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  • Letter from Angélica as Sor Juana, and: Memory in the Making: A Poetics
  • Rosemary Catacalos (bio)

Letter from Angélica as Sor Juana

Keep many thanks. I will wait to see you quickly, because, after all,the dream is everything, finally. Forgive my writing, the silence thatformerly occupied it and then was unbearable clamor, like many dogsbarking at thieves. Ladrando, ladrones. A night full of the long,thin shadows made by guitar strings, lovers dangerously awake,too near my mother’s house in Torreón. Too near the iron gazebo.A band played on Sundays, girls circling one way, boys the other. Wewere not supposed to look. And, as you know, so many men like to crossthe Río Bravo and then act like bachelors. But now, thanks be to God,the children are fine and honor me for getting them out ahead in life.Also, finally, the dream is anything but silence. Also, now the clamoris not unbearable and is the sound of my own voice, speaking. En fin,may you have a happy journey. Come back before long. Angélica esteemsand loves you. Forgive, it’s that I almost don’t know how to write. [End Page 165]

Memory in the Making: A Poetics

for Lorna Dee Cervantes

Remember the tale where the maiden lets down her long, charged hair for the lover,his climb to her tower hanging by golden threads, by the very roots of her dreams?

This is not that story, which even then was vague about who, if anyone, was saved.No, we are just past what some call, without irony, the American Century.

At my university, students who own Beemers ride bikes into the fields for EarthSciences while brown men from another country bike to other fields for food.

The students remember this, the brown men that. They are not the same. I say thisas plain fact, though many hold sincerity has been cheapened in our complex age.

A little girl called Shelly weeps on her way to the school bus. She wears jellies, cheapplastic copies of a Greek fisherman’s sandal. She spoke Spanish before English,

her Salvadoran nana, both her parents at work. Pink keys, purple keychains, clankagainst her turquoise backpack. She did not dream last night. Tearstained, she

watches a family of lizards careen around the bleached trunk of a dead redwood,limbs bleached bones in the Wedgwood bowl of the sky. I can’t see children

these days without asking what they’ll remember of all this. Am I Shelly’sMiss Frances, strange neighbor woman who dressed me in shawls and sang

sadly in German? Whose husband, it was told, went up in flames on the Hindenberg?How do we know what will touch a child, mark her forever? Remember the girls

in their pale summer dresses? Remember the women they became? And then there’sthe memory locked in the cells, in the blood. Certainly potatoes are a kind of faith

to the Irish. Also recall Poland, someone’s grandfather escaping under his mother’sskirts, this cliché all that’s left of being Polish, Jewish, poor. Even so, the moment

still somewhere in the bone; potato stubble, smoke, strong smell of a woman’s skirts,becoming Catholic. Gazing at grandmother, what did she know, and how did she learn it?

And now we are everywhere and nowhere: videophones, internet. No bordersin the air, fresh blood on the ground. How to dance? Where does memory go

in all this? To work, emplumada! ¡A la chancla! We wear the black velvet hatthat came with the dream, loosen our tongues with the fire of roasted chiles.

The Greek women of Souli danced off the cliff of their village to keep out of the handsof the Turks. And here we are on the purple lip of the cañon, telling and telling, and

there’s no such thing as going too near the sun. Each time and each time the first. Justpast the close of the American Century, the child’s plastic keys rattle down the street. [End Page 166]

Rosemary Catacalos
Chicana
Rosemary Catacalos...

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