The Splintering

Perhaps our young minds eventually embrace grammar so that thoughts will maintain their integrity, respect boundaries.  And perhaps time, as a concept, comes into being so that the flood of perception can be mastered, channeled, and savored measure by measure.  Yet don’t we all have some vague impression of an early circumstance when that was not the case – when the territories of the body and the world comprised one sovereign frontier; and a sense of was/is/will be swirled around us in waves?  To an infant, each morning brings a constantly-surprising storm of the senses, both thrilling and terrifying – though, at the time, it was simply an immersion in the day.  And this experience came to us bearing no title nor sense of ownership – that is, until we began to recognize the one our mothers and fathers were attaching to it; and then we embraced those syllables as our given names.  Here, in this a brand-new poem from the acclaimed writer Richard Blanco, we are presented with a taste of that childhood domain even as, stanza by stanza, we gradually become aware of those crucial distinctions by which we navigate: who and what we are (and are not); and what must transpire during these moments to make us aware that love is underpinning it all.

Richard’s Cuban family emigrated to Spain where he was born but, soon after, resettled in Miami, Florida where he would spend his formative years.  His memoir, The Prince of los Cocuyos (Ecco Press, 2014), offers a compelling account of his childhood and adolescence as he came to terms with his cultural and sexual identities and began to find his voice as a poet.  His first collection, City of a Hundred Fires (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), received numerous honors including the Agnes Lynch Starrett National Poetry Prize.  The books that followed were equally lauded, including: Directions to the Beach of the Dead (University of Arizona Press) which won the 2006 PEN/American Center Beyond Margins Award; and Looking for The Gulf Motel, a recipient of both the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award.  In 2019, Beacon press brought out his most recent collection How to Love a Country.  Though he’d long been gathering a following, for many readers Richard’s work first entered their awareness on January 21^st, 2013 when he stood on the steps of the Capitol in Washington D.C. as the Inaugural Poet for President Barak Obama’s second term – breaking barriers as the first immigrant, Latinx, and openly-gay person to receive such an honor.  But it pleases me to say that Richard has used the prominence which came from that experience as a platform, not to advance his career, but to advocate for freedom of expression, and to open poetry up to diverse and underserved audiences.  Having taught at many colleges, he is currently an Associate Professor at Florida International University; and he also carries the distinction of being the first Education Ambassador for the Academy of American Poets.

In “The Splintering”, the poet reinhabits a boyhood moment when pain and love helped define something essential in his being.  I won’t be surprised if you also remember, as I did, certain youthful adventures where life might have gone horribly awry – if not for the devotion of some dear protector.  I hope one day, some enterprising anthologist will pair Richard’s poem with Li-Young Lee’s “The Gift”, a piece about his father extracting a metal splinter from his hand, soothed only by the sound of his parent’s story-telling voice.  Taken together, they form a marvelous tribute to mothers and fathers, and the sort of love whose imprint our lives still bear.  Perhaps, reading Richard’s poem – when his succession of couplets splinters at the end, and we suddenly reawaken within our own familiar worlds – we’ll find ourselves in the presence of some of the faces that safeguarded our perilous journeys: those close at hand and others unimaginably far.