Not Here
Espada, Mart?n
Poem Not Here for Ra?l 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...
...Mart?n Espada Mart?n Espada's most recent book is "Alabanza: New and Selected Poems...
...The officer in charge of interrogation shook the poet's papers and fumed: This is not poetry...
...Zurita says: After the bombing, after the coup, no one could stand here to look at the ruins...
...Zurita's beard is forged in gray, the steel of a Navy ship...
...He has also released a CD of poems called "Now the Dead Will Dance the Mambo...
...They grieved, heads down, hands in pockets, moving along, glancing up, a blackened balcony in the corner of the eye...
...Did you grieve for Allende...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...He is a professor in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst...
...the coup was a world in miniature they painted by hand, a train with real smoke and bells circling the track in the basement...
...I am the one navigating the night without stars...
...What Zurita saw gnawed like a parasite at the muscles in his eyes: Chile's warships invaded the harbor of Valpara?so and subversives staggered at gunpoint through the city of hills down to the dock...
...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...
...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...
...Ten miles away, at the White House, the plotters were pleased...
...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...
...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...
...the fountain of smoke is gone...
...The fountain speaks in the water's tongue...
...Today we walk through the courtyard of the presidential palace...
...If you did, you were suspect...
...September 11, 1973: Zurita's heart crashed deep in the ribs of a Navy ship...
...He lights a cigarette for those who would see the ruins where the ruins have been swept away...
...The other poets tell me: Electricity was involved...
Vol. 69 • September 2005 • No. 9
