Full Immersion Baptism (in Brake Dust)
Los Angeles, 1996
In the pocket between a woman and her gallo, I was born.
Under a bridge.
Under a hard moon (alone, a fat white coin
not shining enough in a sky outshone by a city
and its crazies, its crooks, its
Concrete and intestines of rie bar), and above
these sleek and bulky buildings,
above these urban arteries bulging
of asphalt and exhaust,
the air glimmers inorganically and
has grown black as crow feathers.
My baptism, then.
Atop a rooftop, around a grip of dendrites
that snap and click (magically, synaptically)
inside a skull vividly recollecting his scalp
pressed watchfully, obligingly, to mine
on colchones that smelled of Eternity and Chicanismo
(one floor below the roof--the apartment
with the altar to la Virgen honoring Patricio
and the Daytons stacked high like coins (in the bedroom)),
the city has risen up.
Atop a rooftop one night in August,
where Cyndi Lauper crooning
for those of East Hollywood who’d open their ears
is too much to bear:
“You with the sad eyes/ don’t be discouraged...”
My baptism, then.
At the moment two cars collide.
At the moment he surrenders.
At the moment the cuffs strike wrist bone and ulna:
A high-speed chase where
I lost someone (lost for good, for
crimes, for carga, for my
epiphany (what I’ll call that
crestfallen hour I sat speechless on the
empty sofa while tv cameras
and newscasters and ghetto birds
announced a man’s flaws to the viewing world)
to come to me like a giant bird plunging earthward off
the oddly perpendicular perch
from where he’s despised me;
(never got to deliver mi despedida,
or say my last goodbye, sit atop a rooftop with
a vato and swoon to Cyndi Lauper again).
In the pocket between a man and his Regal, I was born.
Under a tower.
Under a big white sun and the Hollywood sign.
Under heavy lights and an observatory.
Under eleven hundred stars (uneven, unruly even for
the most disheveled of constellations
attempting futilely to pull themselves together
amid the weight of an entire freeway
and its wet iridescence (a recollection of his scalp
and his shine and that skin up around the canthus
of his eyes in a rainstorm as he smiles, and we push
to catch the last bus out of Hawthorne.
Despite the time, the silver velour beneath us
is his backseat, which tenderly composes itself,
assembling in the form of arms and lungs and
other things that bring people together,
hold them there, keep us from coming
unyoked, unaligned)).
In the pocket between a man and his Regal,
a woman and her gallo, I was born.
Under a bridge.
Under a hard moon.
Under a big white sun and the Hollywood sign.
