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  THE WOMAN I KEPT TO MYSELF

  poems

  by Julia Alvarez

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  for

  Judy

  para

  Tití

  To whom do we tell what happened on the earth?

  —CZESLAW MILOSZ

  CONTENTS

  Seven Trees

  Family Tree

  Samán

  Weeping Willow

  Maple, Oak, or Elm?

  Arborvitae

  Locust

  Last Trees

  The Woman I Kept to Myself

  Intimations of Mortality from a Recollection in Early Childhood

  Anger & Art

  El fotógrafo

  The Red Pickup

  Spic

  All-American Girl

  Bellevue

  Abbot Academy

  By Accident

  Vain Doubts

  First Muse

  Lunch Hour, 1971

  Heartland

  Bad-Weather Friends

  Sisterhoods

  Reunion

  My Bottom Line

  Love Portions

  Fights

  Tone

  Hairbands

  Manholes

  Canons

  My Kind of Woman

  Museo del Hombre

  Ars Politica

  Naming the Animals

  The Animals Review Pictures of a Vanished Race

  Why Don’t We Ever See Jesus Laughing?

  Addison’s Vision

  Winter Storm

  The Therapist

  Disappearing

  Gaining My Self Back

  That moment

  Signs

  Deathdays

  All’s Clear

  Now, When I Look at Women

  At the GYN

  Grand Baby

  Life Lines

  Spring, at Last!

  Regreso

  In Spanish

  You

  Leaving English

  Meditation

  Aficionados

  Touching Bottom

  Cleaning Ladies

  Tom

  I Dream of Allen Ginsberg

  Famous Poet, Years Afterward

  Why I Teach

  Undercover Poet

  Small Portions

  “Poetry makes nothing happen”?

  Reading for Pleasure

  Direct Address

  Passing On

  Keeping Watch

  El sereno

  Looking Up

  What We Ask For

  What Was It That I Wanted?

  Keeping Watch

  Why I Write

  Did I Redeem Myself?

  Seven Trees

  FAMILY TREE

  When I was born, my mother wrote me down

  on the family tree, a second bough

  dangling from her branch which was attached

  to a great trunk which sunk down into roots

  sprung from the seeds of Spain and Africa,

  the latter never mentioned but expressed

  by darker faces in the family clan.

  We were on the up and up, “good” hair, light skin,

  a foreign education for the men,

  fine weddings for the guaranteed virgins.

  Branch by branch, blossom by blossom, we grew:

  our individual trees lost in the woods

  of Alvarez and Tavares ancestors.

  Until by emigration, seeds were cast

  on foreign lands: a maternal great-aunt

  married a German and our name was lost

  in guttural patronymics, blond cousins

  with year-round suntans. My sisters and I,

  transported stateside in the sixties, turned

  into tangle-haired hippies, slinging our English slang.

  We clipped ourselves off from the family tree,

  independent women! Or so we thought,

  until our babies started to be born,

  sporting Mamita’s dimples, Tío’s brows,

  the voice of Tía Mariana, thick and sweet

  like boiled-down sugarcane: the family tree

  transplanted but not totally transformed.

  Even I, the childless one, intend to write

  New Yorker fiction in the Cheever style,

  but all my stories tell where I came from.

  SAMÁN

  Ciudad Trujillo, 1957

  The samán tree grew on our property

  near where we bordered an abandoned lot,

  fenced off with barbed wire, a no-man’s-land

  we children were forbidden to explore.

  Especially after the squatters came,

  poor campesinos with their eyesore shacks,

  hidden by double hedgerows from our house.

  But from the branches of that tall samán,

  we could see their tin roofs, their cooking fires,

  their naked kids, their clotheslines hung with rags.

  Beyond them stretched the military strip

  where El Jefe’s elite and airborne corps

  practiced maneuvers, roaring toward the sky,

  their steel sides glinting, wings flashing like knives,

  as if to clear a pathway up to God

  and bring back all those disappeared below.

  Waving, we watched them as they plummeted,

  tanks rushing toward them in reconnaissance,

  gun blasts shaking the branches where we sat.

  It was our perch into the heart of darkness.

  One day, the last day of my childhood,

  as we straddled a branch, my sister told

  the bloody politics of the body:

  how I would bleed, how babies came to be,

  how I would labor in delivery.

  Then she swore me to secrecy or else

  something so horrible she couldn’t tell

  would happen! “Or else what?” I begged to know.

  But she climbed down and left me looking at

  what had already happened to the world.

  WEEPING WILLOW

  New York, 1960–1961

  The first time I saw my father crying

  we were already living in New York

  in a dark sublet on a second floor,

  from which we could see nothing but concrete—

  stone buildings, a cold and marbled sky—

  more like the landscape of a prison yard

  with pale jailors speaking gibberish

  than the dictatorship we had escaped.

  Amid the noise of traffic and English,

  it was a silent world—till Papi cried.

  He bent over his chair, holding his sides,

  while Mami rushed around, shutting windows,

  afraid the Super would warn us again

  about the level of our noise, the smell

  of garlic wafting through our vents.

  We had been looking for another place,

  maybe out in the suburbs with some trees,

  where we might feel at ease being ourselves.

  When Mami hushed him, Papi wiped his face,

  burying his grief inside his handkerchief.

  A year later, we rented a small house

  with its own yard in which there grew a tree

  I’d never seen before: its long branches

  hung down and wept when the wind blew through them.

  One winter night my father woke us up

  to our first blizzard. At the bay window,

  we watched the backyard slowly fill with snow—

  the bushes, lawn chairs, swing set, garbage pails,

  the branches of the willow disappeared,
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  and one by one we all burst into tears.

  MAPLE, OAK, OR ELM?

  Syracuse, 1973–1975

  Maple or oak or elm? By now I know

  how to tell them apart. Yet when I think

  of falling in love as a young woman

  I think of my confusion naming them—

  maple, oak, elm? One of them always grew

  outside the bedroom window where I lay

  waiting for passion to wash over me.

  What did I know of love but that I gave

  my body for the chance to play

  the happy heroine of a love story?

  But I wasn’t happy, I was lonely,

  already knowing this was the wrong love

  or rather the wrong life-story for me.

  So I lay there, studying the tops of trees,

  the map of branches that might orient me

  as to where I was going by myself

  after this heartbreak. With my eye, I traced

  the traffic of the branches as they climbed

  toward their destination in the sky,

  losing myself in their hectic movements.

  Until his love cry brought me back to earth,

  down through the branches, the open window,

  stealing like light across the bedroom floor,

  over the rumpled sheets to this woman

  who was and wasn’t me, who didn’t know

  where she was going or whom she might be:

  maybe the burning maple showing off,

  or mighty oak synonymous with strength,

  or vague elm whose unmistakable shape

  can only be discerned from a distance.

  ARBORVITAE

  Champaign, 1985–1987

  After the divorce, I moved to the heartland,

  and the worst period of my life began:

  sadness is too mild a word for the grief

  I went through, and grief too noble-sounding

  for the dull hopelessness I’ll call despair

  for lack of a better word. What else was left?

  Life’s guardrails were gone: I had no kids

  to keep me this side of the edge, no man

  asking where had I put his dressy shoes,

  no golden lab wagging its welcome tail

  as I entered the one-room bungalow

  whose owners, a young couple, lived next door,

  proving the love story I had failed at.

  Separating my rental from their house

  was a hedge with a fancy Latin name,

  arborvitae, pruned by the husband,

  who came outside on weekends to maintain

  Its Comeliness, the title I gave it,

  mocking its tactful function as a screen

  to keep me out of sight of the owners.

  When they divorced, I searched for a new place

  with room for a writing room. I unpacked

  the poems I had abandoned in a box

  and got to work. From the study window

  I looked out at an almost treeless view—

  the Midwest ravaged by Dutch elm disease—

  but for a ragged windbreak of scarred trees,

  which turned out to be arborvitae, too.

  But now these trees of life seemed rightly named,

  buffeted by the hard winds of the heartland.

  LOCUST

  Weybridge, 1998

  Happiness surprised me in middle age:

  just in the nick of forty I found love,

  a steady job, a publisher, a home,

  ten acres and a sky-reflecting pond—

  a better ending than I’d expected.

  We built our own house on a bare hillside

  and started planting trees: elm, maple, oak.

  Under my second-story writing room

  (which was all windows on the southeast side)

  we put in locusts for their “instant shade.”

  By our third anniversary those trees

  were grown so tall, it was like climbing up

  into a tree house when I went to work,

  pulling the mind’s ladder up behind me

  from the absorbing life I was living.

  I tried to focus but those branches filled

  with songbirds busy at their nest building,

  squirrels scampering to the very edges

  of blossoming branches buzzing with bees.

  How could I write with all this activity?

  It took some getting used to but, of course,

  life feeds life. Where’d I get the idea

  that art and happiness could never jive?

  I felt stupid, wasting so many years.

  But I took solace from those locust trees,

  known for their crooked, seemingly aimless growth.

  We have to live our natures out, the seed

  we call our soul unfolds over the course

  of a lifetime and there’s no going back

  on who we are—that much I’ve learned from trees.

  LAST TREES

  When I think of my death, I think of trees

  in the full of summer, a row of them

  marking a border, still too far away

  for me to name them, posted with rotted boards

  everyone but the faint of heart ignores.

  (By then, I hope not to be one of those.)

  I want to go boldly to the extreme

  edge of a life I’ve lived to the fullest

  and climb over the tumbled rocks or crawl

  under the wire, never looking back—

  for if I were to turn and see the house

  perched on its hillside, windows flashing light,

  or hear a dear voice calling from the deck,

  “Supper’s on the table!” I might lose heart,

  and turn back from those trees, telling myself,

  tomorrow is a better day to die.

  I’d race to beat the darkness to the door,

  thrashing and stumbling through the underbrush,

  flushing out red-winged blackbirds, shaking loose

  seeds for next summer’s weeds from their packed pods—

  only to look up, breathless, and realize

  the hillside’s gone, I’m surrounded by trees

  that I don’t recognize, Dante’s dark wood

  closing in on all sides, my last moments

  filled with a fear that takes my breath away.

  Better not to look back until I’ve reached

  that line of trees I’ve used to mark my life,

  naming them as I pass under their boughs

  into the growing shadows: maple, willow,

  oak, arborvitae, locust, elm, samán.

  The Woman I Kept to Myself

  INTIMATIONS OF MORTALITY FROM A RECOLLECTION IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

  Looking down at my arm

  I see the roundness taut around the bone,

  the smooth youth of the skin, the tiny pores,

  the hair as if not my own, fine hairs bleached by the sun,

  the freckling constellations (a wing, a fan?),

  the tiny sparklings of perspiration,

  a glow as if someone has taken a rag

  to a clouded surface and rubbed hard—

  and, aha! see there! (I am seven years old!)

  a face begins to form.

  Oh, lovely arm, I have never seen before

  at the end of my shoulder, whence did you come from?

  Travel with me through life with your mate to match.

  How will I bear to see you braceleted,

  strapped with a watch, holding a newborn son?

  But how can I stop this grand progression?

  The clocks are ticking in the cricket grass,

  a voice is calling from the far-off house,

  the night is falling, the stars go round and round,

  I taste the rotting leaves, the burning sun.

  I put my arm up to my face and smell
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  as a dog is given a lost child’s dress to smell.

  I am already lost, beyond repair—

  the tiny pores, fine hair, the alarming arm!

  The voice grows urgent: Time to come in!

  Time to eat! Time to get out of the sun!

  (Of course, my life would have to catch up with me.)

  But ah, the heady, sweaty arm, tasting of tears—

  I lift it high, turn it this way and that,

  It is mine, my prize, a body that’s going to die!

  ANGER & ART

  As a child, I hated statues, comic books.

  I sighed whenever I was given a doll—

  these stand-ins for living beings angered me.

  Stuffed animals on my bed drove me to tears.

  Why settle for Snoopy, Barbie, baby dolls?

  I wanted a puppy, slurping on my face;

  a teenage friend with a boyfriend and real breasts;

  a baby who’d do more than close her eyes

  when I laid her down! Where did this rage

  against the mockery of art come from?

  What did I know? I was only a child

  with my immortal life ahead of me.

  Nothing I loved was dying. (What was death?

  Somebody’s costume at a masquerade?

  I hated masquerades!) But time was ticking:

  a baby cousin in a puffy box;

  my teacher’s science bulletins at school:

  The sunlight on your face is eight years old.

  The twinkling stars you wish on have gone out.

  How could I bear a world where nothing held?

  Everything, everything falling through the sieve

  into the graveyard of the past: puppies,

  babies, teenagers, mothers, fathers, me—

  all of us swirling round in that whirl of time!

  This was a rough epiphany for a kid

  with a passion for the real. I held my breath,

  hoping to make it stop—until I blacked out—

  and woke up to a dying world, old sunlight

  shining on my face, a child no more,

  now that I knew what art and rage were for.

  EL FOTÓGRAFO

  Each time he came with his black hood and box

  to record a special day, a baby’s birth,

  a first communion, someone taking off

  to Nueva York, a divorced aunt’s return