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 r />
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