In the Beginning, There was the Light

From my earliest memory,
what looms and envelops
is the light,
saturating
and blinding,
warming
and reassuring,
revealing
and guiding,
with its life-charging
pulse.

These were the beginnings:
a small furnished room,
a crib bathed in luminescence,
a cosmic tunnel
of light
flooding through
the window,
the suspended
particles of dust
so many dancing worlds alit,
miniscule projections
of the giant orbs beyond.

It’s an intimate memory,
with the palpable feel
of having been lived,
but I see it from outside myself.
I’m not yet two;
Pupo, yet unborn.

Another flashback resolves
through Mami’s eyes:
I pull up the chair
to just under the hammock
cradling the newborn Pupo.
I climb up, stretch my body,
and reach with my head,
looking to knock him off
my hammock.
Bad enough having to share Mami.
But soon I’d defend him
against little would-be bullies.

Other reminiscences unfold
bathed in daylight,
played out in street scenes, like:

Going down a midtown sidewalk,
I goggle in awe
at the lost peaks of skyscrapers
piercing a clear blue sky.
Mami, self-conscious,
barks at me from under her breath
to stop staring
like a wonderstruck hick,
¡caramba!

A summer day of 1957,
our block in the Barrio
flushed in daylight and alive—
tops, marbles, and Spaldings
bouncing off stoop step edges.

Strolling down 116th,
heartbeat of the Barrio’s Marqueta,
perusing the wares,
Puerto Rican mothers
haggling with Jewish merchants
in the time-honored tradition
of working people.

Family country outings
to upstate Las Villas or El Duco’s,
grooming and training race horses in New Jersey.
Lucent August skies; embracing, life-affirming green—
nostalgic snatch of the Island.          

Later, finding myself,
the five-mile mid-afternoon treks
between home and Times Square,
brisk pace, youthful, intimate reflection.

Memory’s daylight
is especially brilliant,
tinged in affection,
stories, and warmth.
Its glow from the past
yet reaches us,
covering us
in our first innocence,
our earliest sense of wonder
when everything was new.

Dawn of my infancy,
engulf me, for a suspended moment,
in the memory
of first light,
newborn wonderment,
bright emerging life.

Oh, pulsing, dazzling radiance!