Dragonfly (page 6)

Okay, back to the serializing of Dragonfly. And, to continue the insect connection, as in my recent beetle-on-a-string theme, this time we focus on the dragonfly. This poem is in fact the title piece of the collection.

Miraculous Dragonfly Tutubi Milagrosa — a Tagalog phrase emblazoned across this sack of jasmine rice, also in Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Laotian, English, and Thai: a concert of tongues, scripts, pictographs. But the crudely drawn dragonfly cruising the names seems hardly a friendly miracle: metallic globes for eyes, skeletal legs from a giant mosquito, hairy carapace like some gene-fused nightmare from a low-budget movie. Abdomen shaped like a missile — a penile sting. Not gossamer wings but helicopter blades: Cobra chopper streaking over silky jungle mist hovers, cybernetic killer machine poised on a stream of fire, molten metal. No. Dragonfly out of my childhood is delicate, a four-year-old's handspan from wingtip to wingtip. Almost sunset near the Rizal monument in Manila's Luneta Park — cicadas in full choir, singing a canticle. A little boy in khaki shorts, a scrape on one knee, stands still then takes a step like a tightrope walker in line with the slender tail of a jade and ultramarine dragonfly. The boy's gaze, his whole being, funneled into fingertip and thumb. For a moment, a small universe of utter beauty and grace in his hand, my hand — intricate shimmer of wings, the eyes iridescent jewels. Page 6 NOTE: Image sources at right, from top to bottom: (1) my wife Mary Ann Blue Gotera's artwork for the cover of the original publication of Dragonfly; (2) a Cobra helicopter firing a missile, from Wikipedia; (3) a photograph by Pablo Yáñez, from his wonderful website www.modernstills.com; (4) a photograph by Judy of the Woods (browse her interesting website on how to carry on a sustainable life at www.judyofthewoods.net); (5) a photograph by Darrin O'Brien (check out his photostream on flickr). Many thanks to these lovely people for giving me permission to use their images in the blog. Do click on the images to see them enlarged; the details of the dragonflies in particular are quite exquisite and not quite as enjoyable in these smaller versions I've posted.

This poem happened because I didn't know something. What I didn't know was what "milagrosa rice" is.

There is indeed a brand of rice called "Dragonfly." I tried really hard to find an image online of the bag it comes in but came up empty-handed; you'll have to take my word for it that the bag is indeed marked with the word dragonfly in several Asian languages. On the bag also is a primitive-looking rendering of said dragonfly, and the whole shebang is labeled "Tutubi Milagrosa." I saw a bag of rice just like this in an Asian food store, and that started up this poem.

Now, tutubi (too-too-BEE) is the word for "dragonfly" in Filipino (or Tagalog, as the poem says), and milagrosa is Spanish for "miraculous" — a word imported wholesale into Filipino. Putting two and two together, then, I thought the rice bag said, "miraculous dragonfly." In fact, the word milagrosa, it turns out, refers to a type of rice, so the bag is quite pedestrian in declaring its contents as tutubi-brand milagrosa rice. Nonetheless, the misunderstanding — the resonant phrase "miraculous dragonfly" — fueled in me a mindstorm of meditation and memory, and this poem is the happy result.

First, a couple of facts. If you read the first installment of my ongoing bio in the blog, you know that I was born in the US but also lived some years as a small child (fact one). This poem is set during that time, just like the poem "Beetle on a String," posted on 1-30-2009.

Fact two. You can catch a dragonfly in your hands. This poem is my most-anthologized poem, and it has appeared in several language-arts textbooks for middle school and grade school; I have also performed this poem for students at various middle schools and grade schools, and this is what kids (and adults, I'm guessing) always want to know: can you catch a dragonfly? And how do you do it?

Look at the pictures of dragonflies above; you'll see that their thorax, the part of their body behind the head is quite bulky, containing the musculature for the wings. Although dragonflies have these gynormous compound eyes and probably have much better peripheral vision than we do, I don't think they can see behind themselves. That bulgy thorax gets in the way, like a bulky backpack. Now, I haven't checked with an entomologist on this, but I'm pretty sure I'm dead on here.

So, find a dragonfly that's landed; line yourself up with the tail, so you're directly behind the insect; then sidle up and grip the dragonfly by its tail between thumb and forefinger, ever so gently of course. Now this makes dragonflies really mad, but just hold on. I learned recently that the safest way to hold a dragonfly, so you don't harm it and it doesn't harm itself thrashing, is to bring the wings together above the insect and use them as a kind of handle. The bottom picture above demonstrates how to do that.

Try this out the next time you're near dragonflies; you'll be amazed at how easy it is. But of course, do let the dragonflies go. Don't keep them in a jar and try to feed them plant stuff. They are carnivores and must catch their prey, other insects, on the wing. Even if you put insects in the jar with them, they won't be able to catch them because they have to do it while flying. So don't keep them very long. In fact, it's best to let them go right away.

Fact three. (And this is a confession.) When Mary Ann needed a dragonfly for a model when she was working on the book cover, I went out and caught one. (She didn't actually think it could be done; who says you can't learn practical facts from poems?) We kept it in a jar and tried to feed it. But no go. It died, alas. So I know whereof I speak from actual experience. And my penance is to tell people not to keep dragonflies. Besides, here's a little fact that might intrigue you. The dragonfly forms a cage with its legs and uses it to scoop and trap other flying insects. That's why it can't catch another insect inside a jar, not enough room to get up some speed.

By the way, there's a cool story (fact four) behind Mary Ann's dragonfly illustration for the cover (top image above). She spent a summer drawing dragonfly after dragonfly and although they were wonderful renderings, I thought, Mary Ann was never satisfied. One day, she ripped a dragonfly shape out of white construction paper. She liked it okay, but the color seemed wrong. So Mary Ann pasted it down on another sheet of paper and painted the dragonfly black. After she let the black dry, she lifted up the dragonfly and the black part of the image above was what was underneath, on the throwaway sheet. Mary Ann simply added the turquoise accents, and there it was.

Okay, enough with the facts. "Just the facts, ma'am." Oh, wait, I wanted to add about Mary Ann's art experience that I just love how accident and serendipity can be such important aspects of art; another way to say it is that art can often be a gift to the artist. From the universe, from God, from whatever greater benevolent force you may believe in. And we, the artists, are just a conduit for that grace.

Changing gears. I'm teaching a course in Beginning Poetry Writing right now, and we're at that inevitable point in class when (some of) the students assert that a writer can be universal, can reach the widest audience, by being vague and ambiguous. The argument goes like this: readers won't identify with one's specific detail because it will contradict their own detail, their own memories, so one ought to write generally in order that readers can inject their own feelings into the poem. Nothing could be further from the truth. The poet must provide her own concreteness, and write those details out of her own life so that they glisten and scintillate with her own experience and vision; readers find joy in those specifics, feel that they are in capable hands, and trust the poet to "bring it." Ironically, it is at moments like this that readers bring in their own details, noting how they resonate with the specifics the poet has laid out.

I hope you can see this dynamic at work in this poem. Note in the second stanza the details of "metallic globes for eyes, / skeletal legs from a giant mosquito, hairy carapace / like some gene-fused nightmare from a low-budget movie"; as a child, I was enthralled by those old black and white 1950s movies filled with monsters inevitably produced by atomic radiation, for example, the movie The Fly starring David Hedison (later remade with Jeff Goldblum as the mad, but loveable, scientist). Comic books too were full of that stuff: the Hulk erupting periodically from scientist David Banner who had been exposed to radiation from the gamma bomb he had designed. (These 50s and 60s "morality plays" are, for my money, related to guilt about atomic holocaust, but that's a story for another blog entry.) My point here is that these insect/robot/cyborg details are specific to my own pop-culture interests, but they surely intersect with similar C-movie details gleaned by everyone from Saturday matinees and late-night TV.

Ditto with the war vs. nature stuff in stanza three: "silky jungle mist" vis-à-vis "cybernetic / killer machine." For people of my generation, this screams Vietnam. But, since the twentieth century and evidently the twenty-first too are times of wars and wars, this material should reverberate for most readers: the Gulf War, the war in Afghanistan, the current war in Iraq, etc. (And those are just the American ones.)

In the second half of the poem, there are details that are more closely related to the specifics of my own life: "a four-year-old's handspan from wingtip to wingtip"; "the Rizal monument" (José Rizal is the national hero of the Philippines, so there are both personal and national references in this passage); "cicadas." And much more specific and personal: "khaki shorts, a scrape on one knee." These details are designed specifically to ground the poem (and the reader, of course) in verisimilitude, in an apparent reality, to help them feel as if they are "there." Although perhaps someone may not have worn khaki shorts, everyone will have had abrasions and bruises. So a common humanity is invoked by these small details.

In the final stanza, I start to include general ideas, notions that aren't concrete: "his whole being," "a small universe," and "utter beauty and grace." But notice that this is one stanza out of six, and the earlier five act as contextualizing ballast: all the Asian languages mentioned in the opening stanza, for instance. This transition from the specific to the general allows the speaker then to reveal: "his hand, my hand." And the last line returns us to specific detail: "intricate shimmer of wings, the eyes iridescent jewels."

As we used to say in poetry workshops of the 70s and 80s, the poem earns the right to use large, universal concepts by anchoring the poem first in concrete detail and then re-anchoring the poem at the end with concrete detail.

Once again, though, let me remind you that the writer is never the best source about his or her own writing. So I would love to hear what you think about all this; leave me a comment below. Or if you have questions, ask away. Thanks. I hope you are having a truly marvelous day today.

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Martin, Jimmy, Barack

This week is a monumental one historically, with the annual celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. today, followed by President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration tomorrow. I've been watching TV shows on the lives of these two men this past weekend and noting the interesting interplay between one focus on how their work benefits African Americans and the other focus that the benefits are really for all Americans, all people. Similarly, Obama is lauded as the first African American president, but many also note that of course he is part white, with an upbringing that includes Asian influences and experiences. In fact, in an interesting cultural twist, some Irish Americans as well as some Irish claim Obama as one of their own, through his ancestor who hailed from the Irish town of Moneygall; these relatives pronounce his given name with a stress on the first syllable: BARE-uck.

All of this got me to thinking about how Filipino Americans of my generation grew up in this country: we fit in the gaps and hollows between black and white, and I can recall taking on, as a youth, typical characteristics of African American or European American identity, as needed in various situations. One of those environments was the world of "bagboys" — both boys and men, actually — at the US Army Commissary in the Presidio of San Francisco during the late 60s. I particularly remember one young African American man, Jimmy (whose surname in the poem has been changed).

Jimmy Hurt They called us Schoolboys, the Regulars did. Mostly men in their forties, all black except for that old Filipino, Pablo. We were high school kids, cruised in weekday afternoons and Saturdays to bag for tips at the Army commissary on the Presidio. The baddest of us schoolboys was Jimmy Hurt. He would float in, with rust alligator shoes, red piping on his socks, double-breasted Edwardian, gold-tipped mahogany cane, and a Billy Preston natural. The rest of us came in our white shirts and blue aprons, but Jimmy would change in the back room, among the piled-up bales of grocery bags, then swagger out. The royal blue of his apron folded under, an ironed crease just where a Nehru coat would be hemmed. And man, could Jimmy bag! Half-gallon Coke and Pepsi bottles spinning in his hands like Cisco Kid's six-shooters. Gerber's jars orbiting in air before the swish into the sack. The ruby on Jimmy's right ring finger glinted as his hand swooped down on a 16-oz. can of Del Monte peaches, then right hand behind back, the can materializing over left shoulder, the left hand plucking it from the air like a Willie Mays blind catch. Square as Euclidean angles, Jimmy's bags had edges sharp as his dark Ben Davis pants. He always made fifteen to our mere five per hour. And then we might not even get home with that. Jimmy'd hold court in the back room, playing "Tonk" for five dollars and ten. He never lost. I heard he later played secret agent for the cops, when police stations in San Francisco were under siege by pipe bombs and other explosive devices. Jimmy, in black turtlenecks and cords like some Hollywood commando, lurked outside Fillmore Station with a walkie-talkie, reporting any "suspicious individuals" besides himself. Anyway, last week, Danny McVeigh and I were shooting nine-ball for beers at the Town and Country on Geary, when Jimmy walked in, carrying a glossy cue case, no cane, sporting a charcoal-gray knit with red accents. I called a three-ball combination: 4-5-9 into the left corner. Jimmy stopped to watch. Purple clicked into orange, yellow on white sliding two feet seven inches into the pocket, sweetly. Jimmy reached up slowly, pulled his bottle-green shades down to the tip of his nose. Looking at me over gold rims, he said, "How much you want to shoot for?" —  Vince Gotera, from Forkroads: A Journal of Ethnic American Literature (Winter 1996).

I really looked up to Jimmy back then. He was eternally sharp, always dressed "to the nines," an unbeatable pool shark, never off-balance, always in charge. The Regulars, the bagboys who were shagging tips to support families, treated Jimmy as an adult, though he was probably eighteen or nineteen when I knew him. I would have been fifteen, probably. And of course he lorded it over us, the other "schoolboys" &mdash Peter Pan to our Lost Boys, though Jimmy would have sneered at that comparison, would have thought of Pan as fey, no street cred. Jimmy was the ultimate hipster, cool and composed, a ladies' man, a cardsharp, con man, player, dancer, hustler, entertainer — the way he bagged groceries was what got him 2-3 times as much in tips as the rest of us (we all worked only for tips, even the Regulars). Jimmy exhibited the mastery and command of James Brown with the poise and looks of Marvin Gaye.

Jimmy would be about sixty now. I wonder what he ended up doing? Could the alleged "secret agent" phase have turned into a career in law enforcement? Did Jimmy perhaps win something enormous in a game of nine ball? A Lincoln Continental with a white shag rug? Maybe his very own pool hall? Or maybe Jimmy became a man of the cloth? A pastor in some AME church in a big-city ghetto. Though part of me sees him as more of the TV-evangelist type, raking in lots of moolah, checks and cash. I bet he didn't end up a bagboy Regular. I bet he didn't end up in prison (maybe you were thinking that; it certainly occurred to me). Jimmy was too much the entrepeneur, a young black man who made the most of the space society allowed him and enterprised beyond that space.

As I was writing that last paragraph, I couldn't quite figure out what I would say about poetic craft in this poem. There is my usual play with line breaks, using enjambment to push double meanings. The usual sound play: "double-breasted Edwardian" paralleled with "Billy Preston" — not just the ən sound at the end but also the echo of rest. The element that jumps out to me in this poem, which I don't think I've discussed before in the blog, is narrative.

Like a movie, the poem begins with an establishing shot: the commissary, the men and boys bagging groceries for tips, the social hierarchy. Then the presentation of the protagonist, Jimmy: both how he looked and what he did. Told in little flashes, micro-vignettes. All in past tense, a distant past: customary, repeated actions. Then, in typical storytelling fashion, the narrative flashes forward to a later time, to something Jimmy was said to have done between the bagging days and today, a kind of "middle past." And finally the transition to a very recent past — "Anyway, last week" — for all intents and purposes, the present, really. We see a scene played out: characters named, a real location, the landing of the combination shot. And finally the kicker: Jimmy, who apparently doesn't recognize the speaker or maybe does but plays coy, starts up his hustle, his con, his game. Always the playah.

For what it's worth, it's all based on "true stories" from my own past. During those bagboy days, I did shoot pool one time with fellow bagboy Dan McVeigh at the Town and Country pool hall on Geary Blvd. Jimmy came in and witnessed me sinking that exact 4-5-9 combination. And he did say, "How much you want to shoot for?" I don't recall now if I played Jimmy then, but I'm sure he would have figuratively cleaned my clock, walked away counting all my money. The difference in the poem is that I build in an implication that time has passed, perhaps quite a bit of time, but Jimmy hasn't changed. Still the playah. And of course that's Jimmy's strength, his attractiveness.

Not sure what else to say about the narrative. What do you think?

Today, I wonder where Jimmy is. And what he thinks of Dr. King and President Obama. Maybe in the nation we have been becoming between Dr. King's day and Obama's presidency, grown men won't have to bag groceries only for tips — no wage, no insurance — to put food on the table. I guarantee, Jimmy would have something really striking to say about all of that. And the man would be dressed up, yo. Slick.