I don't know if anyone has ever said this to you,
but the other day, somebody said it to me.
It's a good thing your father is dead,
because if he weren't, this would kill him.
You've heard that.
Well, my cousin Gisella said that to me about my father.
And she said it in reference to the hurricane in Puerto Rico,
and specifically the destruction of his birthplace of Utuado.
And there was an article in the Chicago Tribune all about
Utuado's-- it was the first time I've ever read anything about
that mountain town in Puerto Rico in a newspaper in this
country.
And she's right, I'm glad he's not here to see it,
to read the description that I read
in that article about this community of people trapped
where a bridge had been crushed and washed away on one side.
And there was a huge lake on the other,
and people could hear them screaming
but couldn't reach them.
And so that description haunts me
as my father continues to haunt me.
Francisco Luis's father, Frank Espada,
was born in Utuado, Puerto Rico in 1930.
He came to this country in 1939.
He died in Pacifica, California in 2014.
He was a community organizer.
He was a civil rights leader.
Some would say he was the leader of the Puerto Rican community
in New York in the 1960s.
He was also a documentary photographer
who created something called the Puerto Rican Diaspora
Documentary Project.
When he died, I went through a ceremony
that will be familiar to anyone here who's ever lost a parent.
It's a ceremony of going through the stuff, right,
it's going through the junk.
And you're sifting through it, and you're
thinking the unthinkable.
I'm going to throw this out.
And then you come across the treasure.
And it's a treasure only to you, but a treasure nonetheless.
In my case, there were two yellow Kodak boxes
marked Puerto Rico Noche Buena Diciembre 1968,
Super 8 home movies.
We used to make those in the '60s.
We thought we were very sophisticated.
And there I saw it, film of my father at the age of 38,
me at the age of 11, my first visit
to the island of Puerto Rico.
I'm originally from Brooklyn, New York.
And I began to watch, and this poem came out of it.
There's one Puerto Rican-ism here
that I want to flag for you before I read.
In Puerto Rican Spanish, the word bendito
literally means blessed one, can mean 10 different things
depending on what you do with it.
So this is a poem called "Haunt Me,"
and it's for my father, Frank Espada.
"I am the archaeologist.
I sift the shards of you, cufflinks, passport photos,
a button from the March on Washington
with a black hand shaking a white hand, letters in Spanish,
your birth certificate from a town high in the mountains.
I cup your silence, and the silence
melts like ice in a cup.
I search for you in two yellow Kodak boxes
marked Puerto Rico, Noche Buena, Diciembre 1968.
In the 8-milimeter silence the Espadas
gather, elders born before the Spanish-American war,
my grandfather on crutches after fracturing his fossil hip,
his blind brother on a cane.
You greet the elders, and they call you Tato,
the name they call you there.
Uncles and cousins sing in a chorus of tongues
without sound, vibration of guitar strings
stilled by an unseen hand, maracas shaking empty of seeds.
The camera wobbles from the singers
to the television and the astronauts
sending pictures of the moon back to Earth.
Down by the river, women still pound laundry on the rocks.
I am 11 again, a boy from the faraway city of ice
that felled my grandfather, startled after the blind man
with the cane stroked my face with his hand dry as straw
crying out, Bendito.
At the table, I hear only the silence
that rises like the river in my big ears.
You sit next to me clowning for the camera,
tugging the lapels on your jacket,
slicking back your black hair, brown skin
darker from days in the sun.
You slide your arm around my shoulder, your good right arm,
your pitching arm, and my moon face radiates,
and the mountain song of my uncles and cousins
plays in my head.
Watching you now, my face stings as it
stung when my blind great-uncle brushed my cheekbones,
searching for his own face.
When you died, Tato, I took a razor to the movie looping
in my head, cutting the scenes where
you curled an arm around my shoulder,
all the times you would squeeze the silence out of me
so I could hear the cries and songs again.
When you died, I heard only the silences between us,
the shouts belling the air before the phone went dead,
all the words melting like ice in a cup.
That way, I could set my jaw and take my mother's hand
at the mortuary, greet the elders in my suit
and tie at the memorial, say all the right words.
Yet my face stings at last.
I rewind and watch your arm drape across my shoulder
over and over.
A year ago, you pressed a Kodak slide of my grandfather
into my hand and said, next time, stay longer.
Now in the silence that is never silent,
I push the chair away from the table and say to you,
sit down, tell me everything, haunt me."