He Could Sing, but He Couldn’t Fly

We heard about the memo: legal aid lawyers had to ask for papers,

a green card, policing what the law called illegal aliens, as if they

had antennae sprouting from their heads and searching the air,

sputtering in tongues from another planet, choking on oxygen.

This would account for their coughing, not the oil tanks empty of oil.

Now, if the tenant says I have no papers, say Oh, I’m very sorry in Spanish.

Now, if the landlord heaves the clothes out the window, jabbering about

rent like a parakeet startled by a cat, if he sneaks into the bedroom at night

and wheezes like a lovesick vampire, say Ay, señora, lo siento mucho, swing

open the door of the office and point to the courthouse down the street.

When the boss would ask Does she have papers, the lawyer who lied his way

out of a date with the firing squad on a hill of skulls in Chile would smile,

creasing his unshaven face as if to say Here’s a piñata you’ll never break

with that stick. When the boss would ask Does she have papers, I became

a wiseguy pugilist, Two-Ton Tony Galento in the movies, after the canary

who sang to the cops dropped from a rooftop: He could sing, but he couldn’t fly.

Years before Two-Ton Tony, the brawler who trained on beer and sausage,

spoke his wiseguy wisdom on songbirds in the movies, the newspaper boys

sang of Abe Reles, Kid Twist, so called for his dexterity with an ice pick

in the ear. The night before Kid Twist would testify against Anastasia

and La Cosa Nostra, he plunged from the window of the Half Moon Hotel

in Coney Island, as half a dozen detectives played cards and saw nothing.

The headlines called him The Canary Who Could Sing But Couldn’t Fly.

I was no Kid Twist. I knew my mother’s stories of gangsters and Revelation,

informers and crucifixion in Brooklyn. I would not twist the ice pick or drop

it to sing of illegal aliens, skin somehow green as the invaders on the screen

of my first color TV. There was Spanish in my ear, telling me of boys in green

uniforms who juggled green mangoes with bodies beheaded at their feet.

There was testimonio in my ear, telling me of flight over mountains

and deserts to be here at last, here in the land of ice spreading across

windows like white lace curtains. They could fly, but they couldn’t sing.