The Empire State Building
Is on 63rd Street
Ramon wanted to bet Manolo
Manolo said impossible
...
some waves
a wave of now
a trombone speaking to you
a piano is trying to break a molecule
...
Two guitars were left in a room all alone
They sat on different corners of the parlor
In this solitude they started talking to each other
...
By the East River
of Manhattan Island
Where once the Iroquois
canoed in style—
...
A campesino looked at the air
And told me:
With hurricanes it's not the wind
or the noise or the water.
...
In a city that now floats
in a bottle,
In a dimension outside
of the census,
...
Through the Victorians
spinning a wool of music
the gang in the breeze
Boys and girls headed toward the
...
In which everything goes backwards
in time and motion
Palm trees shrink back into the ground
Mangos become seeds
...
Is the ocean really inside seashells
or is it all in your mind?
—PICHON DE LA ONCE
Behold and soak like a sponge.
...
Her voice comes out of her knees,
her fingernails are full of sound,
Birds are in her lungs,
which gives her gargantuan flight,
...
The mountain have changed to buildings
Is this hallway the inside of a stem
That has a rattling flower for a head,
Immense tree bark with roots made out of
...
Next to white rice
it looks like coral
sitting next to snow
Hills of starch
...
Song 1
Julito used to shine the soul
of his shoes before he left for
the Palladium to take the wax
...
Time is crying upon the backs of lizards,
Through the white stone of the medieval city
They dash.
The houses that are walking up the stairs,
Flowers out of ruins,
...
Victor Hernandez Cruz was born in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico. He moved to New York City with his family when he was five years old, but he didn’t start learning English until two years later when his family bought a television set. He started writing poetry early and at seventeen self-published his first book, Papo Got His Gun! And Other Poems, on a mimeograph machine. Since then, more than a dozen collections of his poems—among them Snaps (1969); By Lingual Wholes (1982); Red Beans (1991); Rhythm, Content, and Flavor: New and Selected Poems (1989); and The Mountain in the Sea (2006)—have been published by traditional publishing houses. He is a member of the Nuyorican movement of writers. Cruz writes from the observation point of traveler and city dweller; he is fluent in Spanish and English, and the poems reveal his familiarity with music, New York, California, the Caribbean, Puerto Rican history, and the immigrant experience. Of Red Beans, Jose Amaya wrote in the San Francisco Review of Books, “Cruz experiments with the vast linguistic and cultural possibilities of ‘indo-afro-hispano’ poetry and comes up with a strong vision of American unity.” Ann C. Bromley observed in the American Book Review, “Red Beans celebrates a migratory poetics that is self-reflective, lyrical, lush, and often dead-pan humorous as Spanish and English dance a lambada through its pages.” Cruz commented in a 1990 interview that writing poetry is his way of traveling, and that his major concerns include “the history of immigration in a world-wide sense; the idea of civilization coming into other civilizations.” He often writes poems based on material he has recorded in notebooks. When asked why he seldom uses the first-person point of view in his poems, he explained, “The poetry’s not really about myself, it’s about my culture.” Victor Hernandez Cruz was one of the founders of the Before Columbus Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes the recognition of multicultural writers. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.)
Side 19
The Empire State Building
Is on 63rd Street
Ramon wanted to bet Manolo
Manolo said impossible
The Empire State Building
Is on 72nd Street
They made a ten dollar bet
And borrowed Cheo's car
And headed towards Brooklin
When they came back
Late that night
All that Manolo wanted to know
Was
If Gloria cooked
I love your Poems just wish i could learn more about our family. Please reach out and touch someone.