Cardinal at My Window with a Mask on Its Beak

Carlos Aguasaco’s Cardinal in My Window with a Mask on Its Beak, translated by Jennifer Rathbun, opens with snapshots of exploited 19th and 20th century migrants, such as Ota Benga, an Mbuti man caged in a “human zoo” in the Bronx, and Juan de la Cruz Sihuana, known as “the giant from Cusco.” In “The Smile Mute Expression with Enormous Wings,” the speaker meditates on the Spanish clown Marceline Orbes, who committed suicide in 1927:

like the poet  the clown comes to an end with a
                                                     collage of images
                                             choked with goodbyes
                                                       expressions transformed
                                             into tears and wrinkles

Aguasaco also interjects literary figures from the same time period, such as Federico García Lorca, Cesar Vallejo, and Gertrude Stein, throughout this collection (in a rollicking exchange, Stein and Vallejo box inside a movie theater during a screening of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times). This wide-ranging archive culminates with a series of poems modeled on sonnets by Francisco de Quevedo, Garcilaso de la Vega, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. But the book hinges on the titular poem, in which the speaker notices a peculiar cardinal perched outside the window, and, in another moment of recognition, collapses the space between songbird and wordsmith:

     […] I    like a bird in a stone cage
as if I were his reflection
have a mask wound around my ears
a red and white blanket covers me
and my disheveled hair  looks so much like his high crest

Here, Aguasaco deftly transports readers to our present-day pandemic, with its face coverings and quarantines (“We had forgotten the scent of flowers!”), and it’s fitting that a speaker who identifies with bygone poets and migrants should feel a sense of kinship with the bird. Taken together, these poems offer an escape from the “solitude of confinement” so many of us have found ourselves confronting these last two years, a reminder that life—and art—continues to flock and flutter, even still.