 |
| Joe Gouveia leads panel on the rant, Split This Rock Poetry Festival 2008. Photo by Jill Brazel. |
Joe Gouveia -- community builder, poet, great guy -- is battling cancer. Again. He has done so much for poets, as a
newspaper columnist, the host of a radio show, an anthologist (Rubber Side Down: The Biker Poet Anthology), an organizer of
readings and workshops, and more.
Split This Rock invites our community to give back and contribute what you can to the Joe Gouveia Recovery Fund, here: http://www.gofundme.com/584zps
Poet and essayist Martín Espada, a good friend of Joe's, has written the following poem in tribute. We urge you to read it, repost it, and spread the word, as we pay tribute to Joe, help him cover expenses while he's hospitalized, and thank him for his own powerful voice, his big heart, and his generous spirit.
Here I Am
For
José “JoeGo” Gouveia
He
swaggered into the room, a poet at a gathering of poets,
and
the drinkers stopped crowding the cash bar, the talkers stopped
their
tongues, the music stopped hammering the walls, the way
a
saloon falls silent when a gunslinger knocks open the swinging doors:
JoeGo
grinning in gray stubble and wraparound shades, leather Harley
vest,
shirt yellow as a prospector’s hallucination, sleeve buttoned
to
hide the bandage on his arm where the IV pumped chemo through
his
body a few hours ago. The nurse swabbed the puncture and told him
he
could go, and JoeGo would go, gunning his red van from the Cape
to
Boston, striding past the cops who guarded the hallways of the grand
convention
center, as if to say here I am: the
butcher’s son, the Portagee,
the
roofer, the carpenter, the cab driver, the biker-poet. This was JoeGo,
who
would shout his ode to Evel Knievel in biker bars till the brawlers
rolled
in beer and broken glass, who married Josy from Brazil
on
the beach after the oncologist told him he had two months to live
two
years ago. That’s not enough for me,
he said, and will say again
when
the cancer comes back to coil around his belly and squeeze hard
like
a python set free and starving in the swamp. He calls me on his cell
from
the hospital, and I can hear him scream when they press the cold
X-ray
plates to his belly, but he will not drop the phone. He wants
the
surgery today, right now, surrounded by
doctors with hands
blood-speckled
like the hands of his father the butcher, sawing
through
the meat for the family feast. The patient’s chart should read:
This is JoeGo: after every crucifixion,
he snaps the cross across his back
for firewood. He will roll the stone from the mouth of his tomb and bowl
a strike. On the night he silenced the
drinkers chewing ice in my ear,
a
voice in my ear said: What the hell is
that man doing here?
And
I said: That man there? That man will
live forever.
- Martín Espada
