Poems, Lyrics, & Short Stories I Like

[Spidey Revivey]

"Letter to My Father" by Martin Espada

October 2017

You once said: My reward for this life will be a thousand pounds of dirt
shoveled in my face. You were wrong. You are seven pounds of ashes
in a box, a Puerto Rican flag wrapped around you, next to a red brick
from the house in Utuado where you were born, all crammed together
on my bookshelf. You taught me there is no God, no life after this life,
so I know you are not watching me type this letter over my shoulder.

When I was a boy, you were God. I watched from the seventh floor
of the projects as you walked down into the street to stop a public
execution. A big man caught a small man stealing his car, and everyone
in Brooklyn heard the car alarm wail of the condemned: He’s killing me.
At a word from you, the executioner’s hand slipped from the hair
of the thief. The kid was high, was all you said when you came back to us.

When I was a boy, and you were God, we flew to Puerto Rico. You said:
My grandfather was the mayor of Utuado. His name was Buenaventura.
That means good fortune. I believed in your grandfather’s name.
I heard the tree frogs chanting to each other all night. I saw banana
leaf and elephant palm sprouting from the mountain’s belly. I gnawed
the mango’s pit, and the sweet yellow hair stuck between my teeth.
I said to you: You came from another planet. How did you do it?
You said: Every morning, just before I woke up, I saw the mountains.

Every morning, I see the mountains. In Utuado, three sisters,
all in their seventies, all bedridden, all Pentecostales who only left
the house for church, lay sleeping on mattresses spread across the floor
when the hurricane gutted the mountain the way a butcher slices open
a dangled pig, and a rolling wall of mud buried them, leaving the fourth
sister to stagger into the street, screaming like an unheeded prophet
about the end of the world. In Utuado, a man who cultivated a garden
of aguacate and carambola, feeding the avocado and star fruit to his
nieces from New York, saw the trees in his garden beheaded all at once
like the soldiers of a beaten army, and so hanged himself. In Utuado,
a welder and a handyman rigged a pulley with a shopping cart to ferry
rice and beans across the river where the bridge collapsed, witnessed
the cart swaying above so many hands, then raised a sign that told
the helicopters: Campamento los Olvidados: Camp of the Forgotten.

Los olvidados wait seven hours in line for a government meal of Skittles
and Vienna sausage, or a tarp to cover the bones of a house with no roof,
as the fungus grows on their skin from sleeping on mattresses drenched
with the spit of the hurricane. They drink the brown water, waiting
for microscopic monsters in their bellies to visit plagues upon them.
A nurse says: These people are going to have an epidemic. These people
are going to die. The president flips rolls of paper towels to a crowd
at a church in Guaynabo, Zeus lobbing thunderbolts on the locked ward
of his delusions. Down the block, cousin Ricardo, Bernice’s boy, says
that somebody stole his can of diesel. I heard somebody ask you once
what Puerto Rico needed to be free. And you said: Tres pulgadas
de sangre en la calle: Three inches of blood in the street. Now, three
inches of mud flow through the streets of Utuado, and troops patrol
the town, as if guarding the vein of copper in the ground, as if a shovel
digging graves in the backyard might strike the ore below, as if la brigada
swinging machetes to clear the road might remember the last uprising.

I know you are not God. I have the proof: seven pounds of ashes in a box
on my bookshelf. Gods do not die, and yet I want you to be God again.
Stride from the crowd to seize the president’s arm before another roll
of paper towels sails away. Thunder Spanish obscenities in his face.
Banish him to a roofless rainstorm in Utuado, so he unravels, one soaked
sheet after another, till there is nothing left but his cardboard heart.

I promised myself I would stop talking to you, white box of gray grit.
You were deaf even before you died. Hear my promise now: I will take you
to the mountains, where houses lost like ships at sea rise blue and yellow
from the mud. I will open my hands. I will scatter your ashes in Utuado.

 

[enviousdominous]

Often a story comes along that isn't just a story, it's a challenge unto the reader to make sense of what's being described. In the story I'm about to share, I encourage you to picture yourself as the judge in a courtroom. You're not so much attempting to determine who is guilty of the crime at hand, but -- based on a curious nature -- attempting to understand the seemingly irrelevant details of why and how the crime occurred.

In 1922, a man named Ryunosuke Akutagawa wrote a story called "In a Grove". He was a prolific writer, and I feel that of his many works that In a Grove was the most brilliant. To write this, he seems to have conceptualized a single event, and then perceived of how several characters would indicate key details of what occurred before, during, and after that event. Reading this story as though you're the judge, you are given the opportunity to piece together the details of everyone's testimony and come to a final conclusion of what occurred. Your conclusion isn't a legally binding one, it's merely an attempt to unravel a complicated knot and be personally satisfied with having solved a riddle.

The story can be read at this link

My assessment, for what it's worth, is this:

Spoiler

Tajomaru and Masago were having an affair, but neither had anything to do with binding Takehiro to the tree or plotting to kill him. I believe that they found him there bound to the tree, and that both assumed that -- in that moment -- they could persuade the other one to kill Takehiro.

However; Masago wasn't aware of how eager Tajomaru was to humiliate her husband prior to killing him. Her wish was that Takehiro would simply die, and thus she wouldn't have had to witness his expression from having realized that she had had sex with Tajomaru.

Tajomaru is not a murderer. He did not murder the women at the temple as was suggested by the policeman, and he did not realize how difficult it would be to bring himself to murder a man while he was bound. He is also not an honorable man, and he chose to flee the scene instead of choosing to engage Takehiro in combat.

With Masago and Tajomaru's affair apparent to Takehiro, he chose to end his own life but failed to do so.

Here's where I get into some "wild theory" territory, so brace yourself.

The traveling monk isn't what he seems. All characters in this story have inconsistencies with how they recall what happened, but it's especially startling that a Buddhist Priest would recall details falsely.

The Woodcutter describes seeing a headdress (or a form of turban) of the style found in Kyoto, which is also where the policeman (more like a bounty hunter) claims that the murders of the two women occurred.

The smaller details seem to give the biggest clues in this story. Someone from Kyoto left the headdress, and that same person is likely the individual that murdered the two women and also that removed the small sword from Takehiro's chest.

I believe that the Medium's testimony is only slightly flawed, in that I believe that the details of Takehiro hearing his own crying and feeling an invisible hand taking the blade are that of the Medium channeling the memories of someone else who was there.

I believe that the priest contradicted himself when he gave a detailed description of Masago, and then claimed that as a priest he does not observe many details of women.

Tajomaru confessed to murdering Takehiro, though I believe that his confession was only to absolve any doubts in regard to Masago's honor. I believe that Tajomaru truly loves Masago, and wants to die with the narrative of her life being that she was an innocent victim of a sadistic man.

Here's what I believe happened: The traveling priest is from Kyoto, and he murdered the two women that were visiting graves in Kyoto. He encountered Takehiro and Masago as they were traveling, and became obsessed with killing her. He discovers that she is going to the grove at times to meet with her lover, Tajomaru. On that fateful day, Masago and Tajomaru find Takehiro bound to a cedar tree in the grove with leaves in his mouth.

I believe that Masago and Tajomaru saw that they couldn't set him free, and they couldn't simply walk away. They would have to kill Takehiro to avoid judgement for what they had been doing. Neither could bring themselves to kill him, and instead Tajomaru chose to set him free and flee.

Takehiro was overcome by hatred and shame, and attempted to kill himself by stabbing himself in the abdomen. Masago describes attempting to end her own life, only to fail each time. This gave me the idea that Takehiro gave himself a non-fatal wound. He laid there weeping with sorrow, as he was described by Masago's mother as a man with a gentle soul.

I believe that the priest staged the scene so that he could murder Masago, and make it look like it was the result of a lover's rage. I believe that the priest intended to implicate Tajomaru, and then kill him as well. I believe that the priest, still in the grove, removed the small sword from Takehiro's abdomen which resulted in his death.

I don't suspect the policeman, in spite of his obvious blind hatred for Tajomaru, because he had never encountered Masago. I don't suspect the woodcutter, because nobody else had ever met him before.

Final Conclusion: The priest orchestrated the scene, and he murdered Takehiro.

Edit: I have a theory about the comb and headdress. I believe that both items had belonged to the women who were murdered at the graveyard, and they were left at the scene as if to indicate that Tajomaru had accidentally left them there. While this might seem to implicate the policeman, I believe that the priest was aware of the suspicions of the policeman, and attempted to make it more convincing that Tajomaru had murdered the women.

 

[enviousdominous]

There's a type of writing that I'm especially fond of, so it was very difficult for me to cherry pick which example of that type of writing I could serve as the most potent example.

That type of writing is where you, the reader, are being served a distorted view of the environment by an "Unreliable Narrator".

If you like the example I'm about to share, please seek out a short story called "The King in Yellow".

The example I'd like to share is particularly gut-wrenching for me, and I'll explain why later. It's a story that I'll summarize as a typical example of how a seemingly quaint suburban family might desperately try to manipulate public opinion of their status, in spite of their unspeakable cruelty.

The story, "Season's Greetings to our Friends and Family!!!" can be read fully at the following link: Skip's ESL BITS - English Language Learning - ESL Listening Stories, Songs, Audiobooks

The TLDR version of that story; a stereotypical midwestern housewife is confronted with suddenly having to accept custody of a Vietnamese girl who is the love-child of her husband and a Vietnamese woman who was conceived while he served in the US Military in Vietnam, and she is also confronted with the understanding that her drug-addicted daughter is the mother to a baby that's addicted to crack cocaine. Her attitude toward her circumstances seems very whimsical, in that she's trying to present these circumstances to you in a manner that -- if taken as being absolutely true in how she presents them -- makes her appear to be a very warm and loving presence that seeks only to nurture her loved ones and serve as the moral compass of the family.

As she carelessly shares details that reveal that she's inherently bigoted and that she hardly sees her own grandchild as a family member, you -- the reader -- have a sinking feeling that you're effectively reading the half-hearted confession of a sociopath that, while they acknowledge in passing the horrifying circumstances of their actions, sees themselves as being the true victim of everything that's occurring.

When you look into the nuances of her thoughts, you discover that she's attempting to cover for her own plot to vilify her Vietnamese Step-Daughter, and to frame her for the murder of her Grandson. She doesn't share details of how she put her own Grandson into washing machine, and after he perished from being put through a cycle of washing, she then put his lifeless body into the dryer to be found later. When you reach that point of the story, and further read that her neighbor had witnessed her returning home long before calling the police to most likely commit the act, her entire version of every event comes into stark question. She very loudly instructs her, now adult age, Vietnamese Step-Daughter to "WATCH THE BABY!" over and over again, as if to alert anyone that could hear her that she had potentially instructed someone with a paltry grasp of the English language to "WASH THE BABY!".

This story is fictional, but casts a very stern gaze on the gated communities of American society, where the logic of "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" prevails over "Justice for all".