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Poetas y Pintores: Artists Conversing with Verse
The Artist The Poet
Maria Tomasula Orlando Ricardo Menes
"Meridian"
2005
Oil on Panel, 36" x 24"
The Poet
Orlando Ricardo Menes
Ghosts
Ghosts leave tracks of salt, Mamá says, don’t you
know they slurp sea water, breathe spray as we do air?
Growing up yards from the old schooners wharf,
she heard llantos, cawing wails that drown to gargles,
felt the etheric tingle of their touch, yet her Catalan
father alone was vidente, one who gazes the aura
majoris, fluid emanation, bluest in tropical ghosts.
By day a math teacher who dabbled in chemistry,
Abuelo the occultist spent whole nights—and wages—
testing spectral properties in haunted houses,
experiments meticulously recorded on scraps, stubs,
wrappers: Flowers of benzoin reveal cancerous testes,
and if exposed to sugar-of-lead fumes, the aura vibrates
like a glass bell. When colloquies took place at pensiones
and greasy-spoon fondas, he’d disappear for days
among the other metafísicos, men who bought tractates
with their children’s milk money, raised fists over
how many faces God has or whether the astral plane
is impermeable to original sin. A prodigy since
childhood when he’d doodle algorithms on his soles,
Abuelo dazzled colleagues with scrawled axioms,
theorems, but at home Abuela spat the vilest insults
as she kicked his theosophical tomes. Short on credit
from el chino bodeguero, she laundered so many
aprons, table linens from Chinatown she’d scrubbed
away her own fingertips. Despite broom smacks,
kitchen projectiles, Abuelo refused to surrender,
pure science my destiny, then the unexpected occurred:
his house haunted by the anima sola—lost soul—
of Don Melitón, the storekeeper who’d drowned
in choppy seas after stabbing to death his adulterous
young bride. Abuelo tried consecrated aqua fortis,
an occult fumigant, and failed; conjuring the angel
Rahab, kabbala’s Prince of Primordial Seas,
only made matters worse when a gale battered
el malecón, their first floor overrun by sea wasps.
Meantime, Don Melitón’s briny spittle spoiled
the month’s lard and cassava; his uric streams
befouled drinking water. Abuela threatened divorce,
seven-year-old Mamá, too scared to sleep or eat,
lost half her weight, he bedridden with frustration.
One morning at the laundry, Señor Chang
suggested a Cantonese exorcism to expel the ghost
for eternity, and Abuela took home a bartered
pagoda with tasseled lanterns, one porcelain
Confucius, several spells scribbled on red paper.
After placing the shrine under a breezy window,
Abuela lit joss sticks and candles, lay the spells
between cups of seawater. Burning ghost money—
old lottery tickets—and puffing a cigar, she fanned
the smoke into the temple, uttering three times,
Scram sea dog, scram to your lair beneath the waves.
Mamá tells that no one saw or heard Don Melitón
again, yet the pagoda stayed por si las moscas until
they moved to Regla, across the bay, where Abuelo
got a job teaching night-school arithmetic. To this
day Mamá remembers how, when putting her ear
to the pagoda’s door, she’d heard the surging sea,
waves that roar into breakwater, gale’s augury.
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