The Floating Television

In Old Havana
the first television drifted
from home to home.

Payment plans
were a new temptation,
even though few could afford
more than one or two months
of eerie magic.

After thirty days, or sixty,
the floating box of ghostly images
was repossessed, loaded, and moved
on donkey carts or trucks
to the next eager family
waiting for dreams.

Day of the Dead

Beside grinning sugar skulls
the hands of a magician
emerge from butterflies
and cactus.

The sun is a moustached musician
the moon a blue-robed dancer
and death is a vendor
of white lilies.

On the ceramic Tree of Life
a wedding angel shares leafy branches
with Adam and Eve.

Teleculebra

La novela
the soap opera

twines
and loops

through hundreds
of nights

in a hundred
nations

tangling minds
weaving twists

insults hissed
loves betrayed

dry scales
from the coiling

serpent
of melodrama

fall onto the eyes
of a hundred

wistfully shared
human wishes.

Gathering Watercress in a Los Angeles City Park

Littered creek, dusty sky,
a familiar spray of green leaves
rising from rainbows
of oil-stained water.

We lived in the parallel universe of immigrants,
where wild plants have names
and are edible.

Our salad of urban berro
would have tasted bitter and toxic
if my mother had not looked so relieved
at the moment of recognition—
semi-aquatic leaves
just like the ones on the banks
of cayman-infested streams
on the island of Cuba
near the cobblestoned city
she still refers to as her little town.

I was nourished by knowing
at least this one fragment
of a grown woman's
vanishing identity—
plants with two names
should be eaten tenderly:

watercress,
berro.

Andean Threshold

In a valley of mist and stone
climbing roses follow herds of llamas
along crumbling stairways.

The floor of the old hacienda
is a mosaic of circles
arranged in decorative patterns.
The circles are cross-sections
from the vertebrae of cattle
that lived long ago.

In every room, ornate crystal
and porcelain vases hold lavish
bouquets of flowers.
The furniture is mahogany.
The floor is bone.

Outdoors, a man on horseback
wears a green hat with a green feather
like Robin Hood.
His legs are encased in woolly goatskin chaps.
His spurs guide the horse in a dance.
He is a servant of the people who live indoors
like royalty, wiping their shoes
on the time-polished threshold
of bone.