Boys Whistling like Canaries

If there was a mountain and then a mountain on the mountain,

then there would be a path that ran up to the base of that mountain

like the beginning of a story about a heaven.

And if there was a heaven, then there would be an island below it

green orange trees circling a red square full of singing canaries,

the flocks of boys beneath basking on sidewalks

dreaming like pigeons drowsing on rooftop edges

while waiting for someone

to drop a piece of sandwich onto the ground.

If only I could find my way down to this earth

then I could eat its food and remember

that when I was a young pigeon—

that when I was young,

I too was a pigeon, like you.

But this is not that story

because I was born out of doubt

seven months after my parents married each other

in a small church below the cliffs above the sea—

this is not that story

because I have been unable to believe in a heaven for years—

this story is about the note you hear

in the song of the canary just now,

a lightweight sound, a tiny breath

they learned from a boy not unlike that boy

whistling his way across the parched expanse of this square—

the Placa de Generalissimo

named for the general banished to this island that Bolívar left

in order to free the new world, the old one being already lost

to the madness of decrepitude and the false preservatives of nationalism.

But you must know, every man is a boy gone mad with age.

As mad as the botanical gardens planted here in 1788,

its seeds of enlightenment grown unnaturally.

No complexity of pattern and shade from its branches,

no careful art of pruning to entwine a riot of vegetation

into a diverse botany captured apart from nature

but a still and stagnant memento mori to landscape,

each plant a geriatric miracle of its species

perfectly spaced apart the precise width of the head gardener’s leather shoe

allowing him to more easily eliminate unwanted vegetation

while bringing water each day around noon to pacify the rest.

These wide boulevards the generalissimo might embrace

as he did this placa lazily strewn with café tables and chairs,

his arms outstretched to demonstrate in his conspiracy the width

a full battalion might require to take a city’s center on the march,

the first warmth of the morning tripping off the mountain’s edge,

and the fog falling all the way down the hillside

to the sea and all the ships in port.

The head gardener was a man with no patience for generals.

He was a scientist and believed in the working man,

not because he had read Marx and Engels

or sung “L’Internationale” on the first of May,

but because his copy of Das Kapital was made hollow in the center

to hold a small glass bottle of homemade apricot brandy

stoppered with an ancient waxed cork wrapped in string—

my sweet dialectic he said—

retrieved from its place on a shelf in his small wooden office

stashed in a dark corner of the garden walls

where he and his assistants would begin each day with a coffee

cooked in a brass pot on a brazier and laced with the brandy

as antidote to the aches and pains that came with being part of reality—

that most men, in order to feed and shelter their families, have only their bodies

 to give in exchange.

And so I cannot blame the head gardener

for using his shoe to measure out the spacing of his plants

or for his lack of elegance when pruning his trees—

though his education might allow him different

he worked as hard as his men, his back bent to the shovel,

and dug down into the black soil like any grave digger

stolidly building a final home for himself.

His son was a boy who dreamed like the crow flies

with a jungle of limbs akimbo, flopping and squawking his way

through the house out onto the street and down the narrow steps

to the placa where the generalissimo sat ensconced upon his wobbly wire chair

halfway through his soliloquy of overthrow and redemption.

By now the boy was whistling

a tune everyone he passed felt was so familiar

they were surprised when they could not recall its name—

perhaps part Mozart, a bit of jota, a little flamenco

he might have heard one night over the small brown radio

his father kept stashed behind a cupboard in the kitchen,

or a piece of the music that wailed from the club with the green light

spilled from its doors late at night when the men stumbled out,

or the voice of his mother calling to him come home small one

or even the songs of the canaries that filled each tree

and every block in every town and village across this island

that was becoming every day more and more like a cage

and less like a step on a path at the base of a mountain

that led to a story of heaven tilting and gleaming at the edge of the sky.

But the tune in the boy’s whistle does not matter

because truthfully, the boy was whistling no tune

except the one created by the contours of his unconscious,

the notes going precisely where he was going

and occupying exactly what he was thinking—

nowhere and nothing

like a canary perched at the top of its tree

its breast splitting open the sky with its lime-green

singing the only tune that had ever been in its head.

This moment—

let it all rain down.

The heavens, the mountain, the story of how the path came to be.

Every hundred years, the mountain explodes,

the last in 1909.

Let’s have an early one.

Better everyone die here—

the generalissimo in his wobbly chair,

the boy in his song, his father

the head gardener and his men

sipping dialectic and coffee from fertilizer cans—

than the million who would die afterwards.

But no, the generalissimo heard the boy whistling

and immediately knew this nothing

now rapidly effeminizing his country

as he was just telling his conspiracy gathered about him like flies

had to be stopped—

You must wrestle the law like an angel

to make it obey

God’s will and not man’s desire to be free.

And so he consigned the boy to his prodigious memory

to be recalled three years later and added to a list

written out carefully on the best paper

at a desk once owned by a king or a king’s bastard son

by a secretary with a lisp who had never thought

she would get anywhere or any place so grand

without first removing her underclothes—

about which I can assure you, she was not wrong.

Later, the general would boast with pride,

his country had so many prominent intellectuals,

in so many cities the army had to use the football stadium

in order to kill them all.

Bullfighting rings being too small.

Except on the island, where the boy and his father

(because where would a boy get nothing from

if not from his own father?)

were led by the guardia to an empty banana warehouse

unilluminated except for the shafts of sunlight streaming

through rivet holes cut all around in the corrugated steel,

and pushed towards a group of men loitering at one end

neighbors, cousins and friends

all of them shivering though it was not cold.

Perhaps from nerves

or perhaps from the absence of nerves

the boy began to whistle

but this time

for the first time

he was not whistling a tune made of nothing

but the tune sung by the canary

trapped by the bird man with the small shop

downtown next door to the motorbike repair—

a canary who after years singing from the top of his tree

in the placa, found himself suspended in a small wire cage

with rust spots at each of its welds—

a cage nailed to the yellow wall of the shop

that the canary had just realized

would likely be his tomb—

this song of sudden mortality

was the one the boy whistled now.

It made the men of the guardia

go mad immediately,

and they shot them all, an entire warehouse of men,

in less than twelve minutes,

the boy hit first in the throat

so that he fell beneath a steadily growing pile

of men in great bunches,

the air so thick with smoke and explosions

and the cries of men dying calling out for each other

their wives and their children and God

you might have thought the volcano indeed was erupting.

Then silence

save a last breath escaping

through the hole in the throat of the boy.

How do you explain this sort of madness

except that it must come from the songs of the birds

as their last revenge for the cages of men?

Afterwards, the mother took her broom

and a chair from the café to the edge of the town

and began sweeping the earth

from one side to the other.

She started at the base of the mountain

and slowly worked her way up

walking backwards,

her footsteps disappearing

as her steady broom left behind

a smooth gray path in the volcanic soil

that her neighbors followed worriedly

urging her home, wringing their hands

asking her what are you thinking,

where are you going

only to receive each time the same answers

Of a heaven.

To meet Bolívar.

Until they finally stopped asking

and then they stopped going.

And then they started to forget.

When the mother finally reached the top

she set down her broom, set up her chair,

and made a black cup of coffee.

Then she sat down and waited

to disappear into thin air.

If there were a heaven, she would have found it then.

But if there wasn’t, then she just rotted away.

And if there wasn’t a heaven, then perhaps there wasn’t a path.

And if not a path, then not a mountain or an island

or a town or a square or a boy.

If you like, I can confess that none of the details here are true,

a crime for which perhaps I should be shot,

but you cannot deny the canaries singing at the top of each tree.

And if there are canaries, consider whether each note

might not be a body

buried someplace

no one remembers,

except for that one note

you just heard a canary sing

right overhead—

a lightweight note, a tiny breath

that may only leave your body

through a hole in your throat.