Singing at the Gates

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  we meet as friends

  we embrace each other sadly,

  he becomes kin, no more finger pointing,

  and I attend to him,

  our emotions like a secret entryway

  which we use to retreat from the pain,

  the tears, the hurt,

  of being together all the time.

  No one understands how we feel,

  yet, he understands

  how I imagine my denim workman’s shirt

  to be an Inca gown of a princess

  and when he wakes up brutish and growling,

  I understand his pain

  how he would like to be rid of me,

  go south to his village in Mexico and retrieve his life,

  meet his old friends,

  go out into the fields and join them in work.

  But it’s not to be,

  we are tied together as sure as were convicts chained and hobbled

  forever. There is no escaping our prison cell.

  There is no date when the sentence will expire.

  He’s tattooed the Sacred Heart of Christ on his back

  which I have tolerated,

  imagine,

  in bed when I’m loving a man,

  and the man asks about the tattoo,

  how can I explain

  it is not my skin, not my tattoo,

  that my flesh is made of air, of mirrors,

  of stones and dirt,

  how do I explain to my lover

  that my bed is a small canoe

  and my kisses are flowers

  I toss on the water

  in his honor.

  You see,

  my prayers have never been answered,

  I have never been restored to my original self,

  I don’t know who I am or how I got here—

  somewhere, the angel,

  that was supposed to look over me,

  got drunk and fell off a cliff,

  and there is not one to help me,

  so I offer a red-lipped smile at the world

  and a few people know

  the smile is a wound.

  G.

  There is this stark sadness,

  the stench about this life,

  that lingering trace that I am mad,

  that it’s all a bad, sorrowful nightmare.

  I have blue linoleum floors,

  a blue bed I sit on to clasp my black anklets,

  and who knows

  how long can I carry on—

  what will happen when I get old,

  when my beauty fades like an old pair of shoes

  with heels shaved down,

  me wobbling bow-legged down the sidewalk

  with little boy throwing stones at me?

  A cheap fan cools my heated bones.

  Smoking a pipe now and then relieves the presence of the stranger that

  always seems to be there,

  staring at me in the mirror.

  Not God, not saints, not folk cures,

  nothing can help me anymore-—

  these pink walls, these clown faces, these colors

  I paint myself with are the witnesses to my life,

  and no one will notice when I’m gone,

  stabbed in the heart one night

  in bed by a jealous lover

  but until that time,

  I dance on the small stage,

  and I believe I am someone else,

  believe that none of that will come to pass.

  There’s never been anyone to talk to,

  so I talk to the clown faces,

  we pretend we are on some stage, in some theater in New York

  or Los Angeles,

  that we do not live on our knees,

  that we do not fear the day,

  that we are on stage singing to a full house,

  and a wealthy man falls in love with us,

  and takes us away to live in a big house,

  yes the dream,

  I suckle like a babe at its tit,

  gorging myself on its milk,

  fattening myself each night

  because the days are so bleak and lean

  that sometimes

  I feel dead,

  I feel my life carried in a coarse wooden casket

  through the streets

  a monster that finally died,

  a monster that lived behind doors,

  that given us by life,

  and that made us worse than we ever thought we

  could be.

  So just to be,

  is enough, with our bountiful baskets of gifts we once had to offer to life,

  which we emptied at the disgraceful landfill,

  which we gave away for small dusty awards,

  with the grief of lepers everywhere

  we go,

  chased away so we must live in darkness,

  here in this trashed out place I call home,

  we’ll believe is my beautiful palace

  and you I,

  for a moment, will believe,

  what we do, is love

  and not drown, in our sadness,

  not drown in our sadness.

  Let us be honorable as

  those stray dogs roaming fence-lines

  snatching white pigeons midair,

  slouching under a tree to feast on their catch,

  let’s scatter our feathers my angels

  everywhere,

  growling at intruders as we crush the bones

  of each other’s hearts;

  and have our romance played out in the cemetery

  visiting those like us we’ll call our relatives,

  quietly sitting over the graves weeping,

  as traffic hums on the freeway in the distance,

  let’s pretend our voices are children’s again

  and pretend we believe in a Christmas,

  taping paper reindeer and snowflakes to windows,

  believing outside Santa was watching me.

  and Baby Jesus really is being born,

  nestled in mangers of our straw hearts,

  you and I are the shepherds

  came out only at night

  loved in the dark so no one could see my face,

  screamed and cried in a voice no one heard,

  lost herself

  in hair-blowers, curtains, music, black leather outfits,

  empty rooms,

  like an angel with wings butchered,

  mangy hair,

  tossed out of heaven,

  to exist in rock-rubbled crumbling graffiti walls

  even stray dogs avoid,

  or industrial raftered buildings

  intended to store fifty gallons of toxic waste,

  or converting factory workers’ bathrooms,

  with stained sinks, I,

  somehow, pretend it’s my extravagant dressing room,

  and the torn mattresses and busted windows

  and ripped screens,

  blood stained floors, warped water-logged cardboard walls,

  become my palace,

  where my heart grows like a spiny yucca cactus,

  and paper roses sprout

  in blood that blooms from heart wounds.

  Here, you see, Gods are blind

  here where I live I’ve sewn God’s lips shut

  with threads of my black pubic hair,

  here I’ve
cut God’s hands off that never reached out to bless me,

  here I’ve taken a hammer and crushed the religious idols,

  here, when you come to see me, drunken,

  seeking sex or company,

  you’ll find no Gods reproaching us

  for what we do,

  because when you come here to visit me,

  it’s the page in the book

  that was torn out—

  so under the black blankets of my bed,

  we invent the story we desire,

  we imagine the story

  with a kinder ending.

  SINGING AT THE GATES

  No Pope nor Priest could more enhance my life

  than Mechica smiles and Inca eyes,

  those startled sparrow eyes peering over papa’s nesting-shoulder,

  entering the Santuario, her father’s back to me,

  the brown baby girl hugging his neck,

  her face pressed against his white shirt collar,

  as it has been for a thousand years,

  from Mayans, Incans, Aztecas, Mexicans, Chicanos,

  Cholos y Homies,

  we’ve carried and carry our infants through government massacres, forced marches

  off our lands,

  to the present in fiestas, low-rider gatherings, our children

  clinging to our arms and bodies for safety,

  a continuous unseen line from the beginning of our Mestizo birth,

  walking across America,

  long before white men arrived,

  our arms circle our loved ones,

  imperfect and beautiful,

  in NY baseball shirt, chain and crucifix down our chest, La Ruca

  wearing Brown Pride workout t-top,

  black net-gloves wrist to elbow, tandito hat with feather,

  tight black shorts, bobby socks, platform spike heels,

  low-riding

  mamacita down for the dream cruise.

  Y pues, look around and see the pensive

  sombrero’d rancheros con palos en los fieles,

  scooping shovel after shovel of dirt

  cleaning la acequia—

  soil-scent fills your nostrils aging veterano,

  and I wonder what palabras are whispered to you by the rain

  y el viento,

  sage, yierba, alfalfa, calabacitas,

  boots and jeans worn down and faded by day-long plowing.

  In cities along the Rio Grande,

  Burque, Santa, Espa, Taos, y Cruces,

  locos scrawl graffiti duels, branching on adobe walls predicting

  a cold and deadly winter,

  y mujeres gather at la cantina for a wedding, clap and sing,

  close eyes, open mouths, faces ’pa la musica,

  so much erotic sensuality in their waists and legs y nalgas!

  Backpack Chicano students roam plaza crowds

  where senoritas flick Spanish fans over heavy lidded eyelashes,

  las ninas tie roses in their hair,

  madrecitas clutch home-spun woolen shawls,

  crowds tip-toe to see the singer and musicians,

  while the woman in the wedding dress leans

  toward the photographer,

  rosary weaving through her fingers,

  silver crown on her turreted hair,

  white of her teeth whiter

  than her wedding dress.

  I sing at the gates about the beauty of my people,

  while police arrest a boy for wearing his baseball cap

  cocked to the side,

  stigmatized thug for wearing a goatee and mustache,

  tattoo of the archangel Gabriel

  on his arm,

  chain around his neck,

  NIKE hoop shirt,

  leaning against a ’45 coupe door, hood muraled with Tonantzin,

  sunglassed jainas with long black hair chilling inside,

  I praise them for never having forgotten their cultura

  or ancestral roots, wearing papa’s hand-me-down khakis,

  warmed by a woodstove, surrounded with pious paintings

  y mama’s weaving loom,

  some eventually lose their land to casino slots,

  some mourned at roadside altars senselessly murdered,

  where I kiss the wreathes on barbwire fences

  and sign myself in prayer, march behind three priests

  bearing crucifixes in procession,

  and after solemn benedictions,

  sit my woman on my knee and fondle her breasts in their memory.

  I praise cowboys swinging their ropes, soft leather saddle rubbing

  with the horse’s clip-clop,

  take my youngest son to the Matachines dances

  in the sacred Chicano pueblo,

  pass the Mayan turquoise jaguar mask

  three thousand years old around and fast for days,

  pray and sing pray and sing pray and sing,

  for the five-year-old girls in Flamenco dancer’s hoop skirts

  ruffling hems high as they kick and give the rooster’s yelp,

  serape adults clap and hats fly,

  while old men kneel before the rebel priest wearing a well-used cowboy hat,

  flanked by two stout men

  holding candle staffs aloft praising the cottonwood tree.

  I amble past barrio yards

  where vandals hammered statues to smithereens,

  beheaded Jesus,

  trampled fencing as they fled,

  and I recall

  I started my learning from tio Solis,

  his small adobe home displaying more religious statues than a church,

  the special one—El Nino de Atocha, had his own small alcove and altar,

  mat for shoes, tiny pictures of our familia y la plebe on the walls,

  carvings of La Malinche, Cortes’ puta, who rather than let him

  send her kids to Spain for an education,

  drowned them

  in Rio Grande.

  I learned dancing with gypsies, old men in suits, ribbons,

  wooden swords and tin mirrors, and I danced

  past crumbling adobes, rusting truck hulls y el campo santo,

  in knee-high weeds,

  wearing my feathered bishop’s bonnet,

  scrolled with paper, I scuffed

  my cheap black shoes in dust and gravel singing

  he-he-ho-na-no

  all the way down to the twilight river-trails,

  following the young girl in white crinoline first-communion dress,

  asking Spirits to bless her journey.

  No mountain hawk has more courage or fierce truth

  than the Vatos that come from north and south and east and west

  tattooed low-riders dressed in swaying cloths like Mayan healers,

  who’ve walked beside mothers to a hundred burials

  for young locos shot by police or rival gangs,

  who kneel to take rocks from the dirt to make crosses

  for fallen brothers and sisters, rock crosses all over Aztlan,

  symbolizing union, faith, identity.

  Generation after generation—

  La Raza’s people-priest wears a bandanna

  stations himself among la gente, rattling our tambourines,

  wearing our Matachine mask,

  from ancient ninety-year-old abuelitas

  who make who we are burn bright, unfold and rumble deep,

  deep rumble to the young altar boy
/>   peering through the crowd for his cousin,

  deep rumble to the Chicana nun kissing Christ’s feet,

  deep rumble as we unfurl banners of San Martin

  and San Ysidro Labrador, who gives our fields abundant harvest,

  to the Penitentes in moradas chanting ancient Moorish/Indio alabados

  by candlelight, to La Palomia in a hundred small churches

  kneeling in pews

  appealing to Christ for mercy, murmuring

  the deep rumble of our love.

  We stand together great and small,

  mentally ill next to the lesbian aunt,

  pinto next to the school teacher,

  twelve-year-old tecato’s daughter next to the community center fighter,

  mother with a hundred lovers next to ese who vows never to retreat, proud

  Santero with his retablos, firme bato,

  I lose myself in all of you,

  in the tiniest capilla in the furthest reach of el llano

  for an infant who never survived the harsh winter

  because there was no medicine,

  I am the sand beneath its head,

  the bonfire log that flames in a man’s backyard

  as he stands with stick in hand, thinking of his life,

  the widow who proudly shows off her mother’s photograph

  framed in wood she whittled and shaved herself.

  I celebrate you, the virtues and customs you have defended

  despite colonialists rampaging to kill every one of you—

  you survived, madre clinging to babes in arms

  and kneeling before crosses,

  you survived hefe hoisting your sons on your shoulders and riding

  them around the yard,

  you survived amante waiting outside church for your novia,

  you survived ninos playing in church yards, on steps, rails,

  you survived vato loco

  with hat and tank-top t-shirt, polished shoes,

  leaning on haunches,

  an arm on crooked leg,

  very cool, beside your chromed out

  low-rider,

  you survived abuelita smiling under the apple tree,

  so grand and open and happy a smile it’s like a wheat field on fire,

  singing our skill with mud and rock in building adobes,

  our carving the finest figures of wood,

  our cultivating fields to offer huge crops.

  Intact is the older brother’s love for the younger,

  intact is love proving we are men and dying foolishly,

  pistiando with our compas and fighting each other,

  sometimes killing one another,

  our cultural past and heritage runs though the boys

  wrapped in thick coats and beanie caps riding their horses,