Marjorie Moorhead
Nuyorican in Vermont
Tyehimba Jess, the poet, posts
a tweet today; a video
of Miguel Algarín (just passed away).
Long live the spirit of the Nuyorican…
Pouring one out.. Jess says.
The video shows compañeros pouring drink
on the street; they toast, laugh, recite.
It takes me back some thirty-seven years,
to you. We pour a little on the sidewalk
for the boys inside you said, explaining
this ritual of remembrance; respect.
To know someone in jail was as foreign for me
as the island of Puerto Rico, where we visited
your Aunt’s house in Bayamón, art galleries
in Old San Juan, rock formations at the shore.
It was around 1984.
You still lived in El Barrio (was it East 103rd?)
in your studio. Artwork covered every wall.
A long canvas held in-process figures;
life-sized, created in texture and gesture;
motion and emotion; the thick gesso-acrylic mix
holding your strokes, your struggles and strengths,
visible in whites and blues, hints of red.
In Vermont, you painted too. The mountains
remind me of Puerto Rico, you said,
telling me of visits there in your youth; respite
from harsh edges in Nuevo York.
Hearing news of his death, you drew a loving portrait
of Gilberto, last seen in NYC gaunt, with a cane;
haunted, frightened of the virus in his veins.
Were you frightened too?
It was before you got so sick.
Walks past corn fields labored. Eventually bedded
with pneumonia (Pneumocystis; the opportunistic one).
Always, you drew and drew. Mountains, figures, faces,
a bird leaving someone’s mouth like breath, the moon.
Death took you away from us Jorge.
Cruelly, and too soon. Death found you
like so many others you’d known,
and those I’d yet to meet.
Marjorie Moorhead is the author of the chapbooks Survival: Trees, Tides, Song (Finishing Line Press 2019), and Survival Part 2: Trees, Birds, Ocean, Bees (Duck Lake Books 2020). Her poems have appeared in Sheila-Na-Gig, Porter House Review, Verse-Virtual, Tiny Seed Literary, Amethyst Review, and other journals, as well as in several anthologies, including most recently Covid Spring; Granite State Pandemic Poems (Hobblebush Books, 2020, Alexandria Peary, ed.). Moorhead writes from the NH/VT border.
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