Poet's Sampler: Mairym Cruz-Bernal In the last years of the Twentieth Century it seems to me that poetry has become fearful, poets will not come out from behind their work. Some of us wear the masks of dead gods. We lean against monuments and with our fingers trace the epitaphs, piece together fragments and call them poems. Those of us who are obliged to be political rant and rant, but this can be another form of hiding. And oh, the tired third person, ourselves cast as others! I am grateful to writers like Mairym Cruz-Bernal whose magical lyric opens, full-faced, on a life entire. Cruz-Bernal is a young Puerto Rican poet and translator who writes in English and Spanish. Her authority lives in passionate disclosure, vulnerability, rebellion, lives in an outrageous insistence on parting company with her readers in order to make art. --Deborah Digges Poems by Mairym Cruz-Bernal Cutting Pablo's Hair Absence The Silver Woman The Pain of Pleasure Cutting Pablo's Hair What must I do? I see nothing but obscurities on every side. Shall I believe I am nothing? Shall I believe I am God? Pascal Pablo's long hair seems like pieces of rope. He has not bathed for months, and for a year he has been heaping trash. Says that God talks to him, that he is the chosen son that will save the world. But Pablo doesn't want to be the chosen son when he can be God. He knows that ministers don't want to just preach. They want to own their people's soul. That's why they speak differently. Pablo speaks with a sophisticated accent. I wonder what language God speaks. Pablo says: "When the Spirit enters a body, that body becomes someone and speaks in different tongues that no one can understand, like God." I can't understand people either. Pablo has been quiet. People ignore quiet people. Pablo has spent half his life asleep. When he was awake the people he loved died. He was six years old when his younger and only sister died. A cocktail of sadness and anger navigates within him. He cries. He has been left without his other person. Since that time his father started drinking and hitting his mother. Pablo wanted to kill his father. When Pablo turned ten his father was killed by a car. Pablo's father was twenty-six, his own age now. He was sad but he did not cry. A father turns into an alcoholic by the immense sadness of losing his only daughter. A son who thinks that the one who father loved was sister. "What about me?" What am I hear for? I imagine Pablo's thoughts. But he remembers he wanted to kill his father. Pablo is a person who is not a person. He needs to invent a person to be someone, God. He wants to be isolated from people, to meditate like Jesus in the desert and like Jesus in the desert he is tempted. A voice orders him to throw himself from a precipice. Another voice tells him that he is elected by God to save the world. But Pablo believes he is God. He keeps his shit in his pants. Suppose, that just for a day someone could get Christ's feces and keep it. Everything that comes out of Pablo's body is holy. He won't clean his sweat. He won't flush his sperm. Like Christ, he will stay without a woman. He won't shave. He won't cut his nails. Pablo will not comb his hair, nor speak right. But when I ask him if he knows what elements are important for vegetation to live, he says: "Solar light, water and oxygen." When I ask him why it gets cooler at nights, he says: "Because the sun is turned off." I wanted to do the impossible for Pablo, but the impossible can not be done. I wanted to tell Pablo's life in the past tense, to make these happenings history. "Can you cut these voices demanding me to have a someone inside," Pablo asks me, "I want my thoughts to belong to me. Can you cut my hair." I can cut your hair, Pablo. Let me cut your hair now. Absence Drawing sketches of your eyes I imagined them inside the holes of the eyes of the fish bones I saw in the soup I was making last afternoon. The holes were so perfectly round and empty I imagined your eyes filling them - your eyes so abruptly awakening inside the holes of the bones of your eyes. Your face so full of bones. Once we were on the most western side of this island, it was there you wanted to eat fish and I was pregnant. And pregnant women's desires are highly respected in this country. So I said I wanted fish to the people that had already said they didn't have any. They pointed to the fishermen's boats arriving at the beach. They had fresh countless fish in a sea full of dead Dominicans, who run out of their country, barefoot, on the same colorful little boats, to die, drowning in these waters. We bought half a dozen and they were pink. We ate them all. I took a picture with one of your eyes looking through the hole of a fish's eye-bone. Oh! Your eyes, always wide open, wider, your eyes that see too much even in the places there's not much to see, your eyes that hear, even through the stories that seem superfluous, your eyes that have materialized me making me a woman. I am writing sketches of your skin, the color of the wood we built our house with. You are so much part of the nature I admire, always searching, moving, restless, around the square section of your earth. We sleep with each other, we talk on the phone at mid-morning and at mid-day - snack times for conversation, but I miss you. Eating dinner tonight, our son to my left, our sleeping daughter to my right and you, all the way across the long round table I could hardly hear you. I said I am going to marry again. You round your eyes, scared, I guess, threatening to our so called stability. And I said yes, marry you to have another time for us alone. Work, children, meetings, tear me apart. We sleep together but I miss you. Playmates in the Bathtub On Fridays the maid comes to clean this house in the woods. These floors have no shine, made out of wood, they get dirty easily. I'm so careless. The kitchen has an old white sink with twin faucets: one for the woman in the house, the other for the same woman in the house. The bathroom has an old toilet that flushes by pulling a chain, a bidet, and right in the middle of it, an enormous tub with golden legs. The tub has a round plaque that reads "Birthday Bath." I used to give myself long round baths, take the soap and round it all over my round eight months' pregnant belly. I used to lay back and splash roughly till the water jumped out of the half-full tub. My legs pulling up my pelvic bones, pressing my uterus. I laugh to myself feeling the baby swimming inside, knowing I could not have her come out of me, never. Knowing she would never break my perineum and pass through the narrow me. I laugh feeling a certain relief. I go up again, making my legs push strongly my body high, feeling the strain in the veins of my thighs. * The maid complains I leave my bras everywhere. I hang them on a hook the carpenter made for the bathroom. She thinks underwear is supposed to be hidden. But everybody can see them, they are sold in ordinary stores. The truth is I only hide my panties, not my panties, but the smell of my panties. I choose them pretty, with french laces, all colors except white. White is the color of my mothers'. I hate bras. They press too hard. I take them off all the time, any place around the house. I hang them wide open and she comes, complaining with her lowered voice, folds them, hangs them again and puts a hat on top of them. "You should not leave them like that, people can come in and might see them, especially men." This is just a piece of cloth, what is the matter with men's heads? I can't believe she believes what she says. I try not to be too hard on her and I just smile. I'll keep on hanging them wherever I please. She knows that. She knows I'll do whatever I want in this house I've been pregnant for too long now. I can get pregnant in this house if I wish. But I can't give birth. I can't give birth anywhere. It hurts. Both hurt: giving birth and not being able to give birth. * I have to give myself completely to this man in a white gown. I have to put on a paper-dress opened in the back. I can't even wear a bra. Everyone will want to see me. They want to shave my pubic hair. I tell them no. Don't touch my parts. I can't even feel them, I'm all asleep. I've been dispersed. I just feel half of my chest and arms. I look to the left and there's another man looking at me as if I and my body were a curiosity. I've never seen him but I hold both his hands and press them. I am afraid. I don't trust the equipment. I wonder what if the electric power goes out. What if there's an earthquake right now. I try to see the opening in my womb through the crystals of the doctor's eyeglasses. They have little drops of blood. I want to explode. Maybe I am exploding. My heart begins to feel the pressure. I have no God to protect me. I have been dismembered. At the moment of my daughter's birth I am rehearsing the moment of death. * I don't feel her body. She is out now. A man is cleaning her body. A man is penetrating her mouth, pulling her tongue out, opening her openings. I can't explain her hands, the force of her muscles stretching. I can't explain her legs hitting the man with anger. I can't explain how she's breathing, rhythmically, out of my body. I surrender to her and to her beauty. She is taken away from me. A schedule is set to see her, to feed her. * She will be one year soon. We call her the "Savage Girl." She knows me already. I know who she is. We both know our desire, to be fighting against each other, like I am with my mother and my mother with her mother: women against women of their own blood. I treat her with respect. It's been weeks now that she's walking. She looks at me from the corners of her eyes. We have a secret. She ignores me often. And I close my eyes. I try to make love to my body, I become pregnant again, and I am again in my white "Birthday Bath" pulling my pelvis up, feeling the touch of clean water caressing my body, feeling fresh. I take my time in the tub. I hear no one crying yet. The Silver Woman I remind myself I am in the city where civilization started, that I am a woman and that I have a name. I remember my name. Remembering does not stop my dance. I raise my head and round my lips opening all the mouths of the silver woman's body till she is no longer in front of me, till I swallow her into my own body. The mirror is broken. I know now I carry a woman inside me, someone who was thrown into a mirror. I don't know if I should act as if I were crazy. Swing, maybe. I grasp my knees, move my body back and forth. I feel the dizziness of a wild dance. I press my head to my knees and smell even the intimate odors of my body. The woman is beautiful. How can a beautiful woman suffer so much imprisoned in that mirror? She looks at me while I dance, touches the corners of the mirror to touch me. I had to be scared, but I don't remember. I surrendered all my senses of logic to be calm in front of her. I want to give her space to exist. In the obscurity of the hallway, in the midst of a strange cloud of dust, I sit like a student on the rug looking up to the tall woman in front of me. But she inclines her body to resemble my height. I am motionless, legs crossed, hands poised on my knees, each side with each side and I look at her eyes and think what would I do if I were crazy. I walk slowly. Nothing to do yet I find no rest. My own voice coming from the outside says Mira. In front of me, mirrors. As my body quiets, a woman is forming her body out of smoke: her contours, her wide hips, her long arms stretching as if she had been bent for ages. A silver woman moving her petrified soundless lips. I start to walk down the narrow hallway of this cheap hotel when I feel my head bending, my eyes facing the navy-blue rug. I start counting the dots of dirt like fat in an open skin. I think, how would I act if I were crazy. The Pain of Pleasure I didn't take notes to remember. I forget to take notes. I forget my tape recorder. I don't keep memories. Everything is lost, every memory hidden in the depth of my dreams. But my dreams are always too far, and I forget them. It was only last night that my daughter woke up with a strange kind of cough and when I went back to my bed, closed my eyes, I saw I was trying to close a door but the bolt was stuck. I called someone, a man, to help me fix the bolt. Our hands touched by chance, not by wish. It felt dirty, like something sticky was left on my hands after each rub, something sticky in my hands I don't want there. A door I can not close to keep my son from knowing what happens in my bed, to know my ambivalence, my yes I want and my yes I don't want. I don't want him to know I give my love to another man. The other night he heard my noises. He thought it was pain and not pleasure. I thought he was sleeping and not listening. And maybe I feel guilty because I can't share this pleasure with him, the person I love most.