Letter to Yeni on Peering into Her Life Poem by Sandra M. Castillo

I see you, not as you stand before me,
so full of language threatening to spill from you,
a silver-blue luminous substance the page of cups
might carry in love, in a gold chalice,
but as a child I might have seen, held,
had I been an adult on that island
where we might have become anyone
other than ourselves.

You are a sound you say your father carries,
a beat in the heart of an African drum
that seduced him with the thunder of Changó
the red of blood and earth,
a flesh-pink guava growing inside you,
its seeds on the tips of your fingers
like islands, like memories becoming leaves,
their veined undersides becoming maps,
palmlines, bridges where the sound of water collects childhood
in a blue bucket of memory,
where my Tío Machuco stands with childhood sandwiches I ate
sitting on the cold terraza, leaning against the Southwest red
of that couch Tía Hilda discarded like a useless memory
when we were no longer voices in open rooms with connecting
doors,
when we were words, onion-skinned paper
as transparent as re-written history or exile.