Diva (Paperback)

Chapter One

    The New World's History in Three Voices

Confusing Cuba with a wealthy land,
Columbus started what for centuries
has plagued the people who survived in me:
part-slave, part-royalty, part-Caliban,

cross-dresser in the golden silk the sea
rolls out along a beach that isn't mine,
American yet un-American
because not one of us is truly free,

I am compelled to sing in rhyme
forgetting what the end of beauty is.
I know that beauty is both grand and wise;
I know that Cuba's dying is a crime

that started with Columbus and his lies.
The Caliban in me will dance as if
he understands that beauty is like love;
the royalty in me could do with less,

but always wants wha

Chapter One

    The New World's History in Three Voices

Confusing Cuba with a wealthy land,
Columbus started what for centuries
has plagued the people who survived in me:
part-slave, part-royalty, part-Caliban,

cross-dresser in the golden silk the sea
rolls out along a beach that isn't mine,
American yet un-American
because not one of us is truly free,

I am compelled to sing in rhyme
forgetting what the end of beauty is.
I know that beauty is both grand and wise;
I know that Cuba's dying is a crime

that started with Columbus and his lies.
The Caliban in me will dance as if
he understands that beauty is like love;
the royalty in me could do with less,

but always wants whatever he can have.
Today, I think I'm just as beautiful
as something. I convince myself I feel
but can't remember, what the proud black slave

in me would call "the greatest gift of all."
I don't know what she means by that, her hands
so calloused none are more American,
but sing for this island, this miracle.

    The Repeating Island

The culture of the Peoples of the Sea is a flux interrupted
by rhythms which attempt to silence the noises with which their
own social formation interrupts the discourse of Nature.
Antonio Benítez-Rojo

In Cuba, 1949, a boy
Who almost was a man, who lived beneath
A mountain where guerillas hid, so green
And full of shrieking parrots—children hid,
The sea murmuring, murmuring like the dead

So close beneath the mountain that was green,
All colors gathered in the jungle's arms.
The children playing, hiding, shrieks and laughs,
He played with them among the trees and snakes.
The trees that hid the renegades by night,
The snakes their wives made into soup,
The angry men who came by night to steal,
The men who smelled of liquor, black as night,
The traitors, rapists, pigs who stole their eggs
And chickens, killed the cows his father raised.
One day, they'd come to steal the whole nation,
The waves repeating, repeating what they said.

A boy one day, his country's fate the next,
In Cuba, vast plantations all around,
The sugar and molasses, white and brown,
The sugar cane like bullwhips in the wind,
The coffee quiet on the mountainsides—
Plantations framed by mountains and the sea,
Plantations where a kind of slavery
Made sweetness from the blackest sin,
Made bitterness from the sweat of men,
Refinement white as sugar, white as sand,
Dissolving in the coffee brewed so black.
The children playing, playing in the sun:

The men who stole, his people said, were men
More black than brown, whose children played and starved
And waved the Cuban flag. One story goes
There was a little boy, a boy who was
As lonely as a solitary star,
The boy who beat a young mulatto girl,
The beating, beating like the ocean's heart,

Accused of stealing while the children played,
A parrot shrieking, then the rifle shot—
He tried to save what was already lost.
My father tells me that they lost so much.
(I love my father, like I'm lost, so much.)
My father was his father's son, they owned
A vast plantation. Cuba: mountains, sea,
The vast plantation where a boy became
A man—in 1949, soon, soon,
A new divided nation would be born,
A new divided nation would be born.

    Sonnet in the Cuban Way

To make you fall in love with me, I'd curse
Before I'd sing to you; implacable
And elegant, I'd force you with my class
Beneath a music kind of tropical
But mine enough you'd never recognize
Its foreign cadences. O island whore,
I'd stare like moonlight in your eyes,
I'd lie that I don't want you anymore
Then fuck you like Americans know how—
To make you fall in love with me, I'd die
Just near enough to you there'd be no doubt
My feelings are eternal. Dressed in dew,
You'd meekly pardon my brutality,
In love at last, so naked you'd seem free.

    The Return

He doesn't know it yet, but when my father
and I return there, it will be forever.
His antihypertensives thrown away,
his briefcase in the attic left to waste,
the football game turned off—he's snoring now,
he doesn't even dream it, but I know
I'll carry him the way he carried me
when I was small: In 2023,
my father's shrunken, eighty-five years old,
weighs ninety pounds, a little dazed but thrilled
that Castro's long been dead, his son impeached!
He doesn't know it, dozing on the couch
across the family room from me, but this
is what I've dreamed of giving him, just this.
And as I carry him upon my shoulders,
triumphant strides across a beach so golden
I want to cry, that's when he sees for sure,
he sees he's needed me for all these years.
He doesn't understand it yet, but when
I give him Cuba, he will love me then.

    The Dream of Loving Cuba

The island wants me back. It's half-erect
beneath America on all my maps—
just look at how it wants me, shamelessly,
a geographic urge that can't be helped,

a crime of nature, both a heretic
and ever faithful to its needs. I hate
to see it bargaining for amnesty,
as if this long seduction were the trip

I'll never take to see its shores, as if
to watch the ocean while it masturbates
with every stroke of curling wave could seem
like human hope. I know that it's a trap—

I know the island wants me to be rough,
to tell it that I'm never coming back,
to hate the jungles it puts on for me,
to throw the ripened plantains it prepares

across a room my father ate in once,
a room in a decrepit house in Cuba's locked,
unwilling past in which I dream. I dream
I'm bargaining for something we revere,

like freedom or redemption, and by chance
I come across a map I think I recognize—
unfolding it, I squelch the urge to scream,
until I see it tells me where desire
is. Cuba, take me back! I know that look,
I know you want me, begging on my knees,
to tell the truth of one lost history,
a truth I tell myself, your grateful liar.

    The Cardiac Exam

Before the brainless heart gives out,
I realized while listening
To hers—I guess I understood
Its plaintive language passably,

Unlike the Spanish from her mouth,
That drowning, soft, unloosened song—
It wants to do some lasting good,
It wants never again to bleed,

It wants to float up just outside
The lonesome body that contains it.
To swell with joyful empathy,
Re-tell the cancer's seeding of

Her pericardium—a wide
Expanse of sweetest Cuban fruit
That feeds starved throngs, not emptiness
Unfilled by muffled beats of love

So distant I begin to hear
The music of a dying few,
Of how not one of us survived
Their murders, bodies choking swamps.

The germ of knowledge is in here:
Her failing organ is in you
Just as in me, her blue-green eyes
One world, a promise to be kept.

    Suícídal Ideation

    for Rafael Fernando Campo, d. 1993

Miami, near a hundred-eight degrees.
If temperatures were distances, by now
We'd see it, Cuba's razor edge, we'd see

The first few seagulls. Lowered in the ground,
What else is there to understand of him:
For years I thought he was the Cuban town

I never would inhabit, that his names
Were metonyms I never would decode.
The scorching sunlight, from behind them, limns

The wreaths of flowers in the finest gold;
The buzzing voices of the mourners, black
And secretive as flies. More lies are told.

My deep anxiety, I know, is back.
If suicidal ideation is
A nation that's both tropical and bleak

I know I've been there: long before the wars
Of shame, I razed the island that he was.

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Excerpted from Diva by Rafael Campo Copyright © 1999 by Rafael Campo. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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