The Face on the Envelope
For Julia de Burgos (1914-1953)
Julia was tall, so tall, the whispers said,
the undertakers amputated her legs at the knee
to squeeze her body into the city coffin
for burial at Potter’s Field.
Dead on a street in East Harlem:
She had no discharge papers
from Goldwater Memorial Hospital,
no letters from Puerto Rico, no poems.
Without her name, three words
like three pennies stolen from her purse
while she slept off the last bottle of rum,
Julia’s coffin sailed to a harbor
where the dead stand in the rain
patient as forgotten umbrellas.
All her poems flowed river-blue, river-brown, river-red.
Her Río Grande de Loíza was a fallen blue piece of sky;
her river was a bloody stripe whenever the torrent
burst and the hills would vomit mud.
A monument rose at the cemetery in her hometown.
There were parks and schools. She was memorized.
Yet only the nameless, names plucked as their faces
turned away in labor or sleep, could return Julia’s name to her
with the grace of a beggar offering back a stranger’s wallet.
Years later, a nameless man from Puerto Rico,
jailed in a city called Hartford, would read her poem
about the great river of Loíza till the river gushed
through the faucet in his cell and sprayed his neck.
Slowly, every night, as fluorescent light grew weary
and threatened to quit, he would paint Julia’s face
on an envelope: her hair in waves of black, her lips red,
her eyelids so delicate they almost trembled. Finally,
meticulous as a thief, he inscribed the words: Julia de Burgos.
He could never keep such treasure under his pillow,
so he slipped a letter into the envelope
and mailed it all away, flying through the dark
to find my astonished hands.
from The Republic of Poetry