at New York’s Pane e Cioccolato
The busboy says he’s from Puerto Rico,
a town called Carolina, near the coast
just east of San Juan. I say did you know
I’m from Carolina too. It’s where ghosts
from the Civil War still haunt Southerners.
“Mine’s called La Tierra de Gigantes,”
he says. Smiles slyly. Adds how he prefers
the name his grandmother learned in old days:
El Pueblo de los Tumbabrazos.
He leans down, whispers, “Those who cut arms off.”
He moves to a deserted table close
by, grows silent, folding the dry, white cloth.
He wipes the marble tabletop, his hand
cloth-covered: a gull soaring over land
some twenty-thousand feet below. His eyes
explore terrain with a sad stare, making
me feel he’s lost, not in legends or lies
he’s told me, but in that sudden aching
for home we all have when strangers tap it
loose from deep in our hearts’ caverns, like some
phosphorous glow: how stalactites trap it
and hold it below until our eyes come
down to behold it. Perhaps he sees smoke
from his town’s factories there in the stone’s
brown swirls; or the Loiza River’s flow;
or eyes of a lover who’s never gone,
though he left her in Carolina years
ago, standing on the runway in tears.
Roger Armbrust
August 26, 2001
