Wrestling

​
The man who wrestled barefoot in my day
was Argentina Rocca. A man named for an entire country
—an exotic one—an underdog, without shoes,
kicking ass in the Northern Hemisphere.
So . . . American.

The man who made the maps—Vespucci— 
not an Argentine, of course, but still a foreigner.
Italian.  I understand we mispronounce his first name.
That it’s really amer-RI-go, with the accent on the ri
and a long e instead of a short i and not aMER-ri-go.

When said that way, as in
“I’m proud to be an amer-REE-can,”
something in me breaks loose, drifts free,
like salsa dance shaking its hips
in a strange barroom.

My Dad and I had fierce combats about the truth
of wrestling for I believed. After that, the loss
of Santa Claus was nothing, the kind of fraud
that one gets over easily as part of normal growing up.

Still, I wanted Rocca to be more than that,
not just a put-up job the big boys let win
occasionally to show that everything’s fair.
Patriotism might be that sort of fraud, one better
outgrown, except it sticks in the throat like a cheer
at a ballgame, surviving all attempts at amputation.

Rocca, subtle one, setting and springing traps— 
duck and dodge and leap and slap—Nijinsky
with a sting in the soles of his feet.

I couldn’t see the cage that held us all,
even the bosses, a masked opponent named Jim Crow
ruling the center of the ring.

Every map’s a prison of a kind, with colors for bars.
I’ve learned to ask who owns the maps.
That much at least, no more.