Cover to Cover Open Book – February 7, 2018: Jack Foley & Nina Serrano

What this episode covers

Part Two: Radio’s interwoven pair—Foley and Serrano, like guitar and piano, like Piedmontese and Siciliano, like tenor and soprano, like Paris and Milano—having survived Trump’s SOTU, are back, unimpaired, to offer their unique blend of whatchamacallit: poetry, music, commentary, what have you. This is Nina’s first poem: I began writing in 1968 at age 36, when I wrote a video drama with Roque Dalton for Cuban TV. Dalton (1935-killed in 1975) was an exiled Salvadoran writer living in Havana. My concern for his safety inspired my first poem in 1969, as he prepared to join the Salvadoran revolutionaries to liberate his country from the military dictatorship. At the time of the poem’s publication in an alternative SF newspaper, Express, I could only use his initials in the title and refer to El Salvador as “unknown terrain.” TO ROQUE DALTON BEFORE LEAVING TO FIGHT IN EL SALVADOR (Havana, 1969) Mass media I adore you. With a whisper in the microphone I touch the mass belly against mine like on a rush hour bus but with no sweat and no embarrassment. “Don’t die,” I whispered, in person. Only the air and revolutionary slogans hung between us. “When I die I’ll wear a big smile.” And with his finger painted a clown’s smile on his Indian face “Don’t die!” the whisper beneath the call to battle. My love of man in conflict with my love for this man. Women die too. They let go their tight grip on breath and sigh, and sigh to die. They say that Tania died before Che. I saw her die in a Hollywood movie. Her blood floated in the river. I stand in the street in Havana. There are puddles here but few consumer goods to float in them. Here the blood is stirred by the sacrifice of smiles to armed struggle. A phrase and an act. They leave one day and they are dead. “Death to the known order. Birth to the unknown.” Blood. Blood. Blood. The warmth of it between the thighs soothes the channel the baby fights and tears. I stand by a puddle in Havana a woman full of blood not yet spilled. Can I spill blood by my own volition? Now it flows from me by a call of the moon; The moon … a woman mopping her balcony spills water from her bucket on my hair, my breasts and into the puddle. The question is answered. And this is Jack’s tribute to the late John Oliver Simon, written immediately after Simon’s announcement that his cancer had returned and was inoperable—and that he had fallen in love. FOR JOHN OLIVER SIMON, AFTER THE NEWS Tears for John Simon Tears that the disease Everyone fears Should summon him Once again. Tears for John Whose tears (And words) At my wife’s death I hold in my heart And will hold in my heart Until whatever form Multiplicitous Many-Fingered Death Takes Takes me. I have traveled the road A little ways— As I listen I recognize The Cancer Road, The things everyone does When they have cancer. John is standing at—or a little beyond—its outset, Beginning to know The dark thing within him That will take him From the world. Friend, You will be remembered By me, by everyone you knew or touched For the words you shared For the eleven syllables For the crossing of linguistic boundaries. I remember your birthday gala. Death is the price we pay for that birth, All of us, Now or later. “We owe God a debt,” said the Elizabethans, Pronouncing “debt” as “death.” I will remember you, saying Goodbye, good luck, Fare forward, fare well in whatever realms Your spirit Reaches. “Therefore that he may raise, the Lord throws down.” * * Donne, “Hymn to God, My God, In My Sickness” The post Cover to Cover Open Book – February 7, 2018: Jack Foley & Nina Serrano appeared first on KPFA.

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