“Castles for The Laborers and Ballgames on the Radio”

By Martin Espada

For Howard Zinn (1922-2010)

We stood together at the top of his icy steps, without a word for once,

squinting at the hill below and the tumble we were about to take,

heads bumping on every step till our bodies rolled into the street.

He was older than the bread lines of the Great Depression. Before the War

he labored at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, even organized apprentices, but now

there was ice. I outweighed him by a hundred pounds; when my feet began

to skid, I would land on him and hear the crunch of his surgically repaired spine.

The books I held for him would fly away like doves disobeying an amateur magician.

Let’s go back in the house, I said. Show me the baseball Sandy Koufax signed to you:

“from one lefty to another.” Instead, he picked up a blue plastic bucket of sand,

the kind of pail good for building castles at Coney Island, tossed a fist of sand

down onto the sun-frozen concrete and took the first step, delicately. Again

and again, he would throw a handful of sand in the air like bread for pigeons,

then probe with the tip of his shoe for the sandy place on the next step:

sand, then step; sand, then step. Every time he took a step I took a step,

an apprentice shadow studying the movements of his teacher the body.

This is how I came to dance a soft-shoe in size fourteen boots, grinding

my toes into the gritty spots he left behind on the ice. I was there:

I saw him turn the tundra into the beach with a wave of his hand,

Coney Island of castles for the laborers and ballgames on the radio,

showing the way across the ice and down the hill into the street,

where he spoke to me the last words of the last lesson: You drive.

“Haunt Me”

By Martin Espada

for my father

I am the archaeologist. I sift the shards of you: cufflinks, passport photos,

a button from the March on Washington with a black hand shaking

a white hand, letters in Spanish, your birth certificate from a town high

in the mountains. I cup your silence, and the silence melts like ice in a cup.

I search for you in two yellow Kodak boxes marked Puerto Rico,

Noche Buena, Diciembre 1968. In the 8-millimeter silence the Espadas

gather, elders born before the Spanish American War, my grandfather

on crutches after fracturing his fossil hip, his blind brother on a cane.

You greet the elders and they call you Tato, the name they call you there.

Uncles and cousins sing in a chorus of tongues without sound, vibration

of guitar strings stilled by an unseen hand, maracas shaking empty

of seeds. The camera wobbles from the singers to the television

and the astronauts sending pictures of the moon back to earth.

Down by the river, women still pound laundry on the rocks.

I am eleven again, a boy from the faraway city of ice that felled

my grandfather, startled after the blind man with the cane stroked

my face with his hand dry as straw, crying out Bendito. At the table,

I hear only the silence that rises like the river in my big ears.

You sit next to me, clowning for the camera, tugging the lapels

on your jacket, slicking back your black hair, brown skin darker

from days in the sun. You slide your arm around my shoulder,

your good right arm, your pitching arm, and my moon face radiates,

and the mountain song of my uncles and cousins plays in my head.

Watching you now, my face stings as it stung when my blind great-uncle

brushed my cheekbones, searching for his own face. When you died,

Tato, I took a razor to the movie looping in my head, cutting the scenes

where you curled an arm around my shoulder, all the times you would

squeeze the silence out of me so I could hear the cries and songs again.

When you died, I heard only the silences between us, the shouts belling

the air before the phone went dead, all the words melting like ice in a cup. That way I could set my jaw and take my mother’s hand at the mortuary,

greet the elders in my suit and tie at the memorial, say all the right words.

Yet my face stings at last. I rewind and watch your arm drape across

my shoulder, over and over. A year ago, you pressed a Kodak slide

of my grandfather into my hand and said: Next time, stay longer.

Now, in the silence that is never silent, I push the chair away

from the table and say to you: Sit down. Tell me everything. Haunt me