Doing Time (36 page)

It was a rime when they were afraid of him.

My father, a bare man, a gypsy, a horse

with broken knees no one would shoot.

Then again, he was like the orange tree,

and young women plucked from him sweet fruit.

To meet him, you must be in the right place,

even his sons and daughter, we wondered

where was Papa now and what was he doing.

He held the mystique of travelers

that pass your backyard and disappear into the trees.

Then, when you follow, you find nothing,

not a stir, not a twig displaced from its bough.

And then he would appear one night.

Half covered in shadows and half in light,

his voice quiet, absorbing our unspoken thoughts.

When his hands lay on the table at breakfast,

they were hands that had not fixed our crumbling home,

hands that had not taken us into them

and the fingers did not gently rub along our lips.

They were hands of a gypsy that filled our home

with love and safety, for a moment;

with all the shambles of boards and empty stomachs,

they filled us because of the love in them.

Beyond the ordinary love, beyond the coordinated life,

beyond the sponging of broken hearts,

came the untimely word, the fallen smile, the quiet tear,

that made us grow quick and romantic.

Papa gave us something: when we paused from work,

my sister fourteen years old working the cotton fields,

my brother and I running tike deer,

we would pause, because we had a papa no one could catch,

who spoke when he spoke and bragged and drank,

he bragged about us: he did not say we were smart,

nor did he say we were srrong and were going to be rich

  someday.

He said we were good. He held us up to the world for it to see,

three children that were good, who understood love in a quiet

  way,

who owned nothing but callused hands and true freedom,

and that is how he made us: he offered us to the wind,

to the mountains, to the skies of autumn and spring.

He said, “Here are my children! Care for them!”

And he left again, going somewhere like a child

with a warrior's heart, nothing could stop him.

My grandmother would look at him for a long time,

and then she would say nothing.

She chose to remain silent, praying each night,

guiding down like a root in the heart of earth,

clutching sunlight and rains to her ancient breast.

And I am the blossom of many nights.

A threefold blossom: my sister is as she is,

my brother is as he is, and I am as I am.

Through sacred ceremony of living, daily living,

arose three distinct hopes, three loves,

out of the long felt nights and days of yesterday.

1977, Arizona State Prison-Florence
Florence, Arizona

Uncle Adam

Had a brogue

And a doberman,

Hated being called Unk,

And made terrible scrambled eggs.

Sent me a ticket

Every Easter at spring break

To visit him in Coral Gables

Because I made him feel young.

Took me to restaurants,

The stock-exchange,

The not-for-public beach,

and slipped me fifty dollars

At the departure gate.

I was adolescent,

Never knowing what moved him

Or why he liked me.

Can't tell him now

That I never meant to be a brat,

or blame it on my youth,

Which like his brogue

And his life

Went away.

1985, State Correctional Institute-Muncy
Muncy, Pennsylvania

Tiny white five-petaled flowers

embroidered along

a portrait-collar neckline.

Short bodice

full skirt, puffed sleeves.

Blood red dress

on a fragile blond child.

Her hair hangs to her waist

unlike the platinum blond

Toni doll whose hair only comes

to her shoulders.

The doll is straight and tall

and proper and hard edged

invulnerable, always smiling

and only closing her eyes

when someone puts her down.

She has a red dress too

identical to mine.

No one touches her

no one takes her red dress off.

She stands by my bed

Her eyes never close.

1996, Eddie Warrior Correctional Center
Taft, Oklahoma

From the cell ten ft. across from mine,

he told how he used to play chicken for money.

He played in bars where no other kid his age

was allowed to go, but he went

and the scars of cigar burns between his knuckles

testified that he won more money than he lost.

“Ever smeiled burning skin?” he would ask. “It's enough to make you sick.”

And his stories were never tired

and I was never tired of hearing them.

After all, living on death row

it's only fitting to allow a man

to tell the story

that wasn't allowed by law

to be told in court.

Where the formalities were too complex

for that sixteen-year-old boy to comprehend,

and it seems the law really didn't understand him either,

but one thing was for sure

he wasn't going to cry,

his father taught him that.

His mother cried for him though,

cried all the tears that were held back

watching him grow, watching his father

make a man out of him

a man, before the child was able to be a boy.

“Mom never really understood” he told me,

“You know, male bonding, the rites of passage,

to become a real man.”

And every part of that real man's bleeding heart

was on death row — spilling its guts,

but still holding on to proud memories

of how he threw up on his first beer.

He was nine, and it was his father who made him drink it.

“That'll make a man out of you, boy.”

And how, when he was seven, his father

made him stay and fight,

“Or you'll get a whuppin' when you get home,” Dad said.

It didn't matter that the other kid

was twice his age and size.

“You never run from a fight, boy.”

And when he got home

he still got a whuppin' anyway,

because he lost.

But by the time he was fourteen, grown men

were self-conscious being in his presence.

“I don't want to make it sound as though

the old man was a Drill Sergeant,”

he told me. “We used to do regular

father-and-son shit too.”

Took him to baseball games

and got him his first mini bike

and they used to go camping a lot too.

“But why did Dad always forget his sleeping bag?”

he would ask, “and why did he have to share mine?”

His hands, the only visible part of him

through the porthole of the cell door,

where they serve our food,

would pound the air and move with his words

as though they were the ones doing the talking,

but the scars of melted skin made it look like

his knuckles were crying

every time the talking stopped.

Then he would excuse himself,

because he had to finish cleaning his cell.

A ritual he performed meticulously three times a day,

as though it were an act of repentance.

“Nobody ever taught me how to pray,” he said.

“One time I got on my knees and just sat there,

but I didn't know what else to do.

I never seen them do anything else

in the movies.”

So finally, when they did come for him,

he just asked the preacher to just clean him

afterward, in case he shit on himself.

But he assured the preacher that

“I'm gonna try my best to hold it all right.”

And then trying his best to wipe his eyes

in handcuffs, he walked out of his cell

seeming to be more afraid of having to leave

the cell than facing death.

Back then I never really understood

his last words to me when he said,

“I died when I was born.

” But now, I'm next.

1997, Sing Sing Correctional Facility
Ossining, New York

You were forty-five and I was fourteen

when you gave me the skirt.

“It's from Paris!” you said

as if that would impress me

who at best had mixed feelings

about skirts.

But I was drawn by that summer cotton

with splashes of black and white — like paint

dabbed by an eager artist.

I borrowed your skirt

and it moved like waves

as I danced at a ninth-grade party.

Wearing it date after date

including my first dinner with a college man.

I never was much for buying new clothes,

once I liked something it stayed with me for years.

I remember the day I tried

ironing your skirt,

so wide it seemed to go on and on

like a western sky.

Then I smelled the burning

and, crushed, saw that I had left a red-brown scorch

on that painting.

But you, Mother, you understood

because ironing was not your thing either.

And over the years your skirt became my skirt

until I left it and other parts of home with you.

Now you are eighty and I almost fifty.

We sit across from each other

in the prison visiting room.

Your soft gray-thin hair twirls into style.

I follow the lines on your face, paths lit by your eyes

until my gaze comes to rest

on the black and white,

on the years

that our skirt has endured.

1995, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility
Bedford Hills, New York

Sometimes you get the kind of day

you deserve: lots of sunshine, wind,

blue sky stretched tight as a military sheet.

Flushed, I jump up and down in the bleachers,

cheering my eight-year-old nephew

around the bases. I am proud, so I lead

the shouting, beer sloshing over the rim

of my cup like stream water out of a helmet.

What more could anyone want than

what's right: the smell of cooked onions, franks,

knishes sold hot from the stand on wheels

just outside the ball park? Luigi owned it —

old tyrant — and we had to stand in line like

I did when 1 was six, the carnival lighting up

the city. At twelve, my brother had the touch,

could tag a bull's-eye with one eye closed.

Some nights he'd dump the pretty woman

above the tank of water so often, the carnies

would blackball him from the games. Back home,

he'd lie awake staring at the ceiling,

smoke curling blue in the moonlight

from the window. One night in July,

sure that I was asleep, he sneaked out

by the fire escape, a red ski mask

stuffed deep into the pocket of his black

bomber jacket. Close behind, I saw him

slip through their defenses

like a commando, do a bellycrawl

over to the Ferris wheel, the tent

leading into the freak show

where we slipped under the flap to see

the dog-faced boy, the bearded lady.

Slipping in and out of shadow, he splashed gasoline

over everything, tossed a match, and the flames

chewed up the night the way they would years later

in the jungles of Vietnam. Back in our room,

he smiled, and we watched the place

burn to the ground.

Later my brother joined the marines, but

all the government shipped back was a sealed casket,

a letter from the President, a medal. I thought

I saw him in midtown Manhattan, yelling, jostling

passersby, his frightening dreadlocks

hanging to his waist. How often does hope

hit you like a sniper's bullet right between

the eyes? I ran after him yelling his name,

but the crowd swallowed him up

like a swamp bog. I double-timed it out of there

on a train back to Brooklyn,

Sometimes the eyes can play tricks on you,

like when you've been out in the bush

for days without water, or here

in the scorching heat of the ball park,

my voice shooting up the scale by octaves, and my

nephew — little trooper — sliding home, kicking a red cloud

of dust over home plate, excitement in his eyes exploding.

1988, Sing Sing Correctional Facility
Ossining, New York

“
ATTENTION ON THE YARD, ATTENTION IN THE UNITS! NORTON, FIVE-NINE-NINE-ZERO-ZERO, OBTAIN A PASS AND REPORT TO THE CAPTAIN'S OFFICE IMMEDIATELY!”
the public address speakers boom. The sound bounces around the yard, boomerangs between the buildings and my ears again and again. I am standing outside the schoolroom, smoking and sweating in the 112-degree summer afternoon, squinting at the sun and wondering idly whether this kind of weather would be more enjoyable if I were lying on a Mexican beach wearing only a string bikini and a smile, holding a frosty margarita in one hand and a fine, slender stick of Indika in the other. I have just decided that it most definitely would be when the summons comes.