Richard Blanco

because the winds are too strong, our Captain announces, his voice like an oracle coming through the loudspeakers of every lounge and hall, as if the ship itself were speaking. We’re not going to Malta–an enchanting island country fifty miles from Sicily, according to the brochure of the tour we’re not taking. But what if we did go to Malta? What if, as we are escorted on foot through the walled “Silent City” of Mdina, the walls begin speaking to me; and after we stop a few minutes to admire the impressive architecture, I feel Malta could be the place for me. What if, as we stroll the bastions to admire the panoramic harbor and stunning countryside, I dream of buying a little Maltese farm, raising Maltese horses in the green Maltese hills. What if, after we see the cathedral in Mosta saved by a miracle, I believe that Malta itself is a miracle; and before I’m transported back to the pier with a complimentary beverage, I’m struck with Malta fever, discover I am very Maltese indeed, and decide I must return to Malta, learn to speak Maltese with an English (or Spanish) accent, work as a Maltese professor of English at the University of Malta, and teach a course on The Maltese Falcon. Or, what if when we stop at a factory to shop for famous Malteseware, I discover that making Maltese crosses is my true passion. Yes, I’d get a Maltese cat and a Maltese dog, make Maltese friends, drink Malted milk, join the Knights of Malta, and be happy for the rest of my Maltesian life. But we’re not going to Malta. Malta is drifting past us, or we are drifting past it–an amorphous hump of green and brown bobbing in the portholes with the horizon as the ship heaves over whitecaps wisping into rainbows for a moment, then dissolving back into the sea.

The sole cause of a man’s unhappiness is that
he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.
—Pascal, Pensées

The vias of Italy turn to memory with each turn
and clack of the train’s wheels, with every stitch
of track we leave behind, the duomos return again
to my imagination, already imagining Paris—
a fantasy of lights and marble that may end
when the train stops at Gare de l’Est and I step
into the daylight. In this space between cities,
between the dreamed and the dreaming, there is
no map—no legend, no ancient street names
or arrows to follow, no red dot assuring me:
you are here—and no place else. If I don’t know
where I am, then I am only these heartbeats,
my breaths, the mountains rising and falling
like a wave scrolling across the train’s window.
I am alone with the moon on its path, staring
like a blank page, shear and white as the snow
on the peaks echoing back its light. I am this
solitude, never more beautiful, the arc of space
I travel through for a few hours, touching
nothing and keeping nothing, with nothing
to deny the night, the dark pines pointing
to the stars, this life, always moving and still.

I am often asked about my dual life as an engineer and poet. In part, this poem is a response to that question. But equally so, here I was interested in exploring the connection, or “bridge” between landscape, memory, and emotion. We are three-dimensional beings. Our experiences always happen in the context of a specific physical landscape. To remember some one, some thing, or some emotion, often means to remember that some place to which these are connected.

Morning, driving west again, away from the sun
rising in the slit of the rearview mirror, as I climb
on slabs of concrete and steel bent into a bridge
arcing with all its parabolic y-squared splendor.
I rise to meet the shimmering faces of buildings
above treetops meshed into a calico of greens,
forgetting the river below runs, insists on running
and scouring the earth, moving it grain by grain.

And for a few inclined seconds every morning
I am twelve years old with my father standing
at the tenth-floor window of his hospital room,
gazing at this same bridge like a mammoth bone
aching with the gravity of its own dense weight.
The glass dosed by a tepid light reviving the city
as I watched and read his sleeping, wondering
if he could even dream in such dreamless white:

Was he falling? Was he flying? Who was he, who
was I underneath his eyes, flitting like the birds
across the rooftops and early stars wasting away,
the rush-hour cars pushing through the avenues
like the tiny blood cells through his vein, the I.V.
spiraling down like a string of clear licorice feeding
his forearm, bruised pearl and lavender, colors
of the morning haze and the pills on his tongue.

The stitches healed, while the room kept sterile
with the usual silence between us. For three days
I served him water or juice in wilting paper cups,
flipped through muted soap operas and game shows,
and filled out the menu cards stamped Bland Diet.
For three nights I wedged flat and strange pillows
around his bed, his body shaped like a fallen S
and mortared in place by layers of stiff percale.

When he was ordered to walk, I took his hand,
together we stepped to the window and he spoke
—You’ll know how to build bridges like that someday—
today, I cross this city, this bridge, still spanning
the silent distance between us with the memory
of a father and son holding hands, secretly in love.

Word is praise for Marina, up past 3:00 a.m. the night before her flight, preparing and packing the platos tradicionales she’s now heating up in the oven while the tortillas steam like full moons on the stovetop. Dish by dish she tries to recreate Mexico in her son’s New England kitchen, taste-testing el mole from the pot, stirring everything: el chorizo-con-papas, el picadillo, el guacamole. The spirals of her stirs match the spirals in her eyes, the scented steam coils around her like incense, suffusing the air with her folklore. She loves Alfredo, as she loves all her sons, as she loves all things: seashells, cacti, plumes, artichokes. Her hand waves us to circle around the kitchen island, where she demonstrates how to fold tacos for the gringo guests, explaining what is hot and what is not, trying to describe tastes with English words she cannot savor. As we eat, she apologizes: not as good as at home, pero bueno. . . It is the best she can do in this strange kitchen which Sele has tried to disguise with papel picado banners of colored tissue paper displaying our names in piñata pink, maíz yellow, and Guadalupe green–strung across the lintels of the patio filled with talk of an early spring and do you remembers that leave an after-taste even the flan and café negro don’t cleanse. Marina has finished. She sleeps in the guest room while Alfredo’s paintings confess in the living room, while the papier-mâché skeletons giggle on the shelves, and shadows lean on the porch with rain about to fall. Tomorrow our names will be taken down and Marina will leave with her empty clay pots, feeling as she feels all things: velvet, branches, honey, stones. Feeling what we all feel: home is a forgotten recipe, a spice we can find nowhere, a taste we can never reproduce, exactly.