Great Spaces.
Gugliel-Moni, Linda Maria Rodriguez
On occasion of the 40th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's
assassination
Voices drift, flakes of ice, on this wintry November morning and as
we take off from the Great Plains, the pain and pride sets in of
homesteader memories of churning butter and bullets, quilting blizzards
and bison and Jefferson's Lewis and Clark streaming free through
unwritten histories and the uncertain beauty of sky wide fields of
legendary tracks of land and mountains of dreams and thunders, stars and
winds, hay and corn cobs on plates, lampshades, banisters, walls, high
ceilings, and even door handles.
Of a 4th generation Nebraskan woman who navigates humbled visitors
through a Capitol towering and stretching out its political and legal
gothic bones in the sacred mausoleum darkness of a Saturday late
afternoon, of Willa Cather and Wild Bill lining up the Italian and
Belgian marbled Hall of Fame into a central nave protected by all 8
virtues offering in the transept wings the East and West Chambers and 2
sets of carved doors through which we all have crossed to arrive here
and now, but so often, have chosen to forget: Men and Women of Assyria,
tamers of wheat and barley, and Native Americans with fellow otter and
turtle, sun and moon.
More voices adrift, spirits of past, present and future, of the
whispering Kurdish women who clean my hotel room, and the Mexican boy
telling his father he is allowed to enter this building, the mulatto
poet who was born illegally in MLK and JFK's MS, of the song and
dance of Lakotas and Pawnees rising from the frozen ground and of the
bearded man, a shark-like reminder at our backs, accusing us of
littering his Great Plains perhaps because a friend and I walked
Lincoln's ways wondering about a lost ID in Spanish.
I fly out over the Great Lakes and the Boston Harbor and wonder how
I will ever explain these Great Spaces to my students whose sun shrivels
the cob and blooms the coconut, whose jungle mountains smell of coffee
and culantro, tobacco and arroz con pollo, bananas and yautias, and
cradle the coqui-coqui, Taino and Arawak chants, booming forth the plena and bomba drum beats, the merengue and salsa all-night hip swings, and
who piled up ant-like 3 million and counting strong on a volcanic island
barely 100 miles long by 35 wide, face with naive hearts blue waters so
often dangerously deep and stormy, deceptively wide, invitingly OPEN.
4:29 pm eastern time
11/ 23/ 03
lincoln-boston logan-san juan
Linda Maria Rodriguez Gugliel-Moni was born in San Juan, Puerto
Rico, and has lived in England, Washington, D.C., Michigan, and
California. She studied at Georgetown, Dijon, Oxford, and the University
of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Her visual poetry collection, Metropolitan
Fantasies--textos errantes, was published in 2001. She edited Enlaces:
Transnacionalidad--El Caribe y su Diaspora--(2000), proceedings of the
Seventh International Conference of Caribbean Women Writers and
Scholars, a project she directed and for which she received an NEH. Her
work has appeared in From Totems to Hip-Hop, The Caribbean Writer,
Sargasso, Mango Season, MaComere, and Thamyris. In 2002 she was awarded
an Associate Artist position at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, where
she worked with Ishmael Reed, and in 2004 completed a Residence with
Elmaz Abinader at the Voices of Nations Arts Foundation. Her short
story, "The Galician," was the 2006 winner of The Raymond
Carver Best Story Award by a Non-North American Author and also was
awarded third prize by the Society for the Study of the Short Story at
the 9th
