with lambent turquoise on a white sand palate, the cluck of coconuts high in the arc of palm trees...
...where the Fuju persimmon beams in late summer and the fig's gnarled silver limbs become conduits for all the ants of the world...
...A lingual bridge lowers into my backyard...
...the mamonciUos with their crisp green shells concealing the pink tenderness of lips...
...where the loquat drops vellow vowels and the scrub jays nesting in the lime chisel them noisily with their hard black beaks high in the branches, and the red-throated hummingbird— mistaking me for a flower—suspends just inches from my face...
...They find me islanded in Los Angeles...
...Earth's language is a continuous current...
...leida Rodriguez was born in Guines, a small town south of Havana, Cuba, six years before the revolution...
...In }W5 she was chosen as a 1^5 finalist for the Pablo \ era da Prize in Poetry and as a runnei-up :ir the Barnard New Women Poets Prize, for which she'll be reading with Carolyn Kizer at Barnard College on February 1, 1996...
...Originally relocated to a foster home in Springfield...
...smelling the sour blend of rice and milk fermenting in a pan by the chicken coop...
...mock orange, pine, eucalyptus...
...1 can't afford not to listen...
...and deliver a lost dictionary of delight...
...deciding whether or not to dip into the nectar of my eyes until I blink, and it sweeps all my questions into the single sky...
Vol. 60 • February 1996 • No. 2
