Bananas

^{for Indrek}

I.  
In Estonia, Indrek is taking his children  
to the Dollar Market to look at bananas.  
He wants them to know about the presence of fruit, 
about globes of light tart to the tongue, about the 
twang of tangelos, the cloth of persimmons,  
the dull little mons of kiwi. There is not a chance 
for a taste where rubles are scarce and dollars, harder.  
Even beef is doled out welfare-thin on Saturday’s platter.  
They light the few candles not reserved for the dead, 
and try not to think of the small bites of the coming winter,  
of irradiated fields or the diminished catch in the fisherman’s  
net. They tell of bananas yellow as daffodils. And mango—  
which tastes as if the whole world came out from her womb. 

II  
Colombia, 1928, bananas rot in the fields.   
A strip of lost villages between railyard   
and cemetery. The United Fruit Company   
train, a yellow painted slug, eats  
up the swamps and jungle. Campesinos  
replace Indians who are a dream and a rubble  
of bloody stones hacked into coffins: malaria,  
tuberculosis, cholera, machetes of the jefes.  
They become like the empty carts that shatter  
the landscape. Their hands, no longer pulling green 
teats from the trees, now twist into death, into silence 
and obedience. They wait in Aracataca, poised 
as statues between hemispheres. They would rather 
be tilling their plots for black beans. They would 
rather grow wings and rise as péricos—parrots, poets,  
clowns—a word which means all this, pericos, those  
messengers from Mictlán, the underworld, where ancestors  
of the slain arise with the vengeance of Tláloc. A stench 
permeates the wind as bananas, black on the stumps, char  
into odor. The murdered Mestizos have long been cleared  
and begin their new duties as fertilizer for the plantations.  
Feathers fall over the newly spaded soil: turquoise,  
scarlet, azure, quetzal, and yellow litters  
the graves like gold talons of bananas.

III   
Dear I, 

The 3’ x 6’ boxes in front of the hippie  
market in Boulder are radiant with marigolds, some 
with heads as big as my Indian face. They signify 
death to me, as it is Labor Day and already  
I am making up the guest list for my Día de los Muertos  
altar. I’ll need maravillas so this year I plant caléndulas  
for blooming through snow that will fall before November.  
I am shopping for “no-spray” bananas. I forego 
the Dole and Chiquita, that name that always made me  
blush for being christened with that title. But now 
I am only a little small, though still brown enough 
for the—Where are you from? Probably my ancestors  
planted a placenta here as well as on my Calífas coast  
where alien shellfish replaced native mussels, 
clams and oysters in 1886. I’m from  
the 21st Century, I tell them, and feel  
rude for it—when all I desire  
is bananas without pesticides. They’re smaller 
than plantains which are green outside and firm 
and golden when sliced. Fried in butter  
they turn yellow as over-ripe fruit. And sweet. 
I ask the produce manager how to crate and  
pack bananas to Estonia. She glares at me   
suspiciously: You can’t do that. I know.  
There must be some law. You might spread  
diseases. They would arrive as mush, anyway. 
I am thinking of children in Estonia with  
no fried plátanos to eat with their fish as  
the Blond turns away, still without shedding  
a smile at me—me, Hija del Sol, Earth’s Daughter, lover  
of bananas. I buy up Baltic wheat. I buy up organic 
bananas, butter y canela. I ship banana bread. 

IV  
At Big Mountain uranium  
sings through the dreams of the people.  
Women dress in glowing symmetries, sheep  
clouds gather below the bluffs, sundown  
sandstone blooms in four corners. Smell of sage  
penetrates as state tractors with chains trawl the resisting  
plants, gouging anew the tribal borders, uprooting 
all in their path like Amazonian ants, breaking 
the hearts of the widows. Elders and children 
cut the fences again and again as wind whips 
the waist of ancient rock. Sheep nip across  
centuries in the people’s blood, and are carried 
off by Federal choppers waiting in the canyon 
with orders and slings. A long winter, little wool 
to spin, medicine lost in the desecration of the desert. 
Old women weep as the camera rolls on the dark 
side of conquest. Encounter rerun. Uranium. 1992. 

V  
I worry about winter in a place  
I’ve never been, about exiles in their  
homeland gathered around a fire,  
about the slavery of substance and  
gruel: Will there be enough to eat?  
Will there be enough to feed? And  
they dream of beaches and pies, hemispheres  
of soft fruit found only in the heat of the planet.  
Sugar cane seeks out tropics; and dictates  
a Resolution to stun the tongues of those  
who can afford to pay: imported plums, bullets,  
black caviar large as peas, smoked meats  
the color of Southern lynchings, what we don’t  
discuss in letters. You are out of work.  
Not many jobs today for high physicists  
in Estonia, you say. Poetry, though, is food  
for the soul. And bread? What is cake before 
corn and the potato? Before the encounter  
of animals, women and wheat? Stocks, high  
these days in survival products: 500 years later tomato  
size tumors bloom in the necks of the pickers. 
On my coast, Diablo dominates the golden hills, 
the faultlines. On ancestral land, Vandenberg shoots  
nuclear payloads to Kwajalein, a Pacific atoll, where 68%  
of all infants are born amphibian or anemones. But poetry  
is for the soul. I speak of spirit, the yellow seed 
in air as life is the seed in water, and the poetry 
of Improbability, the magic in the Movement 
of quarks and sunlight, the subtle basketry  
of hadrons and neutrinos of color, how what you do 
is what you get—bananas or worry.  
What do you say? Your friend,   
                                                       a Chicana poet.