Héctor1,
orador de la gente,
caedor de noveno pisos.
My mind fast forwards &
rewinds, the whirring of a vhs
to your last performance.
This song, the final note a supposed extension
of yourself, a vibrato composed
of your multitudes . . .
I didn’t understand how a body
could hang suspended between
the dead and the living, a perpetual
state of liminality, but your eyes —
they were so concave,
so spectral.
How can a voice be so smothered,
that the sound becomes doubly ash-like?
A deceitful
doppelgänger of your true
tonality. The dystrophy
in your storytelling. ¿Héctor,
qué le pasó al cantante?
The way you gripped
your microphone,
like it was the only thing saving you
from the crashing of despair
against your shore, wavered
away with each subsequent note.
How you loosened your grasp
because the metal felt too much
like flesh and bone,
like rosary beads swallowed by fingers
in desperate prayer by your deathbed,
like your last breath.
How you breathed with an asthmatic
rhythm, catching your air tucked
in between each quarter rest, a fallen, burnt
out star.
Your song became too much like you,
a burnt out star.
The quaking in your wrist
became the only vibration that resounded
outside your body,
and your throat couldn’t shake
like that anymore.
Héctor,
how does it feel
to have this indelible shadow,
choking your mythologies
until you never become more than an outline?
To rob you of song?
—
1 It is believed that Héctor Lavoe’s final performance was in April 1992 at the club S.O.B.’s in New York City. The only online video that exists of this show is of his most famous song, “El Cantante”.
