After The Neighborhood Started to Change
When I was five it was all white on our block, until
the Prathers moved in, blacks to me less strange
than the immigrant McCloskeys presuming
to call them spooks or skels, moving their Irish accents
further east on Long Island once they started to feel outnumbered.
All those German, Irish, Polish kids wrapping
Wop and Guinea around me, helped me prefer
each new black or Latino on the block, to the point
where I only had minority friends, with whom I was secure
from whites too timid to mess with us.
And so I ranged puberty crushed over Puerto Rican
Zoraida, Sylvia, Creole Hallene, instead of blue-eyed
Beths, Marilyns or Margarets. I the only white
in a black singing group, the only Caucasian in the house
of hundreds at the occasional Baptist church or back-
to-some-black-part of Brooklyn gig. I the only blanco
messing with merengue at some salsa-only set,
way out of rhythm but learning the words mejor
y mejor, until the time when the older white folks
couldn’t pick me out of the line-up of minority
teens they feared being mugged by, until all
the white kids still left thought I was at least a little weird,
until the new arriving brothers and hermanas
were all left wondering
what this cracker thought he was doing hanging with their people,
until I eventually grew up, found myself stuck in the small town Midwest,
where everything is mostly all white again, even me.
After Sylvia Ramos Read My Latest Book of Poems
the one that made my wife livid,
presenting as it does the habitual
wringing of my hands over
old fires, Sylvia never absent
from my inventory of might-have-beens,
a woman I’ve known since childhood
who rejected me with doe-eyed ease when
we were teens, but who has since enjoyed,
even encouraged, my literary feints
at infidelity these long years since.
Now Sylvia sends an email from Puerto Rico crying
foul over this latest poem’s documenting
of her many marriages, explaining how it is
hurtful to her, making her unable to share
the book with her child,
as if her twenty-something daughter does not know
she came to light during her mother’s brief time
with marido número tres, as if Sylvia
isn’t smart enough to imagine
all the trouble versifying the truth about how
she still makes meaning in my life has
caused some woman she’s never met,
as if just upon request
I can ever stop thinking
or writing about Sylvia Ramos the woman
a symbol, a flame only the end of poetry can extinguish.