Solar de la Habana (In Praise of the Washerwomen), and: Lorca in the Forest of Goatskin Trees

Solar de la Habana (In Praise of the Washerwomen)

inspired by the film We Are the Music! (1964)

Once a mansion, now a tenement called solar,so close to Havana Bay that spindrift floatslike incense into iron windows and every nighta cloister of gulls jabbers devotions to the moon—this sea-hallowed warren of washerwomen,fishers' widows, who sing ditties, sea chanteysfrom Calabar, sleep in pirogues, hoist laundryto crosstrees of ceiba pentandra that driesin the smoldering dusk soft and brightas the clouds of Oyá, Mother of Rainbows.Day after day, by sunlight or moonlight,they press vestments with charcoal irons,stoke scrap-wood fires, stir heirloom cauldronswhere laundry boils to baptismal cleanness,wrinkled hands scrubbing in rhythm to the seauntil sweat crystallizes to rosary beads.Once the work is done the women gatherin the courtyard by La Fuente, fountain of life,drawing water from terracotta chalicessacred to la Madre Morena, the brown Virginof Regla across the bay whose glass shrinesits on mangrove stilts circled by half-moonsof white sand. They light bamboo candles,drum salt-cured bongós, clack coconut castanets,singing hymns that mix Latin with Yoruba, then the youngest shouts she's just seen Our Ladydance la rumba yambú in gyres, shimmies,twists, and they all huddle before this miracleby the sea to undulate with allelulias, breakinto chants of washboard, lye soap, and hot iron.

Lorca in the Forest of Goatskin Trees

At summer's equinox sunrays curdle to soursop,calabash clouds drift on ginger currents to Africa,and where the mountains shadow a blue-black sea,the poet saunters alone through the forest

of goatskin trees sacred to the children of Ochá,Cuba's first Yoruba, bozal slaves who breathed brineon those Spanish brigs ballasted by their grief,each plank sinew bound, nailed with teeth, bone, cochlea.

Lorca smells sweat of maroons in the leaves,strokes roots that coil his wrist like newborn boas,and as emery winds rustle the star-apple canopy,his heart trembles to murmurous maracas,

that obsidian mane musses to green moss,while his shorter leg, cause of his swaying gait,grows without pain or shame to hardwood—pith and phlegm of Ibadan, Oyo, Enugu.

Something falls from the spirit tree, not fruitor seed, but a fetish of coral and stonewith tiny crania set into eggshell cavities,blue ribbons like entrails of lapis lazuli.

The fetish speaks to Lorca in Lucumí,its consonants like rain pelting a lead river,nasals that blare auroras, an arc of syllablesstrung like the beaded sighs of cante jondo.

The poet presses the fetish to his bellylike tender parchment strained to elegy,then hears a song that gnaws the burlsand whorls of ears blessed to wild wood.

He learns the orisha's name, Eshu Elegba,crossroader, soothsayer, gossip, trickster of tricksters,loud and proud, no little duendehiding way in the mouse holes of Granada.

And Lorca is no more a man but the drumcalled Dundun—wood talker, skin whisperer—whose voice rumbles hymnals of heartwoodacross the hammock and up to the cloud forest

where his song vibrates gourds to hatchas hummingbirds that feed on blood orchids,and the stillborn chichereku grow bat wings,chirping congas in caverns of bromeliad.