From Poem VI
Cruising back from 7-11
esta mañana
in my ’56 Chevy truckita,
beat up and rankled
farm tuck,
clanking between rows
of new shiny cars—
……………… “Hey fella! Trees need pruning
……………… and the grass needs trimming!”
A man yelled down to me
from his 3rd-story balcony.
……………… “sorry, I’m not the gardener,”
……………… I yelled up to him.
Funny how in the valley
an old truck symbolizes prestige
and in the Heights, poverty.
Worth is determined in the Valley
by age and durability,
and in the Heights, by newness
and impression.
In the Valley,
the atmosphere is soft and worn,
things are shared and passed down.
In the Heights,
the air is blistered with the glaze
of new cars and new homes.
How many days of my life
have I spent fixing up
rusty broken things,
charging up old batteries,
wiring pieces of odds and ends together!
Ah, those lovely bricks
and sticks I found in fields
and took home with me
to make flower boxes!
The old cars I’ve worked on
endlessly giving them tune-ups,
changing tires, tracing
electrical shorts,
cursing when I’ve been stranded
between Laguna pueblo and Burque.
It’s the process of making-do,
of the life I’ve lived between
breakdowns and breakups, that has made life
worth living.
I could not bear a life
with everything perfect.
by Jimmy Santiago Baca
from Paper Dance- 55 Latino Poets
Persea Books, 1995