For All of Us, One Today Read online

  ALSO BY RICHARD BLANCO

  Boston Strong: The Poem to Benefit the One Fund Boston

  One Today: A Poem for Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration

  Looking for The Gulf Motel

  Directions to the Beach of the Dead

  City of a Hundred Fires

  FOR ALL OF US,

  ONE TODAY

  An Inaugural Poet’s Journey

  Richard Blanco

  BEACON PRESS, BOSTON

  FOR ALL OF US

  from every walk of life doing what we do,

  making what we make, loving who we love,

  giving what we give, thanking what we’re given,

  praising what we believe, fighting what we fear,

  wanting what we want, speaking how we speak,

  and the telling of the stories we tell one another:

  each of us shaping, evolving, reaching for the ideal

  of this great experiment that is we the people,

  that is our country with the word hope

  as fresh on our tongues as it ever was.

  One sun rose on us today . . .

  Days before our field trip to the science center, Mrs. Bermudez tells our class the sun is actually hundreds of times larger than the earth. We move around it. We’re nothing, zooming through dark space, she says, matter-of-factly, as if it didn’t matter that we were no longer the center of our own little worlds. We, with crayons in our hands coloring dittos of the sun and our nine planets. We, at our desks but also helplessly zooming through cold, empty space. I don’t want to believe her; the sun is the size of a sunflower, I insist. I draw lemon-yellow petals around it and color its center sienna brown. The first time I see a lion I am nine years old, my grandfather’s hands holding me back from the cage I want to open. I can still feel his grip and the lion’s eyes staring at me like tiny, amber planets behind bars, asking me to set him free. My first kiss was under the shade of moonlit palms in Janet Carballo’s backyard, exactly two days before the end of the school year. But I’m still feeling the powdery skin behind her earlobes, smelling her strawberry lip gloss and the orange blossoms in the air already thick with summer. I never saw a comet until I was twenty-four, cupped in the darkness of the Everglades and the arms of a man I loved. It was past midnight on a Sunday, I remember; I didn’t go to work the next day. I’m still sleeping with the mangroves and the ibis, under a masterpiece of stars. The comet’s tail a brushstroke of pure, genius light.

  These are more than memories. They are what lives—and relives—inside our bodies, in every cell and heartbeat. The undiscovered DNA of our souls imprinted with the minute details of those eternal moments that change our lives, our stories, forever. Sometimes they’re subtle, sometimes dramatic, but we know nothing will ever be the same the instant we experience them. And quite often they are unexpected.

  On the afternoon of December 12, while casually driving back to my home in Maine, I receive a phone call with the news that I have been chosen as inaugural poet. Bewildered, I first wonder if it could be some cruel joke a friend might be playing on me. You mean like Robert Frost? Like Maya Angelou? I ask, wanting confirmation that what I just heard is true. Yes. Yes, I’m told, as I keep driving down the interstate in a daze, trying to speak, trying to fathom what has just happened. But I know. My body knows it’s the most important moment of my life as a poet, a day by which I will mark the rest of my life, the day I learned that I will be named the fifth poet ever in our history to be US Inaugural Poet.

  I’m asked by the Presidential Inaugural Committee to write not one but three poems in three weeks. Quite a challenge. But before any apprehension or pressure sets in, the world I move through is transfixed by my jubilation and astonishment: one by one the birches along the highway turn from silver to gold; the bare-branched oaks traced with snow become perfectly balanced sculptures; and the highway stretches right into the sun. I begin the poem in my mind as I drive, musing over a flood of lines and images.

  But then I catch my eyes in the rearview mirror; it becomes a portal into my past. In my reflection I see my father holding my hand for the last time, as he is quietly dying in the spare room of the house where he raised me. His eyes blink forever once: goodbye; twice: forgive me; three times: I won’t be back. Gone, into the space beyond the sun and stars. I think of him, my mother, my grandparents—their courage and sacrifices, all their struggles and hard work to make a better life in America for themselves and for my brother and me. Overcome by a wave of immense gratitude, I pull off the highway, step out of the car, and sit on the shoulder, leaning against the car door. Looking into the sky, the sun becomes a sunflower again. This is because of them . . . I keep thinking and repeating . . . because of them . . . all because of them . . .

  One light, waking up rooftops,

  under each one, a story . . .

  Every story begins inside a story that’s already begun by others. Long before we take our first breath, there’s a plot well under way with characters and a setting we did not choose but which were chosen for us. My journey as inaugural poet began with that December phone call, literally; but figuratively, it began a long time ago in another journey full of sorrow and loss that would end with hope and triumph.

  1968: My parents summon every bit of courage and decide to emigrate from Cuba, exiling themselves from the only country they have ever known, uncertain if they’ll ever again walk into the homes where they were born, or sit in the town square where they courted each other, or share a cafecito with their lifelong neighbors. In my mother’s case, her entire family is reduced to a handful of photographs, black-and-white hopes of someday reliving even the simplest pleasures of her past: tasting her mother’s arroz con pollo, gossiping with her five sisters, dancing with her eldest brother who taught her how to mambo when she was five years old.

  On a dizzying flight from Havana, my parents arrive to the frigid drizzle of Madrid in December: one suitcase and the equivalent of fifty cents; my older brother, six years old; my mother, seven months pregnant with me. They share a one-floor apartment—un piso—with two other families, eat at soup kitchens, and wear mended winter coats from thrift shops. Two months later I’m born in a hospital run by Catholic charities. At home, my mother lays me down in an open drawer padded with towels—my first crib. But not for long. Weeks later, we emigrate once more, to New York City, where my paternal grandparents (exiled through Mexico) wait for us along with other relatives. My first baby picture is for my green card. I’m forty-five days old, a character in a story who already belongs to three countries.

  Turn the page to another chapter: four years later, after my parents have saved enough money, we move to Westchester, a Miami suburb at the fringe of the county, sprawling westward with neon-lit strip malls, new sidewalks, and rows of identical houses built overnight it seemed. Despite its very Anglo-Saxon name, Westchester is a close-knit community of Cuban exiles like my parents, dutifully making their way with one eye on the American Dream and the other, nostalgic eye looking back toward the homeland and the lives they have left behind.

  We settle into the house my mother still lives in today: a modest duplex shadowed by royal palms and mango trees, amid mild winters and summer’s glorious thunderstorms pelting our terra-cotta rooftop. The setting mimics my parents’ lost island paradise—a constant backdrop that feeds hopes of someday returning to their patria, their mother country, exactly as they had left it, to find their lives exactly as they were before, and step back into their story.

  However, it was a story I had not lived, a story I couldn’t quite piece together from snippets of conversations at the dinner table about the palm-lined streets of the sugar-mill town where we were from, or from my grandmother’s go
ssip at the beauty salon damning la comunista who “stole” her house in Hormiguero. Sometimes the story was a fairy tale from my grandfather’s lips, missing the taste of those mystical tropical fruits I’d never seen and the magical scent of the night jasmine in the backyard of his home in Cuba. Sometimes it was a tragedy told through the letters my mother read out loud from relatives in Cuba telling us about the sick, the dying, the executed. And sometimes it was a picture-book story from photo albums smuggled out of the country that I would page through, looking for my resemblance in the black-and-white eyes and smiles of my dark-haired cousins, my barefoot uncles in tank tops, or my aunts in paper-thin housecoats. Their faces unfamiliar, even though they were family.

  Family as distant as the American families I watched on TV, where elegant mothers spoke English and didn’t work outside their homes furnished with plush velvet sofas and polished coffee tables. Unlike my mother, they had time to prepare brown-bag lunches and cook dinner every night wearing pearl chokers and pumps. A world where fathers came home from the office on time every day, smoked pipes, read the newspaper in their cardigans, and said, I love you, son, every night. Neighborhoods with oak-lined streets, where children were never called fatso or faggot like me. No, they rode shiny brand-new bicycles or walked from school to homes with emerald hedges, doorbells, and double-door garages. This was how I understood America, from reruns of shows like The Brady Bunch, Leave It to Beaver, and My Three Sons. Having never traveled outside my culturally insular Westchester, surrounded by people just like us, I truly believed an America exactly like the one on TV existed. That fantasy was the real America in my mind. Westchester felt like a kind of cultural purgatory, a waiting place caught between the real-imagined America and the real-imagined Cuba, both stories part of one story that I wouldn’t weave together until living through my experiences as inaugural poet and forging through the creative process of writing the inaugural poems.

  My face, your face . . .

  To this day, I don’t know exactly how I was chosen as inaugural poet. I asked committee staff, but no one seemed to know the details. I had never met the president—I’ve never met any president. In fact, I believe I am the only inaugural poet in history who didn’t have some kind of personal connection to the administration that chose him or her. This made my selection even more surprising, and the honor felt even greater, given the trust they had placed in me and my work without ever knowing me personally. However, after a while, I began fearing that the exact details of my selection might not be what I had imagined, so I preferred to simply cling (and still do) to my romantic musings: the president reading my books in the Oval Office, so completely absorbed by my work that he tells his chief of staff to hold all his calls, no matter who; or, perhaps, the president reading my poems at the dinner table to the whole family; or, dare I imagine, he and the First Lady snuggled together in bed, reading my love poems to each other and discussing them with delight.

  Perhaps there might have been some political affinity that influenced my selection, despite the family lore that I was named after Richard Nixon. After all, I did fill a lot of “boxes”: I was the youngest, first openly gay, first immigrant, and first Latino inaugural poet. And the list could go on and on with other firsts that weren’t really highlighted: first engineer, first Floridian, first Mainer, first poet with bushy eyebrows—wait, I think Frost may have beat me on that one! Regardless, I can’t help believing that I was selected based on the quality of my work, and that the president must’ve read my poems and been personally involved in my selection, especially since he is such a literary person and an accomplished writer himself. I also can’t help thinking that he may have chosen me because he connected with my story as a child of exiles/immigrants in the same way that I’ve always connected with his story. Surely he must have had to navigate questions about cultural identity, his place in America, and the American Dream throughout his life, as I’ve had to do.

  Questions like the ones I had to face on the first day of my first graduate creative writing course at Florida International University. After we read and discussed poems by Whitman, Frost, and Ginsberg, Professor Campbell McGrath announced our assignment: Write a poem about America. Eager yet anxious, I thought: What do I know about America? What is America? Sprawled on my bed that night (and every night that whole week), I continued asking questions that hadn’t really surfaced until then: Was I American? Was I Cuban? Both? Neither? Where did I come from? Where do I belong? Finally, the day before the assignment was due, I gave up. Or I should say, I gave in—surrendered to the emotional truth about my experience, the only America I knew. I set to paper a poem I titled in Spanish “América,” narrating my childhood pleas for an authentic meal at Thanksgiving, or San Giving, as my mother still calls it, as in San Pedro, San Ignacio, or San Cristóbal—a whole different kind of feast day!

  AMÉRICA

  I.

  Although Tía Miriam boasted she discovered

  at least half a dozen uses for peanut butter—

  topping for guava shells in syrup,

  butter substitute for Cuban toast,

  hair conditioner and relaxer—

  Mamá never knew what to make

  of the monthly five-pound jars

  handed out by the immigration department

  until my friend, Jeff, mentioned jelly.

  II.

  There was always pork though,

  for every birthday and wedding,

  whole ones on Christmas and New Year’s Eve,

  even on Thanksgiving day—pork,

  fried, broiled, or crispy skin roasted—

  as well as cauldrons of black beans,

  fried plantain chips, and yuca con mojito.

  These items required a special visit

  to Antonio’s Mercado on the corner of Eighth Street

  where men in guayaberas stood in senate

  blaming Kennedy for everything—“Ese hijo de puta!”

  the bile of Cuban coffee and cigar residue

  filling the creases of their wrinkled lips;

  clinging to one another’s lies of lost wealth,

  ashamed and empty as hollow trees.

  III.

  By seven I had grown suspicious—we were still here.

  Overheard conversations about returning

  had grown wistful and less frequent.

  I spoke English; my parents didn’t.

  We didn’t live in a two-story house

  with a maid or a wood-panel station wagon

  nor vacation camping in Colorado.

  None of the girls had hair of gold;

  none of my brothers or cousins

  were named Greg, Peter, or Marcia;

  we were not the Brady Bunch.

  None of the black and white characters

  on Donna Reed or on the Dick Van Dyke Show

  were named Guadalupe, Lázaro, or Mercedes.

  Patty Duke’s family wasn’t like us either—

  they didn’t have pork on Thanksgiving,

  they ate turkey with cranberry sauce;

  they didn’t have yuca, they had yams

  like the dittos of Pilgrims I colored in class.

  IV.

  A week before Thanksgiving

  I explained to my abuelita

  about the Indians and the Mayflower,

  how Lincoln set the slaves free;

  I explained to my parents about

  the purple mountain’s majesty,

  “one if by land, two if by sea,”

  the cherry tree, the tea party,

  the amber waves of grain,

  the “masses yearning to be free,”

  liberty and justice for all, until

  finally they agreed:

  this Thanksgiving we would have turkey,

  as well as pork.

  V.

  Abuelita prepared the poor fowl

  as if committing an act of treason,

  faking her enthusiasm for my sake.

&
nbsp; Mamá set a frozen pumpkin pie in the oven

  and prepared candied yams following instructions

  I translated from the marshmallow bag.

  The table was arrayed with gladiolas,

  the plattered turkey loomed at the center

  on plastic silver from Woolworth’s.

  Everyone sat in green velvet chairs

  we had upholstered with clear vinyl,

  except Tío Carlos and Toti, seated

  in the folding chairs from the Salvation Army.

  I uttered a bilingual blessing

  and the turkey was passed around

  like a game of Russian Roulette.

  “DRY,” Tío Berto complained, and proceeded

  to drown the lean slices with pork fat drippings

  and cranberry jelly—“esa mierda roja,” he called it.

  Faces fell when Mamá presented her ochre pie—

  pumpkin was a home remedy for ulcers, not a dessert.

  Tía María made three rounds of Cuban coffee

  then Abuelo and Pepe cleared the living room furniture,

  put on a Celia Cruz LP and the entire family

  began to merengue over the linoleum of our apartment,

  sweating rum and coffee until they remembered—

  it was 1970 and 46 degrees—

  in América.

  After repositioning the furniture,

  an appropriate darkness filled the room.

  Tío Berto was the last to leave.

  Though I knew the poem was honest, I was unsure of it on many levels and apprehensive that it wouldn’t measure up. However, much to my surprise and delight, the poem was met with tremendous praise and warmhearted laughter from my classmates and Professor McGrath in workshop. The reaction triggered something incredibly new for me emotionally and artistically. For years I had practically rejected my culture (to be of one mind with my parents’ and grandparents’ story just wasn’t cool for a teenager). But after writing “América,” I realized their story of exile/immigration was as much mine as it was theirs, albeit a story I didn’t know exactly but was suddenly compelled to discover through poetry. “América” eventually became the opening poem in my first book, City of a Hundred Fires, titled after the Cuban city of Cienfuegos, where my parents were from. Reaching back into my life, into my story within their story, and negotiating a cultural identity became the driving tension and theme of two subsequent collections of poetry, several essays I would write over the next twelve years, and even the inaugural poems.