Singing at the Gates Read online

  SINGING

  AT THE GATES

  Other Titles by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  Published by Grove Press

  Memoir

  A Place to Stand

  Fiction

  The Importance of a Piece of Paper

  A Glass of Water

  Poetry

  Healing Earthquakes

  C-Train and Thirteen Mexicans

  SINGING

  AT THE GATES

  Selected Poems

  JIMMY SANTIAGO BACA

  Grove Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2014 by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorize electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  Printed in the United States of America

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  ISBN: 978-0-8021-2210-0

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-8021-9290-5

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  for Stacy

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  Excerpts from the Mariposa Letters

  December Nights

  This Voice Within Me

  Looking

  Excerpt from Letter to Will Inman, 5 May 1977

  From Swords of Darkness

  The Young Men Are Laughing

  A Desire

  I Turn My Little Fan On

  Walking Down to Town and Back

  Rude

  From What’s Happening

  What’s Happening

  I Applied for the Board

  Steel Doors of Prison

  Overcrowding

  Ah Rain!

  The Rusting Sky

  I Think of Little People

  From Rockbook 3

  We Prisoners

  My Heart

  Your Letter Slips Through the Opening in My Heart

  The Distance We’ve Arrived At

  Living My Other Life

  Just Before Dawn

  Dreaming About Freedom

  *

  Quetzal Feathers

  Saturday

  Things Unexplained

  Silver Water Tower

  With My Massive Soul I Open

  A Handful of Earth, That Is All I Am

  Tapestry of Downtown

  Black Mare

  New Day

  From Set This Book on Fire!

  Part 1

  In ’78

  I’ve Taken Risks

  I’ve Seen Too Many

  This Dark Side

  Let Me Give You a Portrait

  I Put On My Jacket

  I Have Roads in Me

  Commitment

  Part 2

  In ’88

  Sunday Prayer

  The Reason I Wake This Morning

  Celebrate

  In the Foothills

  Grandma

  At Lori’s House in Wisconsin

  It’s an Easy Morning

  Sometimes I Long for the Sweet Madness

  I Move Through

  I Am Uneasy

  The First Hard Cold Rain

  Part 3

  In ’98

  Ghost Reading in Sacramento

  The Truth Be Known

  Poets Can Still Have a Good Heart

  It Makes Sense to Me Now

  I Wish My Life

  The Journey Has Always Been

  My Dog Barks

  Another Poet I’ve Known

  With Paz By the Fire Last Night

  Set This Book on Fire!

  Why and When and How

  *

  Rita Falling from the Sky

  Smoking Mirrors

  Singing at the Gates

  Julia

  This Disgusting War!

  Against Despair

  Acknowledgments

  Credits

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Early through my prison sentence for drug possession I began writing Mariposa. She too was a poet, with three books to her credit, but that wasn’t the kernel of my inspiration. No indeed, she had agreed to let me write her with all my questions on what a woman needed, dreamed of, felt, probing the very vaults of woman’s sexual secrets. And, of course, in blind heat I flung myself into this joyous undertaking and soon my letters were fat volumes of contrition and vows to love her forever. O, that every young poet should have someone like her on the receiving end of their poems, someone who levies no judgments, no academic critiques. She responded with passionate encouragement to just write, write, and write. And I did and in such manner was I able to explore my deepest fears and most naive assumptions and improve not only my mind and my imagination but also my writing. I let go as avidly as the gullet crowing of a rooster at dawn.

  And thus this collection begins by reaching back to those early days when I was learning how to write and read and continues on to spread its literary wings over the past four decades, and finally perches on a branch of the present day.

  It covers a lot of distance, whirling in a spectrum of varied themes from prison reform, love, education, barrio life, environmental issues, and the joys of family. Ranging from short to long lines, logic grounded in the hearty senses to surreal landscapes of the imagination, terse metaphors to unfolding multilayered verse, outraged to serene, playful, compassionate, and exploratory.

  I love the growl of poetry, the staggering crash of idols and the burning of literary pacifiers. I love the breakthrough to spiritual development of self that rattles the cage of fear and frees you to become more of yourself through embracing life, its sorrows and enchantments. And that’s what these poems call for, incinerating our convenient complacency that has allowed our environment to become so toxic we can’t breathe the air, drink the water, or eat the food. This collection is by no means timid. These poems are about risk taking and losing all you have, stripping yourself of the unessential detritus that accumulates through artificial culture and going lightly into the adventure of life—bare ass naked as the day you were born.

  I look back at those initiate days, between 1973 and 1979, when I was a young man in Arizona in a maximum-security prison, and I sing joyous praise for the cage and the guards and the warden. Thank you for condemning me to a 5x8 cell for over six years; had I not been imprisoned at a time when my youthful fervor was to slake my thirst at the elicit nectar of the criminal tit, I would have been killed or murdered by the cops or DEA. But instead I live, and I live to write these poems another day.

  Interspersed through the coll
ection are poems originally published in various magazines and journals, poems that represent my first jaunt into the public eye. And, I might add, my first payment—for some of the poems I received a mere ten dollars, which to me at the time seemed like a million because the lift in confidence that gave me was immeasurable.

  I chose the epistolary format to start communicating with the world and friends, and writing letters for me became the outlet I was most comfortable with in laying out my emotions and thoughts. I mixed poetry and prose not from choice but necessity. I needed a wide-open field page, something broad, an expanse in which to seed my words, to be allowed to expand my train of thought, to track my doubts and acclaim my certainties.

  To be sure, my teachers were as strange as footprints on the ceiling. These early love letters to Mariposa got my body purring and my heart rumbling. I was also writing letters for the convicts, killers, and gangsters—they often asked me to write their wives, girlfriends, kids, etc. Then Will Inman, an old gay white man living in Tucson, good souled, heart brimming with justice for all, launched me on a poetic-activism adventure that had me reading Ernesto Cardenal (Nicaragua) and Miguel Hernández (Spain), to name a couple, and writing reams of letters. Beginning in 1977, Will and I exchanged over a hundred letters within a period of six months—some of my letters were published in Illuminations, his bilingual magazine established along the Arizona/Mexico border.

  Assailing the days with such enthusiasm and adrenaline as I had never done, driven by the stimulus of a linguistic universe hitherto unimagined, I blew away the margins and perimeters of all that I had known or assumed in my pre-poetry days. When you get arrested and convicted of selling drugs and they accuse you of attempted murder on a DEA agent and take you out on the West Side prairie at four a.m. and try to push you out of a car going 60 mph and, failing this, break your jaw with a gun butt and cheekbones with a fist, and your front teeth are gone and you come to in the hospital—it’s a wake-up call for most but a special one if you’re a poet.

  Imagine you’re sitting at home in a house you built that contains all you have in life. Suddenly, a sheriff breaks through the door and hollers, You got one minute to get out. And a minute later you’re standing outside on the road watching your house and everything in it consumed by fire. You have sixty seconds to grab everything that means something to you. Most people snatch up family photos and rush out.

  That’s what writing was for me, every day—snatching memories and writing them down before the fire of forgetfulness and trauma relegated them to the dark chambers of amnesia. When I got put in prison, everything burned before me and I stood and watched it burn down. No vestiges or tangible links to my past, lean from loss, I went through my memories and started scaling and trimming and editing to revive them from the ashes. In a manner of speaking, that’s what this collection is about—the salvaged remains of my life, always one step ahead of the fire that blows through my imagination. I write from this place of immediate evacuation, from a place where I must leave everything behind and take only what I can carry and what is most meaningful to me—and that is the narrative, the story, the poem.

  Timing is everything.

  My very first chapbook, Rockbook 3, was part of the publisher’s series called the Rock Bottom Books. Having my first chapbook published was like stumbling onto a freshwater spring in the mountains and finding intact Anasazi pottery bowls to drink from. I went there for water, came back with priceless discoveries of cultural significance. In a violent setting like prison, any artifact that affirms your humanity is invaluable and that’s what the chapbook did. Even though it was humble in design and origin, it affirmed my worth and purpose as a human being and not just a prisoner with a number. Hell, for the first few days I thought I was Norman Mailer or Grace Paley.

  It was the greatest beginning a poet could have. I mean, imagine, living in a place where men were stripped down to their essential cores, screams of torturous madness crackling the midnight air, human beings split in two by rapists, killers beheading other criminals, everyone on guard, every­one operating and existing on hope, deteriorating into despair, the strong broken, every bond that kept these men intact rendered insufficient in holding the opposing forces of life and death in balance, every­one swept over the ravaging waterfalls of sheer survival and in the process becoming the person they most feared they might become. What a magnificent place to set a poet to record the human soul! And there I was, witness to the human landscape under epic conflict. Instead of sitting in the day-care nurseries of dreary university classrooms, I was gifted to be an eyewitness to life on the edge.

  And around the time of 1975, an amazing stranger in Santa Barbara, California, solicited my poems and later published a small chapbook, entitled Swords of Darkness. I was beside myself, enthralled, drunk on the elixir of becoming a known poet. (Where are you, my friend? Thank you for this gift in my development as a poet that has meant so much to me.)

  My work with words, like a blacksmith on his anvil, was slowly breaking the tangible attachments to my criminal and illiterate past and ­creating—through writing and language and reading books—a paradigm shift. No longer bound in the mummy wrappings of illiteracy, in Rockbook 3 and Swords of Darkness and in the dozens of magazine poems and in Will Inman’s anthology Illuminations, I began to lock on to what the potential of my life might become by using language the way a person lost in the wilderness takes his compass to steer him in a direction he senses will guide him to fulfill his destiny. You can understand how I so appreciated the altruism of strangers who published my poems and the little endearing chapbooks—a backbreaking ­undertaking—printed on an old mimeograph machine, sheets of paper folded in half and stapled.

  Then in 1982—now in freedom—What’s Happening was published by Curbstone Press, my first commercial poetry book, a turning-point book that crystallized my fate as a poet in the world. Just as many remember where they were during horrible catastrophes: bombed skyscrapers, hurricanes, assassinations, in my case, as with many poets, I remember the place and time I wrote the poems for my first “real” book from an independent press. I was in Blacksburg, Virginia, staying in an upstairs room in an old Victorian mansion long past its prime, next to a Civil War cemetery, so cold I burned the furniture to keep from freezing since I didn’t have money for fuel. And yet despite my poverty, shivering bones, and lack of food and basic essentials for living, I was happier than I had ever been. I was careful to steer clear of the assembly-line formulaic poem, whose verse is groomed and combed out line after line, cozied in stanzas like the twine on a hangman’s rope, slowly choking life and breath out of language. Through this book a light had suddenly appeared, illuminating my life—a certain radiance umbrella’d the days ahead when I thought about my future. I wasn’t making any money at all but I was happy, the kind of quiet peace one feels when finally moving into a home with a roommate you love: poetry was my roommate for life.

  After over a decade of writing and publishing poetry books, I returned to my roots and wrote a collection to support Cedar Hill Publishers in San Diego, a small nonprofit, run by the indomitable Maggie Jasper and edited by CP, a prisoner at the Corcoran correctional facility in California. You might say I partnered with a criminal. Maggie had written me asking if I would give her a chapbook to help the press get on its feet financially. It was a young independent press struggling to make it, and because small presses played a large roll in my poetic development I readily agreed.

  Set This Book on Fire! was published in 1999 and edited by a man doing time in prison—an applicable irony aimed at those who use humor to demean hardship and suffering. To the privileged, any writing about suffering should be kept under lock and key in a steel box in the basement. Of course, Set This Book on Fire! disentitled them and made them mad, ill at ease. These poems flatten the tires of the status quo’s funeral hearse with its cadavers muttering the same old, same old scapegoat complaints against the criminal cl
ass.

  Soon my humble fame brought new requests from painters, photographers, and filmmakers working on projects that rallied against that same status quo. James Drake asked me to write poems for his transvestite photographs from his La Brisa collection. Norman Mauskopf, the famed photographer from Santa Fe, asked me to write a long poem to accompany his photographs of northern New Mexico Chicano culture, and Kathryn Ferguson offered me the opportunity of writing a long narrative poem for her documentary Rita of the Sky.

  It was a wonderful way for me to dive into the long narrative and these were themes I ­appreciated —bicultural for Drake, Chicano life for Mauskopf, and judicial issues for Ferguson. At the time I was living in an apartment by the Rio Grande. It was a time of reckoning and regeneration—to change, live by kinder and healthier choices, connect with Mother Earth in a deeper spiritual way—and in doing so become a better person, more substantial and purposeful, ridding myself of detrimental habits and morphing into a higher being.

  Every morning, whether it was freezing or raining or windy, in the most inclement weather, reluctant or otherwise, I rose with the sun and went jogging along the river. And with every week that passed into months, I resensitized my heart and soul to the environment’s lovely kernels of wisdom; I aligned my feelings to appreciate the birds, water, air, noting the subtle significance of colors and textures around me from the tiniest grass tendrils and buds to the birth of mallard ducklings wiggling behind their waddling mother in la acequia.

  I would stand for minutes mesmerized by the sun on my brow and cheeks, a plumage of soft heat feathering my flesh, watching the combat between sun sparks glimmering off ditch water. I was even lucky enough one time to catch sight of two blue heron feathers floating in a nest of twigs drifting in the center of the water. I waded out, thighs carving through the current, and I carefully cradled them in my palms and wrapped them in my T-shirt and carried them home.

  Acutely aware of my surroundings, I birthed a consciousness in me that brought about an abundance of detail heretofore unnoticed; new life now teemed and abounded in my ears, eyes, and nose.