Our friend Maria
dances with words
and twirls with ghosts
as though she is intimate
with the sight of sounds
and echoes moving in spaces
unseen
Stories of ancestors
of loss and longing
as she peels back each onion skin
of their meaning
they burst through doors
into liminal rooms
lavishly decorated in transcendance
and understanding
Her tongue
flavored in equal parts
with the lengua Cubana
of her exiled parents
and streetslick slang
salsa dancing through alleys
and cafés
of Miami's Little Havana
She learned to live
in thank you
and wonder,
fluent in both
Ever curious
about the furious frenzy
of life in each new adopted home
Capitol Hill and northwest DC
and in the ancient hills
of northwestern Virginia
The helper and the guidepost
making a fortune
in meaningfulness
tending to the last days
of old souls
who lived jazz
and taught life to those
young enough to maybe waste it
She helped me find words
that flowed from my heart and not
my doddered head,
beset with its constant off-tempo dance
of inadequacy and doubt,
She coaxed them to leap onto pages;
real and paperous
born of tree and root
the life balm preserving my own stories
As her abuelos left Spain,
as her padres left Cuba,
so too she left here
Fearful of what we might be
becoming
now
Returning to her ancestral stream
on the Gaelic-tinged north coast
of Spain
in search of adventure;
instead found and bound by cancer,
and its cruel
coopting of our body's systems that we have
trusted
and relied on
our whole lives
In DC she learned flamenco
and in Spain she breathed it
Maria made art into life
and life into art,
even as she pulled at the best threads
of the stories and
massaged them into a new flowing scarf,
brilliantly colored
magical and memorable
una cuentista magnifica
Mi amiga linda was
a seed-scatterer
planting connection wherever she went
for she was a perennial,
blooming into mind
and memory
in irregular bursts;
a post on the socials
a note or a text
sometimes just an image
she'd carefully wrapped in the
tissue paper of a phone memory
In her wake spread dozens
hundreds
countless
connections
to and through her
to things meaningful
visceral
and sentient
Alive,
like the aroma of a sofrito
filling a kitchen where
love and life and nurture,
mingle and simmer
indistinguishable;
a stew that feeds
the soul
I would write her a sonnet
if it would bring her back
she was a rare gift
to life itself
and we are poorer today
as if a hacker had emptied
our life savings while we slumbered
She left in her sleep
and I imagine in her final dream
she was flying towards the light
and yet another view of magnificence,
freely soaring and delighting in the
experience
She feasted on experience,
with insatiable appetite for what's next,
even as the tumor forbid
her to savor the full wonder
of taste
and satisfaction of a contented
belly
I am certain whatever she saw
invited her in;
who wouldn't?
Like the dance, and the words
and the magic
She is of the angels now
Who could blame them
for not giving her back?
From one of her final social media posts, a few days after her final birthday.
Hard at work polishing the final draft of Treasures in My Chest, December 2019.
At the release concert for Treasures in My Chest, March 6, 2020. Less than a week later the world shut down.