Door in the Sky

Yesterday, I tied my tongue with twin thin blades of grass. Today, I sew my lips together with spider webs of dust. How can there be a tomorrow when sorrow lays fine layers of sand and fear silts my arteries? After the prison cell, daylight shines pale and bird songs throng the branches. Tiny claws clutch at the heart and the tree’s harp thrives with live-wire melodies. Cicadas saw at their one string fiddles till polished wood bends politely beneath watery sunlight. Sunshine pushes its thread through a needle's eye of cloud and morning strings its seven-seamed rainbow. Clouds stitch themselves into a single seamless sheet. A glow worm in the dark holds earth’s vain shadows at bay. Now a candle flickers and soft music sounds. Incoming waves lisp to a distant, sun bleached beach. Wild doubts inhibit my troglodyte heart. Can the world be reconstructed with an untethered topology here, a mephistophelean meadow there, and everywhere the stubble of midnight shadows? Come: let us sit together and talk about old times. Soon we will run out of days. Night will fall swiftly. Our sleep will be filled with rumours and doubt.

Figure of Four

I stand on one leg like a stork, but soon lose my balance. As I fall, I flap unfeathered wings, grasp at failing air, and slip from my narrow perch, a crab apple released from its strip jack naked prison in the tree by the first puff of a gelid wind announcing autumnal snow. Red faced and wrinkled, I cannot stop my other foot from slipping on the thin apple skin of ice. What good are the feathers I feign when they cannot grip air? I start again and cling to hope like a drinking man clings to the cork from his latest bottle. Here, on the azotea, in this brightest of sunlight, it’s all about pieces of inner and outer peace. Succulent vines, flowers I have imagined from glossy brochures, flaunt red, blue, and yellow flags: flamboyanes, tulipanes, azaleas, jamaicas, hibiscus, nochebuenas … Cempasúchiles guide the footsteps of the dead as they pace their still familiar paths and stop at well remembered doors. I shuffle the fortune cards and recompose my life, note by note, as a musician composes his music, leaf by fragile leaf, as an artist draws his tree. I close my eyes and I am an eagle soaring on wind-ruffled wings. I rise above the streets, above the azoteas, above the zócalo. In Santo Domingo, beneath high circular windows, the sun drenches the open-mouthed singer with light from its quotidian song.

A Different Kind of Doorway

When the stones beneath my feet turn toes into tongues, will they speak the languages in which I dream? Mixtec, nahuatl, and zapotec wrap my waking dreams in their musical rebozos. A golden treasure trove, the rising sun, gilds the roof of the nearest church and pigeons stop their wings, flash frozen in an instant of silence. I grasp at new words as they raise their bubbles of laughter from the brush-stroked street, but they falter on the failing air and I cannot trace the colours of their fall, golden leaves drifting downwards, sideways, on an instant of breeze. There is a secret out there somewhere. I can hear the tongues of the trees, whispering as slow winds stir them. I can hear the sigh of the white egrets as they rise from their overnight branches, the strengthening light channeling their wings as they shuffle intimate dance steps. Last night, the lady who transports balloons from the square at nine o'clock held some secret in her eyes and I glimpsed it again in the curls of the children’s hair as they fled to their homes before the coyotes began to prowl with their cell phones, their pocket watches, and their synthetic happiness shining through cellophane packages. “King for a night and a father for the rest of your days!” the young girl announces, her incandescent eyes blazing from the dark door of a tourist hotel. Lips beckon, eyes draw me in, and for a second I am blinded by their package tour promise of “I’ll always be your love, my love!” How simple, to follow the snake path and slip sideways into welcoming darkness. But at the end of the trail comes the trial. Words threaten; the knife flash of misunderstanding lights up the night sky. An owl flaps towards me from its underworld of grief. My tombstone whistles and calls with lamp like eyes and all hell’s petalled teeth.

Letting Go

The body beneath the masseur’s hands is pliant on the table, obeying a strong will that is not its own. Outside in the street, the stones – baked granite loaves – are warm beneath the sun and hard beneath the feet. Here, in this other world, the soft steam slowly rises, warm water slops on the marble slab, and the abandoned body is released to the curative magic of fire and water, earth and air. Eyes close tight against the soap's sharp sting. The slope of the slab slips a leash from the spirit, and earthly bonds slide downwards and away. The slap of the masseur's hands changes to a swift karate chop. The hardened muscles are breaking down, the rigor mortis of sitting at a nine to five desk is slowly driven away to diminish in the distance. An age old wind whistles through throat and lungs, rustling wings of dead and dyeing leaves. My body has not forgotten how to walk in the woods. It remembers how to watch the dry leaves tumble earthwards to bury themselves in carpets of golden grief. From face down to face up, my living clay flaps like a stranded fish on this potter’s wheel beach where the clay is reshaped in the image of its current maker. The bucket is filled, warm water drenches, and hands restart their rhythmic music: the black and white squares of torso and rib fine tuned by this pianist of my body’s keyboard. Steam rises, eyes close, a new world is born.

Carousel

Yesterday I rushed from place to place, from friend to friend, from face to staring face. I was six years old. Today, the painted wooden pony trots round and round to the urgent grind of the fairground hurdy-gurdy: circles of stark eyes open dark holes in mesmerised faces and demons pour out. Now, I am alone again, with all my broken ghosts. The joker in the pack grins across green beige cloth. I shuffle the cards and a new deal changes my fortune. What secrets will be jangled by the silent doorbell as the minutes inch by, young children reluctant to hurry to school? I step my way, slowly, avoiding the cracks in the concrete, avoiding the burnt brown leaves exiled from their tall tree paradise of swirling wind. They lie there motionless, waiting for the October wind to whirligig them away on an autumnal merry-go-round of copper crazy dance. Jackdaw gathering glistening rings of memory, I sit alone in my Jack Straw castle. What can I reconstruct when chaff and grain have winnowed away in the wind and the short straw of my life has been drawn, quartered, and shredded to build shattered bricks? Tomorrow, perhaps, the sun will let me build again. The azotea will fill with the hummingbird’s bright sword of flame. Golden honey will drip from the sky. The wind will crack his whip and send pale clouds scurrying across celestial pastures where, tonight, great beasts will roam. The leaves will board their sidewalk carousel and whirl themselves round and round until, dizzy, they crawl into silent corners, wrap themselves in their many-coloured coats, and like old dogs, worn out at day’s end, curl up, and fall asleep.

Squeezed Orange

The towering clock greets the hour witha series of hammer blows echoing from its  quivering anvil. Rooster crows his thick, rich cocoa rico and the morning is blessed with roasting beans. Fresh baked bread caresses the corner of my mind. Sweet breads tug at the heart. Now I have squeezed an orange and my glass is full of a golden liquid as fierce and sweet as sunshine on a branch. The orange’s yellow green robe, spent and exhausted, lays its wasted globe on the table beside me. Nature morte / naturaleza muerta -- dead nature, still life: what unpaintable perfumes rise upwards from this dying orange, from this coffee which bubbles and spits black liquid onto a field of snow. Human footprints, trailing through the emptiness, acknowledge my earthbound presence in a wilderness of endless cotton. I build the sugar cubes upwards, two and three at a time. A flattened toothpick supports his upper limbs and my Eskimo sculpture stands strong and silent on the table. Each sugar cube is another stone added to the shrine at the top of the mountain pass. Here, cold winds flare and each grateful traveller adds a rock to this perpetual monument to a peripatetic people. I drink my morning obeisance to the ancient gods. Ubiquitous and omnipotent once, powerless and forgotten now, they filled this land with hibiscus and honey, xamaica and the red-throated colibris who dance their mourning salute to a warrior sun.

Puppet on Sundry Pieces of String

A storm settles off the coast and heavy black curtains of clouds are drawn across the sky. The sun has got his hat on, but will he be coming out to play? There is no brightness at noon and dusk settles early over streets and squares as shop windows string garlands of coloured lights and throw them out to the passers by: life lines with tiny twinkling life belts, helping hands to pluck us from this sea of gloom. An early moon has sketched a lace mantilla over her face and there is no lantern in the sky. Damp fears draw cold strings through bone and marrow. Limbs twist and jerk as hidden thoughts are dangled from an open window into thin air. For a moment, I step beyond the bounds of time. Now there are no clocks. The hairs on the nape of my neck are fine wires pointing the way to fear. False footsteps, imprinted on air, I am above the cobbles, above the gutter with its sad wingless creatures dancing their unending dance across the sidewalk, the source of their beauty shorn in their time of torment. Round and round they whirl, their blunt stumps furiously rowing as they shuffle their weary way. Where now are those angel wings, with their painted eyes and faces? Once they circled in the lamplight, flashing fluorescent colours at waiting candles. An opening door snaps its sudden match of light across the street and the noise of merry makers breaks the spell. I cross the threshold from death to life and a waiter dressed in a red devil suit serves me mescal. Around me: an eruption of devils, imps, and fallen angels dances to ancestral music from below bare hills. My watch has stopped. Time lies frozen on my wrist and I hear the tick of the death watch beetle gnawing at my body’s house.

Don Nadie

Nobody knows him. He walks past the Jesuit Church where the limpiabotas store their stands, at night, when squads of black shadows take over the square. He walks past the tiny seat on the right where the gay guys sit and caress each other and ask the unsuspecting for sudden dates. He strolls by the bandstand and hears the orquestra practicing their nightly tunes. Nobody asks him for a match, for a drink, for a peso, for charity, for a walk down the alley to the cheap hotels... Everyone ignores him and the beggars pretend he isn't there. Dogs flare their nostrils and sniff the air. Sunlight glances away as if he belongs to another sphere. The old lady with the rebozos looks the other way. “Help me!” he says and his ambulant shadow wends its tightrope walk across the zócalo and beneath the black umbrellas raised against the rain. The brujo from Yalalag sees things that others cannot see. He asks for permission, stretches out his hand, and brushes the mosquito from Don Nadie's nose. “¡Hermano!” he smiles: “I too have lost the way!” Is he the one who leaves this place and comes to this place all places being one? The hands on all the clocks stand at midnight. And no! As I write, I am not sane nor will I ever be the same. I think I know who I am, but I can no longer see my blood in the mirror as the razor blade draws its thin red scratch across the dry husks of my soul.

Bubbles

There is a ticking of knitting needles as the alarm clock shuffles its pack of sleeping hours. The church clock makes its presence known, marking each quarter through the fading mist of sleep. Clad in a cotton shroud, I am wrapped in the bubble of my dream. I shiver and shake as the striking hours sear ice cubes through my waking mind. Each one wounds, the last one …. Now the ice man whistles as he sweeps a sea of leaves into untidy waves. Between rhythmic brush strokes, he imitates a venerable tune from some village in the hills where coloured animals score the multiple days of the ritual calendar in a world still filled with animation. Up in the hills, the outstretched, grasping fingers of a greedy generation are protected from alarm clock habits by a world with no time. Ghosts snicker. Tremulous goats bleat tethered on rooftops. When the world becomes flesh, I gasp at the hidden meanings of words trapped in a cage of flesh and bone. Some syllables break free and float upwards into the sunshine like soap bubbles blown by the lame girl in the square. I watch hope light her face as her children climb away to freedom in the linden trees. Sudden rainbows of sound and light: some pop into unexpected silence; others rise like angels on the wind’s wings and soar in disordered ranks to cerulean parade grounds. Now my dictionary dispenses words and magic weaves phrases into fables. Like a man under water, I struggle for breath and view the world with stunted sight. When the brush no longer sounds its sad song of sweeping, a bird in the tree twines a new string of sunlit beads around the morning’s throat. Misshapen pearl in an infinite prison of shell, the outside world sinks away and I return to my prelapsarian configuration of time and space.

Sky Walker

High on my tightrope, umbrella in hand, I walk a thin black line of doubt. Clouds gather in the air and my mind is filled with mist. Scales on my eyes are echoed on marimbas. Soft rain is a wisdom of pearls cast from the dark skies. Below me, a certainty of sound fills the ears with half-tamed jazz tapped out on a clockwork hurdy-gurdy. Each note is weighed for a second in the palm of the performer’s hand as the pendulum clock swings its metronomic weights left and right. Sawn off puppet walking this jumble of worn out surgical wire, I limp level with angels and vultures, twin harbingers of celestial fire. The dawn’s red light scatters brightly coloured birds, sticking them like postage stamps on the day’s fresh page. Princess: when you daub the gaudy frescoed eye of silence with a fox hair brush, your floral kingdom stretches its reds and blues like a picnic spread before me. I dwell in a forgotten village abandoned by time. My neighbours walk among clouds and the sun is a golden ear of corn. The sky is sliced into intimate pieces of knowledge. I close my eyes and envision the sacred rainbow bent like a bow. Below me, in the mercado chico, three old women dream my life, adjust their weaving, and fix me on their loom.

Trinity

Bedroom windows hold shuttered arms wide open. They embrace the sky and clouds outside lean in to listen to my dreams. The wind has snatched the words from my mouth and carried them away. Now they are lost like lost footsteps on a cerulean toile of painted space. Poised on its canvas, Dalí’s other clock is folding in two. Numerals break from their plastic prison, and swarm like bees. The clock clasps its hands and dives head first over the waterfall's cube into an anguished, analytical circle squared to make nonsense of all the engineers in the world. They gather at hell’s gate with philosophers and political scientists for one last conference on space, and time, and the meaning of meaning. In a bubble speech balloon, cat meets dog and beauty is sacred in the beholder’s eye. My neoplatonic shirt shoulders arms as the democratic wind blows cobwebs from the minds of early risers. Lightning flashes its sharp white gash, yeso plastered across berry brown faces, as people in the street look up and smile. Time flies by, speechless, gesticulating with generous motions. My mad shirt flaps deliriously in the wind. A voice rings in my mind: “Brother, can you spare a .... ?” “Díme,” she asks, “Is the world a better place because you are in it?” Sun King, rey solar, roi soleil: a trilingual trinity of nobodies hide their solemn, triangular faces behind the passing cross of a cloud.

Autumn Leaves

Wind sweeps the leaves into seething anthills of activity. Passive voiced, they gather their carefully matched genders, numbers, and cases into churning groups and surround themselves with past participles, thick on the tongue, lively in the mind, as they hope to conjugate something new, something exciting, something different. Perhaps the wind will change and they will be lifted up towards Monte Albán to climb the steps of the waiting observatory. Perhaps it will be the south wind’s turn and they’ll sweep down the andador turístico, carrying all before them in a frolic of window shopping. Soon they will clutter dark doorways where soft eyed people clad in gaudy cotton gather like silk winged butterflies to spin their confusing mixture of mixtec and zapotec into a web of bewilderment. Who knows? They have a life of their own, these leaves. Once I met one on the back seat of a taxi. He was as happy as an elf in autumn as he planned a trip to see his cousin, still living on the tree in Tule. I met another curled up in a tortilla I was carrying to my waiting lips. “What are you doing here?” I asked. And the merry fellow smiled, caught a pinch of jalapeño, and was beamed up on a sunbeam that the wind suddenly sent through the sky’s open door. Lost! Lost!! We are all lost and drifting. Yet still the leaves flood their way forwards and claim they hold the secret that will open the world like an oyster and deliver pearls to our doorsteps. But when evening comes and that last wind blows, they struggle to maintain their place on the sullen branch stripped suddenly naked by the dancing wind and down they come, to join their fellows rolling there, in the gutter, laughing.

“¡Peragua!”

World without end and the hard crisp sanding of leaves over concrete draws word pictures through my mind until I look out of my window and dream myself away, over the rooftops, out to the azotea, as barren as a desert now, where three wise men, reyes magos, bear gifts of gold from Oro de Monte Albán and pack their camels with tinfoil from the abastos. What can I buy with my plastic card? Plastic are the leaves on the artificial plant beneath my window. Plastic leaves, plastic tree, and the sad red silk of my mother’s poinsettia, how many Christmases ago? A ghost ship on the living room table, it spread silken sails to a wind that never rose and sat there, going nowhere, gathering dust. Motes of air sparkled in the low winter sunlight that drove fresh spears of brightness to pierce the solstice gloom. Dark was the ark where, two by two, my memories entered and set sail on a troublesome sea. One winged thought, white as a dove, left through the skylight and leapt overboard to perish on a bitter black tide of reminiscence. “¡No estés mano en mejilla por tiempos pasados!” The camel train of my memories takes on water for a three year journey and slowly vanishes over a barren, boundless, leafless desert: no buildings, no tents, no palm trees, no oases. My horizons are bounded by these camels, by this broomstick which I can no longer fly, executive class, side-saddle, in unexpected comfort. Stubborn as mules, the wandering leaves circulate, pathetic in their wandering circles. A voice calls in my head and the brush strokes cease. Now there is peace on the canvas of my mind. Camels, sandstorms, desert vanish. Suddenly I fill again with bird song and my rooftop world is peopled with the feathery faces of flying flowers.

Tourist Trap

Caves, high in the hills, yawn with sleep and show the underworld’s teeth. This is the home of the dead where the dark king rules. Unfathomable graves litter the hillside, sending dead arteries deep into the depths. Through these, the devil ascends at midnight and sweeps through the town. On nights when there is no lantern moon and the streets are perilous, the sky draws its stars together with argentine threads and the devil bullies through the streets like a strong wind scouring. The houses have blank stone faces and the doors are bolted and heavily barred. The streets are crowded by day but empty at night when only the stranger wanders and cold bites into bones. The wind's teeth leave red striations on the pelt of a strong man’s skin. The market starts at the red-roofed church. “Amigo!” the street vendors call and again “Amigo!” But you will come here only once in your life and you aren’t their friend. Their implacable eyes have little shutters that enclose the devils inhabiting their stony souls. Don’t go with them: they will take you up the hill to those empty caves where the grave dwellers dwell and they’ll set stone knives to your bones, even in the broadest daylight. The souls of these people were sold long ago. That is why they will pose for photographs and seduce you with their siren calls: “Amigo! Amigo!” Beware the ancient wreckers’ coast, the jaws that bite, the claws that snatch at your purse and your pesos. Beware the dollar signs lighting up in the street dwellers’ eyes. The blunt nosed tourist bus snub its way round the dried out river bed and pale skinned men and women walk into the trap.

Dead Days

Money vendors worship at golden altars. They open the chest of the leather wallet with the obsidian knife of tourism and pluck out the gaily coloured hearts of your pesos, sacrificing them to a metal machine which grunts and groans and pumps out an excremental ticket. Back down the hill, the tuggings and twitchings of little devils at hand and elbow: “Amigo!” “Un peso!” Una caridad!” “Por el amor de....” De what? For the love of some subterranean god who inhabits the hills' darkness and pours these concrete inhabitants out from some soulless, sacramental machine on their mission of stripping and plundering the visiting wealth from visitors in sun hats who come here in sunshine only to depart at the end of the day in air conditioned buses where they shiver with their cold civilized hearts in a temperature designed for an ice cube? Even the temple walls are painted red with shame. Old ochre smoulders in protected corners and devil worship starts in midwinter, at midnight, when the fires go out for five whole days and warmth drains from the sky. Then the fear of extinction is upon them and they endure one hundred and twenty hours of pain. When the Pleiades, the Tianguitzli, form a right angle over the central temple, the fire sticks create their mysterious miracle and spark into flame. The dead days are over. The sun will return with all his fire, and burn again, like this firestick, in the hearts and hearths of mortal women and men.

Tour Guide

Some tourists cannot roll their “rrrrs”. They gargle “r/x/r/x/r/x/s” in their throats as if they were sifting pebbles or sand through an hourglass close to their uvulas. They cover their beards and chins with stubborn spit and drool that tour guides know nothing at all. This little brown man who takes tourists r/x/ound the r/x/ugged r/x/ocks of r/x/uins is wr/x/ong! wr/x/ong!! wr/x/ong!!! The tourists sit in the sun and purr like a pack of pussycats. The tour guide squats in the minuscule angle of shade cast by the column of an organ cactus and takes it all in, refusing to argue, just staring with haunted eyes at the ghosts of his ancestors as they walk one by one past the windows of his soul. The sun will soon be setting. Soon the wind will arise with its knotted whip of devilish string and bone and the tourists will be swept from the street like a swarm of autumn leaves lashed by that first real taste of winter, that sudden storm which sweeps out of the hills and leaves the whole world dusted with frost and frustration. Meanwhile, the tour guide sits there, ensimismado, turned in on himself with the knowledge that this is his chosen life, to squat here in the shadow, to listen to that merciless mockery delivered by the whip lash of a foreign tongue. He feigns ignorance, shrugs, rolls his eyes, turns inwards again. A rising tide of foreignness sweeps over the rock form he assumes, breaking white foam across his head and shoulders. He leads the tourists across the dust, to another building where he gives and receives more of the same. At day’s end, he will avert his eyes, hold out his hand, and a dusting of coins will fall from a merciless sky.

Tina Modotti

Voices of conquerors and conquered are carried away on the wind. The dry salt of saliva cakes cracking lips. Around us, the dead are resurrected in their children’s smiles, captured and frozen in the camera’s lens. Avoid the revolutionary stances, the banners read backwards from behind, the multitudes massing in the street for their instant manifestations. This land is composed of anonymous sombreros eclipsing the sun, circle after circle, now and forever, world without end. Dark hands clasp the spade’s handle or wield a broom as the dry leaves tumble. Dark hands peg washing on the line and the sun strikes the sheets and shirts, blanching them with fear of the nothingness that would grip them if those hands did not appear to remove the pegs, fold the clothes, and place them in the pale straw baskets left by our doors. A tiny baby, arms spread to either side, like the crucified Christ, is bound tightly to his mother’s hip. He is held by that strong brown arm we have seen in the market, at the chocolate stall, distributing jalapeños or turning with a bamboo spatula the quesadillas with their yellow gourd flowers warming on the upturned oil drum. What purgatory dwells in the puppet strings of barbed wire twisted over this man’s hands and wrist? Faces glance at us, look away, are shaded by those eternal ollas, the water jars, which women balance on their heads. And now this tiny child, eyes closed, tugging mercilessly at the fountain of life discovered, not in Florida by Ponce de León as history records, but here in Oaxaca at the eternal mother’s everlasting breast.

Terremoto

Two red Volkswagens waltz down the street on a moving wave of asphalt. The corner piece of the sixteenth century palace tumbles, base over apex, a slow motion movie, trapping disbelief and freezing it in midair, frame by frame, silent, until the ground beneath my feet trembles with the impact. The universe’s veil is torn and the face of a cruel Aztec god peers through. Huitzlipochtli, dressed in a flayed man’s skin, has blood red eyes. Lightning flashes from pitiless, sharp-edged cannibal teeth. Water and gas mains have ruptured. There are spots where you wet your feet, others where you dare not light a match. Chewed cigars hang damply from the lips of loquacious labourers who tidy the rubble, piling it, then carrying it away laboriously in hand held wooden barrows. On the hill above the town, dead faces peer through holes ripped in the cemetery wall. Who let the ghosts out from the jailhouse jalousie of their compound in the campo santo? Tonight, lost spirits will wander. All through the night we will hear their low pitched voices whispering and tugging at our hearts and ears. Shall we set them an altar with their favourite food and drink? No. It is not their time. Back they must go, herded like cattle, before they cause too much grief. Tonight, outside in the street, or inside in the warm, huddled round the fierce heart of the kitchen fire, nobody will be safe. We will all sit in fear and trembling, waiting for the after shocks that must surely follow.

Ahuehuete

Cortés held court beneath this 2,000 year old tree greeting curious caciques underneath these umbrella branches. Last year, limed in a wedding suit of white, the great tree escaped waving its branches wildly and stumped down the road to Teotitlán del Valle, looking for its soul mate. It found instead, on the Day of the Dead, a carpet weaver who interfaced its spirit with fine dyed lamb’s wool. Next morning, the tree came back, its soul intact. But now you can’t take photos and the locals have imprisoned the tree in a straitjacket of rusty iron railings. The tree will not escape again. It wanders forlornly round its pen, hiding in corners, never quite what or where you expect it to be. Children escape from the school's prison yard and flash tin mirrors at the underside of branches. Their dancing lights set ancient spirits free from their incarceration. Serpiente lies along a lower limb, waiting for some gossip to walk his way. Mono swings from branch to branch and is never still. A quetzal bird preens the jewels on his feathers. The schoolboys' mirrors chase him with their liquid light. Wandering eyes need time to rest. They need time to discover the old wrinkled man with a face like an ancient manuscript, all lines and creases, his dark skin dried by the sun into the coarseness of furrowed bark. Half buried in the trunk, he nurses a fiery flame. Convinced by the eloquence of this hand-carved map, I strive for a glimpse of my troubled heart struggling on its journey across earth’s sea. Conjured in the mirrors’ confusing crossfire, blood flowers dot the poinsettias eyes and cross their Ts. Sunshine engraves my name with an obsidian blade on the sacrificial pelt I bought at the abastos. A blazing sun dries the cries of shock in my victim eyes. Why ahuehuete?

Rain Stick

A shower of rain fertilizes vacant minds. The tour guide invents new narratives, but fails to please his listeners who march to the market square, where widows sell bamboo tubes full of cactus thorns. Rain on forest leaves: bamboo sticks turn slowly upside down until raindrops patter one by one, then faster and faster as their wooden sky fills up with water’s rushing. Fine weather is forgotten. Every question is drowned in lithe liquid elements of noise. How many stones in the Palace of the Columns? The guide clears his throat and drops phlegm phlegmatically into the dust at his feet. Who covered these walls with stucco? The guide wipes a tear from his eye. Why were they painted red? The guide sneezes. Why were the paintings destroyed? The guide scratches his ear. Why did the conquerors destroy almost everything they touched? The guide wipes his nose in a polka dot handkerchief. Do people still worship here? The guide breaks out in a memorized talk. Questions drop stoically into the dust. Like leaden balloons, interrogations slouch round the dusty square too weighty to seek the comfort of the wind, too laden to soar to the sky. Tell me: if I wrap my arms around this stone, will I really know how long I have left to live? Why are there tombs beneath the houses? Why do these people worship their dead, caring for them in their life beyond this life? Why are we different? Why do we try to forget, to keep our grief secret, to bury our tears with the beloved’s body, sorrow draining with life and spirit from the vacated flesh? Black bamboo clouds release a single teardrop of rain, as large as a silver dollar. A restless flood follows in an autumnal whirl of dried up cactus.

Dog days

Water, seeking its final solution, slips from cupped hands. Does it remember when the earth was without form and darkness was upon the face of the deep? Does it remember when the waters under the heaven were gathered into one place and the firmament appeared? Light was divided from darkness and with the beginning of light came words and then the world: our world; my world. The world of water in which I was carried until the waters broke and the life sustaining substance drained away, throwing me from dark to light. Doubt and drought: the pantano below San Andrés de Huayapam has shrunk with the sun. Dried out onion rings of scaly suds around this giant bath tub. The valley’s parched throat longs for water, fresh water, born free, yet everywhere in chains. I see it in bottles, in tins, in jars, in frozen cubes, its captive essence staring out with grief filled eyes from imprisonment in shop windows, bars, and neveras. A young boy on a tricycle has a dozen prison cells, each with forty captives, forty fresh clean litres of water. “Peragua!” He calls. “Super Agua!” And invites me to ransom it, to set its soul free. Somewhere nearby, they say, is a fountain of water, salt water, that periodically escapes from the ground and forces its way into the fields, destroying the crops, providing the earth wherewith it shall be salted. Real water yearns to be released, to be set free from its captivity, to trickle out of the corner of one’s mouth. Real water falls off our chins to find the safety of the ground. It nuzzles and nests and disappears into the dust that awaits its cleanness. Real water slips through our hair and leaves us squeaky clean, like a film star or a photogenic president with a large nose and a shark's tooth smile. Real water is a mirage of palm trees upon burning sand. It is the hot sun dragging its blood red tongue across the sky and panting for life like a great big thirsty dog.

La Huelga

Between a rock and a hard place -- out of the frying pan and into the fire -- will nothing break? Will nobody give way? Pissed off people are peeing down public drains. Everything builds towards the climax of the storm. Will the Mexican wave release its Noah’s Ark flood? The rainy season has no end. Forty days living in tents beneath strait laced, Victorian whiplash rain. Around me, nut brown faces flash the white lightning of their perfect teeth. Below the palacio de gobierno, a sea of humanity breaks again and again, rhythmically, against the rock of the governor’s closed door. Will water really wear this mass away? More tents are pitched. Voices are raised. Pedestrians bow their heads and pass below symbolic yokes of cordage made from string and plastic, great ship’s sails tethered to the unmoved, unmoving ship of the central square. Now the State Band has been drowned out by a series of village bands that have released their own storm of tormented, raucous music into this unequal battle of the elements. The village bands would deafen the ears of local government officials if they were not plugged with the golden wax of bureaucracy. The palace windows are shut. Does nobody care? Fiesta! Some dance to the music. Others are stuck in the mud and as unwilling to budge as a donkey caught in a well outside Jerusalem on a Biblical Sabbath. Do they have ears to hear? Do they have eyes to see? Will nobody tell them a new tale or grasp them by the old one and pull? Nor stick nor carrot moves them from their dumb, stubborn, stand fast burro of bureaucratic passivity. I leave the zócalo in desperation and string the delicate thread of my cautious footsteps carefully through tent city. I walk past yellow and blue plastic portaloos with their anguished waiting clientele: saliendo de Guatemala, caí en Guatepeor.

Virgen de la Soledad

I meet her at midnight, this azabache virgin, surrounded by her villagers, recién llegados come late to town to pay tribute to La Soledad in her long black starry night of a dress with its rivers of silver sequins. Hour after hour, she stands unmoving, guarding the worshippers who flock to her feet while the flower girls twirl beneath heavy baskets, weighed down by floral cestas, by tessellated skirts, by tucked up hair laden with bouquets garnis of red wounds bleeding their equidistant space, so exquisite, so delicate to the touch. Sick people follow. Some walk; others limp; a few are carried by friends or family. Hands stretch out to touch the hem of this virgin’s dress. La Soledad wants her people to send rockets to the gods. She wants the stars to dance defiantly in their orbits, like the people did, last summer, at Guelaguetza. Then, all the world was white with alcatraces and feet were winged with aves de paraíso. Let us move to the music of forgotten tunes, engraved in stone like the flourishing bodies of the danzantes, who toil not, nor do they spin, yet who flow, tormented in their prisons of hand carved rock. Platonic dance steps once sent the planets meandering across a meaningful sky in undulating patterns. Come, take my hand. A sea of costumes crests before us. Faces in the looking glass: everyone we ever knew suddenly appearing, dancing to a whistled tune or turning up the corners of their mouths from a hand me down suit of lights with the flash of a half forgotten smile.

Old Man from Arrazola

I offer this old man a drink from my water bottle. We shake hands solemnly and talk of our immigrant children with their undefined status in the melting pot of the USA. Brothers across artificial frontiers, there are bonds that bind the poor of the earth, and we are as one. He is from Arrazola. The skin of his hands is heavy and thick, like the leather pelt of working animals. His finger nails are claws. His bare feet poke from the scratchy, old tire and leather of the rough hewn, home made sandals he has carved for himself. His toe nails are clavos, nails and claws of iron that grip the earth like a climber’s spikes. When I look closely at them, they seem cut off from the man, as if they protruded from a bestial hoof. For a moment, I imagine him horned, tailed, and bearded, leaping in a bright red devil’s suit through black smoke and orange flames. Then I see him sparkle and his eyes are as clear as the water he drinks from the bottle I keep for such ceremonial events. Watered now, he is obviously a friend: my true amigo. Where do I go from here? I ask myself. But there is nowhere I want to go, no place to which I can run and hide. I am here, at the centre of my universe, happy like my new friend from Arrazola, in this narrow line of shade which protects me from the fierce obsidian blade of the sun.

¡Ay! ¡Ay! ¡Ayeres!

If we could put every one of our yesterdays together into one large Christmas parcel and place it on a camel’s back to be delivered to us, at midnight, on the fifth of January, when the tres reyes magos visit the Christ child and pass through every Hispanic town and village on their way to Bethlehem, what would we put in the package? Ocho Venado was here last night. I offered him a glass of mescal and he tried to pay me in chocolate beans, but I would have none of it. Instead, he prepared quesadillas with golden flores de calabazas which he pulled from his sleeve like a magician. Then we had guacamole that will linger in the mind and elsewhere for a long, long time. On the lawn was a robin and we looked at murciélago as he slowly circled the ancient códice we spread across the floor. The reading was done in mixtec and we were blessed for a moment by the multitude of tongues that flooded our minds. It was midnight. A star fell down the chimney and landed on the fire and the cat and the dog stood up and spoke to us about a vision of the world we humans lost a long, long time ago. Nueve Viento arrived and told us how he had sat below the salt at the long table spread beneath the tree at Tule when he talked with Cortés and night drew a long blue cloak around the caciques as they pulled at a pipe of peace, then broke it into pieces so that they would never need to smoke it again. Or was it under the tree at Apoala? Sometimes a sharp, black knife slices my mind in two and snowflakes invade my brain, coating it with the thinnest layer of icy fire. Ideas slip and slide and spin their wheels and I cannot change gear to keep pace with the slowest or the fastest. Thoughts are lost. Messages are hidden. Symbols slide past like ghosts on a snowbank white in the moonlight: so lovely and so bright, that the tears freeze in my eyes then fall to the earth as stars.

Girasol

I breathe in and out, imitating the eternal tide of the universe. The hummingbird hovers, eyes on my face, and contemplates this strange pale human plant, this enormous bone and blood sunflower, as I stand in meditation. Snared by this wet, clay rag of a body, my spirit grinds its teeth, clamped fast in its earthbound trap. The hummingbird surrounds me, fanning my cheek with its whirr of wings. Is it really true that if I stay still long enough the world will forget me? Or will I become one with the vanishing victims: the haunted and the hunted? It took the sacrifice of 3,000 larks for the Roi Soleil, to devour one lark tongue pie. Now no sky larks twitter over vanished commons on the morning airs. Only Vaughan Williams captures their last sad song in plastic furrows where the spirits of those strange incarcerated birds still sing. I do not want this hummingbird to go. I do not want it to become as silent as a skylark, as dead as a dodo, as passé as the carrier pigeons that thronged our northern woods and blocked the skies for three whole days with their flying. 3,500 carrier pigeons murdered in a single day, 1599 buffalo cut down in their prime, carcasses littering the plain, in a flying circus act. I see a lone man standing on top of a sixty foot high pile of buffalo skulls, his photo preserved for all eternity. The snap was shot through a narrow hole in a metal tube with a single flash of gunpowder from behind a black cloth screen. So what if the survivors, in tiny herds, are referred to as bison? When I slowly reach to the earth to touch my toes, I stop. I don’t want to continue further and further until my head is buried in the azotea and I can no longer see the extinction that surrounds me.

Sinfonía Simpática

Notes, as crazy as birds, fly from the quavering cornucopia throats of brazen trumpets and flap across the square. Mad tunes, they surf on a sea of sound as the conductor waves his wand and the square is magically transformed. Each musician is an island joined by a musical sea. The crowd chatters like monkeys or parrots on a palm tree. At the end of each tune, there is a desultory clapping of pigeon wings as the people rise from their seats and the grey and white birds scatter. Each alone in the other’s arms, an elderly couple dances. Nothing exists save that one great world of ensueño that wraps them like a rebozo in a multi-coloured dream. The music soars to unknown heights, to the palaces and temples of Monte Albán, there on the hill above them. The anthems of Dani Baa are played on the marimbas by some wanderer who fled here long ago from his highland hillside and exchanged his village for a felt-tipped hammer, techni-coloured dreams, and these hollow bamboo tubes, as empty as his birthright in this multinational, corporate world, yet filling now, swelling like wooden sails with rhythm and sound as notes are strung together and the kite of ancient music soars up and out and the dancers dance their dreams: black ink on white paper to you and me, but to them, it’s Monet at Giverny and a Japanese footbridge spanning dark water, and they will squeeze forever the frieze of these impressions of alcatraces fragmented across the canvas of this central square. My heart thumps like a ship’s sail held down by singing cordage.

El Flaco

Cows in the fields are scrawny and wary of the cowherd with his fistful of stones, his pointed stick, his sharp knife and his slant-eyed dogs that show off the basket weave of their ribs with a rash of gravelly nipples rippling against the skin. They run snapping and slashing with ivory fangs at the frightened cattle. El Flaco, the thin man, is in bed. He looks out of the window and won’t give up the uneven struggle. In the world outside, leaves twist and fall again like they did last autumn. They spread their golden red tapetes across the grass while under elms and lindens, the slender hands of children crush flowers into perfume and interlace bright threads into floating castillos, relámpagos and diamantes of woven light. Can we ever hope to penetrate the thin man’s inner silence? It doesn’t belong to us and can’t be clutched by the camera’s frail artificial eye, the painter’s red squirrel brush, the tail of the dog fox held over bandaged eyes. When the brujo says “¡Basta!” the thin man’s moment of tristesse slips sadly away, unleashed with his spirit to slide through a gap in the organ cactus fence and to wander celestial pastures in search of the golden way that leads once a year downwards to the one time owner’s door. “Light,” the brujo told me, “a fire.” I began with the glow worm of a match and that small flame smouldered as I breathed life into shavings and dry bark. Suddenly, I saw the stars reach out with tender hands and a new spark was kindled to walk among the constellations. The goats on my roof that morning were grey with age. Beside them, a dappled donkey brayed as El Flaco’s spirit set out on its long morning journey to the stars. The tianguitzli, were a herd of seven goats above the sacrificial mound and my heart shrunk to the size of an orange pip. I cradled El Flaco’s  head in my hands and I was afraid.

Anonymous

Filling in gaps in the fence of time until the mind is numb and the world has had its fill of our bare feet on the cobbles, we warm to the deft wool pulled swiftly through the back strap weaving of our insignificant people, too small to be counted, too weak to stand on our own, a people who have been ejected from the square where we have lived for four hundred years, with our fountain, our walls filled with red and black cloth, and now we have moved elsewhere with our portable tents, our awnings, our tiny tables, and we walk along a long dusty trail with our water bottles, our babies, and we are our own beasts of burden, for our belongings which we pack in plastic bags, the wool, the cloth, the fabric, made and remade with our traditional, organic dyes in reds, and yellows, and blacks, reflecting our choices across the centuries, recounting the implicit sorrow in these dark brown eyes that plead and trust that one day, perhaps soon, there will be a tomorrow when we can be together, young and old, and can weave all our memories into one seamless fabric, with its field and cloth of gold, teaching our ways to the babies not yet born who will follow in our footsteps through this valley of dust, for we are dust ourselves, and shadows, and will one day vanish like the shadows we are, unseen in the dust and dusk, our names forgotten, the letters which form us as empty now as our places of birth, and you who read this, you who sift my work between your hands and admire the warp and the woof and the solid weave, you will never, never begin to understand. Listen: they are calling! And you do not hear, you do not understand the words, for you do not even know me by my name.

Nochebuena

They sit there, silent, patient, as they have always sat, as they will always sit, in the market, in the street, in the square, their eyes alight, their faces on fire, waiting patiently for that one word of wisdom that will turn like a well-greased key in a lock and release them, setting them free like the sun at six o’clock in the tropics, free from daily toil and bondage. Will you ever understand the weight of the pesos, the pesetas, bearing them, grinding them down? A million tons of snowflakes, dust motes attach themselves to the rack and pinions of those wings that want to fly, but cannot, as they drag daily through despondence and dust, giant wings which stop them from walking. The humming bird is crushed. The bee is declared redundant, his well known capacities of flight too impoverished for him ever to fly in theory. Laboratory tests conducted by northern professors in sparkling white uniforms have shown that the aerodynamics are wrong. I look at these people as they flap their eyelids and twirl their eyebrows, will they ever take off? Will they ever abandon this mortal coil? Will they ever be one with the angels? Do they even have souls? On the cathedral steps, white clad winged angels waggle their harps while devils dressed in red wave tridents and blow raucous music from conch and clay. “¿Me das un peso por un beso?” Is it an angel or a devil I hear, his or her hands on my knee? Four year old eyes are lost in an epicanthic fold of oriental mystique. A long, slow grief fires the ashes that cooled overnight and I am a flame burning beneath petal and comal and suddenly, I don’t know how,  their grief is my grief and I bleed in vain poinsettias, nochebuenas, tulipanes, flowers of crimson blossoming, flowing from each open vein.

Kingdom of the Blind

If I fell, sightless from the saddle, would the scales fall from my eyes? Would I be able to rise again? Would there be a strong hand at my elbow, ready to raise me up? Police women prod this poor man. He rises from the gutter, a cruel existential cross shadowed  on his shoulders, flaying him, felling him to the ground. When he looks my way, I am ashamed, and turn away. Will I ever forget his face, his eyes, the strength of him, graceful in his bruises and blood, lying there as I burn with a shame that tells me I am not strong enough to stop, to bend, to reach out a helping hand, but can only turn my face. When I glance back, he is there before me in all his glory, a statue walking out of the sunset, and suddenly I am not ashamed for my weakness is my strength and life comes from death for the sweetness of honey pours out from the strong. Now I am tough enough to face myself in the morning mirror and to reach out my hand. Today, I am the beggar and it is myself I raise up on my own two feet, while I look into another’s eyes, his eyes framed in the morning mirror as soap suds sparkle in early sunshine, and a painter’s palette splashes a paint brush light, here, there, everywhere, across a forehead crowned with the shadowy play of light, more light, and the mirror exploding into a halo of sunshine. On the way to the Abastos, my knees give out, and I fall to the ground, the shadows on my shoulders finally weigh anchor and haul me to this halt. I look up to see the patient eye of the tuerto beggar, whose outstretched hand and single eye, I spurn each day in its search for money. The beggar’s clothes whip my nose with the whiff of last night’s spirits imbibed from the bottle he holds as he proffers me the eternal beauty of his wrinkled, worthless, monkey paw of a glorious outstretched hand.

Oranges and Lemons

Where did I lose myself? On what sharp corner of the local labyrinth did the frail thread snap? Suddenly I was left walking through my nightly nightmare holding a ball of wool, and this little old lady, winding me up, winding me in, and look! I have unravelled to the knees, to the thighs, to the twin balls of wool I carry between my legs, and I can feel those frosty fingers fumbling at my ribcage, trying to get in, and I am saved by the great red gong of my heart, as orange as an orangutan swinging like a pendulum from branch to branch as time winds down and something glowing like a sun or the warm heart of a live coal thrust among still ashes gives out light and warmth and suspends me in this private space where I can run and hide, but not from myself, as I carry my own eyes with me, twin windows on the solitude of the bird song I spin and spark to the rhythmic chirping of crickets as the slow planets wheel above me in a sky where the myth of the Empyreum walks no more and solar space glows with the black platonic holes of a boundless attraction and the unlimited sublunar 3-dimensional expanse is as corrupt as ever even though the great musician conducts and moves the celestial choir through its sacred paces and places and draws in light, more light, as I wake from this neoplatonic nothingness to the wild waves of church bells pounding their hammers against the Old Squaw sea-broken stack that rocks inside the rising tide of my head and I pinch myself a midnight of black and blue and yes! I am here, still here, and that other bird song in the yard outside fills my heart with the joy of apples and oranges on branches in sunshine and there are lemons and grapefruit decorating the tresses of soon to be desecrated trees. Two sun dogs, rings around the solar king, dangle great ear rings and my tongue is on fire with the thy-kingdom-come of this joyful outflowing river of words.

Familiar Dream

For all I know, I could be there, and not here or here and not there. But where are here and there when strange films play in my head and my characters act out new roles which I never gave them and never saw them play? Each happy happening is a part of my heart, my bones, my liver, and my lungs. This air I breathe, this sun I see, this yellow lemon extended like a liquid drop of sunlight from a finger tip of branch, what would they be without those others whom I see each night? I dream of them constantly. They wander through the rooms in which I live. They touch the wood I work, finger my keyboard, warm themselves at my kitchen stove, marvel at the pictures they see me draw from the fire’s flames, admire their old cups and saucers which I still drink from and wash. There are no secrets now. In my dreams, as the salt sea crests, we all walk on well remembered beaches wearing only the mysteries of light; Sand between toes scratches at memory and the gritty grind of its mill stone grist fills my sock and polishes my souvenirs until forgotten days are reflected in a time worn burnished halo of hallowed light. We stand again on that old iron footbridge leading to the sands. The ghost train puffs down the abandoned track. Faces vanish in its instant cloud of steam and smoke. Now only the inflection of the chères voix qui se sont tues hang there in that opaque space as sea gulls rock and scream, raucous on a fierce summer wind that bleaches the beaches clean. I break from my dream like a Westbury white horse over surf and emerge to the twitch of unquiet fingers unraveling the edges of blankets and dreams. My pillow case is stuffed with the dry winter coat of a long dead bird, sacrificed so others can rest in peace and I can lie here in relative comfort.

Jacob’s Ladder

Yesterday, at La Mano Mágica, a man opened a brown cardboard bag and spread before my eyes the rich silk tapestry of another’s words. He underlined the gold and silver threads, so delicate, so fine, as thin as this ice on which I walk, on a winter midnight, with the sky sewn with silver sequins. Is there a warp to meaning, a leaning towards sun or moon, a footstep planted firmly on that first rampart of cloud? Below me, tiny figures stroll to and fro as I talk with the gods. I watch mountains move as people toil at temples and fill the markets with their hustle and bustle, so close together, all of them touching yet untouched in their close, cramped world of ideal and ideology where men that one day will be myths now walk in the daylight casting fresh shadows, each day, beneath a resurrected sun, at one now with the sky father, the sky mother. The phoenix grows again from crepuscular ash, from a horizon all aflame, afire, burning the bone fire, febrile in a feverish Rock of Gibraltar world with the gray ape and the monkey fled. Is everything lost? Old wounds open afresh and the night wind swabs down my scars as the slow sky seeps its leeching self upon the doubting soul. Dark spirits brood. Good spirits, like oies de neige – snow geese -- are an arrowhead aimed at the target of a circular, fish eye sky. Feathers on the arrow’s flight rustle in the wind as they fly to what unknown fate on night’s oncoming flood? Fingers pluck snowflakes, round them into goose bumps, and the white snow flies, cresting against mountains, against this volcano, against fire on the flood, on the snow, and look! There’s a ladder leading skywards, with snow angels climbing up white and falling down black to create fresh patterns in the stubborn snow.

Penumbra

Sticks and stones may break on our backs, but the names you call out will never cut through the alligator hide we have developed to protect our inner selves. The stone frogs watching over our burial grounds are the stout-bodied amphibians who live beyond doubt and drought. When this season cycles to its appointed end, everything will be renewed. The phoenix of the rising sun will ascend in splendour, released at last from the ashen prison of last night’s bonfire. Enthralled by sun and shadow, solombra will slice the street in two with its bipartite division of light and dark, its chiaro-oscuro, its Petrarchan metaphor, mysterious in its complex simplicity. I wish all our lives were as easily lived: black and white, right and wrong, not these railway tracks, so separate at the start yet joining together in an invisible distance, not these subtle shades of a grey cat wandering its penumbral paradise of semi-darkness in search of a shadow mouse. Tinged flamingo pink by the dying sun, the cattle egrets are really as white as angels. Zopilote, trickster, carries the light of fire on his wings. Tecolote has wide open, staring eyes. Will the overnight rain wash all our memories away? Will we shed our old selves, like a snake, and leave the dried out body, a husk behind us, on the ground? An old man beats the great church bell with his hammer and an anvil of sound peals out in a great appeal for sunlight, bird song, and the brilliance of light, washed blue in the radiant air. So many Pontius Pilates, you stand there, washing your hands, absolving yourselves of unconfessed crimes. Forget us: we are beyond the tips of your outstretched, towelling fingers. When the sun goes in and the season fades, our children will play hopscotch with your calcined skulls in the ancient ball courts of our minds.

Au Revoir

Is this really goodbye: or are we going to meet again, I don’t know where, in the figment of a world beyond this world? Is there really only this one brief instant of time, frozen beneath my failing fingers, as I choose each letter, and hammer down on the next black key? Are we doomed for a little while to be locked together, for better or for worse, in this oh-so-fragile flesh which shivers on the azotea in the early morning cold while our gaudy peacock selves seem shorn of power and glory. I long for honeyed coffee, for sun and wind to melt away last night’s mist, still lingering with its miniature dreams of castles and knights, and Arthur’s court. For how long will we all survive, scrambled and jumbled, packed in a colourful cardboard box like pieces from a childhood jigsaw puzzle locked away in the drawer of a holiday home and mauled on rainy days by a hundred hands until everything is worn and thin and pieces are lost. Forgotten, we will melt away, like a headland as the ship’s sharp nose carves its pathway through the waves. One evening, when a westerly breeze heads out to sea, we will we hoist anchor and set sail with the sunset. Awaking, we will find our rowboat moored on the further shore. Or will we be drawn, like curtains in a clouded room? When the sun sinks, early lights come on, night enters the room, and star gloom gathers. No estés mano en mejilla por tiempos pasados. Ni futuros. Yet, where are last year’s flowers? Where is its snow? Where are the birds that filled yesterday’s trees and nested last spring in a bustle of joyous song? Wings flutter down the chimney, claws scratch, a pale beak pecks at the window of the fireplace, then falls silent. We find him there weeks later, all shriveled and dried, his sharpness blunted by the window which severed his only exit.

Alebrije

When the wind blows, I fall from the tree but cannot rise above earth’s basic level. My mind is as clear as crystal and I want to be as receptive as clay on the potter’s wheel. Yet I am wood in the carver’s hand and I cannot penetrate his mind nor persuade him of the beauty that I perpetuate. He shaves me down to conform to his own vision of my spirit. Now I am no longer what I was. Nor am I yet what I will be. Dead wood, I lie abandoned on the table. A young girl comes and coats me with paint. Then come the stripes and humiliations, the gaudy circles that make me what they think I am. From what dark pages of a half-forgotten manuscript do they copy my colours? Precious worlds float in the half-life of my unconscious. Today, the brujo walks uphill away from his village church and into the hills. He has become a burden unto himself and his skin is too heavy for his body. The brujo takes me with him and permits the world’s most sacred winds to blow through our bodies as he begs them to sweep us clean. When the sun shines through his ribs, it opens the cage door to his soul and his heart shines out like a sacred fire or a lantern in his chest. He colours my world with fantasy, repaints me with the tints and hues of inner wisdom. When I sing my private song to the universe, he releases me, a sacrifice to the fire, and I fly to the skies, light with the happiness I share. I float away like a boat from the sirens of distress that wail in the village below. The world surrounds me and my spirit dances on the periphery of inner space. When the sun hides his face behind a cloud, I return as rain.

Teléfono

This is really love, to call you on the phone and to have my red run-ragged heart torn apart by the sound of your voice. I hear, in the background, the tick of the grandfather clock. When I close my eyes, I am there in our kitchen. I can see the worry wrinkles I have carved in your face. A glorious thing, this Humpty Dumpty dream: all the king’s horses grazing together as the soldiers try to put the fallen temples together again. At night, I dream I am a chapulín living high in the hills. At dawn, I jump on the earth’s trampoline, higher and higher, until the ground begins to groan. My brothers and sisters join me in my sacred dance, and we leap together, up and down, until a great tsunami of grass laps like a tide and the stonework ebbs and flows beneath the shockwave of our feet. Some nights, I dream I am a dress shirt hanging on a hanger and waiting to be chosen for an evening out. The smell of mothballs is all around me and my nostrils no longer twitch at the cat’s dark comings and goings on the trail of the miniature mice I hear scratching their claustrophobic claws across the fabric of my nocturnal perambulations. Someone has released all my crinkles and creases, ironed me flat, folded me neatly, and stored me away. And now I know it is futile to be intimate in a telephone booth with the air getting hotter and hotter, the absence of space, the cat’s eyes outside prying the lid of the sardine can open and devouring every word as though each syllable was a level one lip reading lesson.

Thoughts from Home

If I could grow feathers on my arms I would fly south this winter, like the great white geese, all the way down to Oaxaca. Tiny houses with snow-covered roofs fall behind and below amid the joys of that upward rush to the starry depths where the great beasts pasture.  The Archer arches his back across a vault of brightness, no longer insipid,  hidden by clouds or masked by the street light’s glare, but inspired and inspiring, carved by the wing tip into a prophetic artifact of luminous song. Now there are children playing beneath the linden trees. A cool breeze rustles the leaves and a thousand tongues speak out in the language of sun and song. I catch each sound like a butterfly in a net and pin the shallow, breathless way that words trip off the tongue.  Meanings twitch and are lost. Vowels and consonants slip into nothing.  On the Andador Turístico the sellers sell and the buyers buy. People walk on their daily missions from shop to shop. They can establish themselves in each moment of madness by means of a photo on a plastic card. Sad mice in the skirting board of an old cumbersome house gnaw love songs at the back of my mind. Birds of ill omen peck at dry berries and puppies chew at the dried up haunch of an idea, blunting their ever-growing teeth. When the white tooth breaks through the red raw gum, I see I have grown long hair and floppy ears. I wag my tail and bury all the now dead bones I hold between my teeth.

Huezeequichi

Mind destroyers with their eyes of asphalt, their poured concrete souls, ice water in their veins hunt for my heart. This morning I watched an office boy in a dark grey suit rush wildly by. His eyes were fixed on a distant horizon and although I called a warning as he passed he neither stopped nor spoke, though he was slipping on the honeyed words dripping from another’s mouth. His buttons were buttoned tightly. Nothing could get out or in. The windows of his eyes were closed and shuttered. His lips were sewn tight. He had no ears to hear, no eyes to see, and his fingers grasped a khaki folder as though it were a manifesto of success. The devil of busyness had laid waste to his soul and he was devastated by the sunshine, the brightness, the clear blue sky as he scuttled, warren warrior, to some rabbit hole of underground darkness. In the square, the stone cold conqueror, drafted in from another world, brandishes his sword at the gathering pigeons. A pair of birds squat on his head and gift his shoulders with the white lime of guano. Is this what we will become, the best of us, the worst of us, statues in a square, to be mocked by pigeons? Or photos in some album where the tiny fingers of the future will trip over our names and faces, all too unaware of the red blood flowing out of sight, within the confines of a world they can never imagine? Now you see us, squatting at the roadside with our little bundles of sin and shame. We beg for the meaningless coin you toss, for a human gesture, a wink from your eye, a nod of your head. “¡Piedad! ¡Una caridad!” But piety and charity have fled. They put on grey suits and rushed with the concrete men down secret sewers to their underground burrows. On a quiet night, if you put your ear to the gutter, you can hear the clink of their mounting coins.

Que la vida es un sueño

We lie down like the dogs you think we are and we whimper in our sleep as the shiny shoes move out to kick us. Yet in our sleep, we dream of strong children: our sons as tall as trees, as fast as the wind; our daughters young, and not yet broken to the conqueror’s whim. One day we will rise in triumph, like the waves of the sea. So it is written in our sacred temples, in the wild eyes of the danzantes as they crouch and clutter the walls and smile servitude from their rocky jails. When the great sea rises and earth and its mountains shake, will the whole world be reduced to its lowest common denominator? “Yes!” says the sea as it laps at the foot of the rock. “No!” says the mountain as it rubs shoulders with cloud and star. Man sails on the sea to look for fish and is afraid. Man ploughs the field behind his oxen and the furrows shake like the waves of the sea and he is afraid. He looks to the hills, but there is no salvation. The mountains close ranks; the passes are shut; great stones roll down. I no longer believe in the great man’s power to renew, to create change. We have become a plague on the face of the earth and all that remains is for nature to take its course and curse us. The earth itself will destroy us, or else we will destroy the earth. “Soon!” say the voices in my dreams. And I turn at night to see tiny fingers scratching their words of frost across the pane. When did it happen? I do not know. There were no voices, no bright lights. I went to bed one night and when I woke up in the morning, everything had changed. The grapefruit still dangled their golden globes in the patio tree, but a thin film of atomic dust was everywhere, radiating light, clogging the eyes of the dead who walked the streets, striving for their daily bread, ce bourreau sans merci.

Escapando del trueno

The skies are black, the wind is building, great rifts of lightning rip the clouds apart, like so many veils of disposable tissues. Is this heaven’s answer to the human nosebleed of may day rocket and jacky jumper? The roman candle of the sun flares to its distant death and night moves up its armies as the big guns flash and the firmament is a no man’s land where angels fear to fly and only the fallen fight desperately to repossess the higher ground from which they were tumbled headlong into the streets. Fiesta: the whiz bang crackle of cohorts of cohetes streak the castillo’s face as a torrent of fire cascades down the cathedral’s gaudy Niagara. What blaze from whose past can echo this rolling of chariot wheels, this winged glory of cloud, that hovers for a moment over the onlookers’ heads, then disappears into the night sky. Swart stars of memory twinkle and dance like fireflies at summer’s end as the thunder builds. Suddenly there are pock marks and the pavement breaks into puddles. Great drops gather the knot ends of their song and fall to their destiny. The sidereal surface of the water’s mirror is freckled by the levée and couchée of innumerable stars, the tianguitzli, falling in a searing shower of sparks. Now the court dwarves are dandled on the red giant’s knee as the last sun sinks to its one great moment of glory. Threat and defiance blaze beneath low clouds and a puppy whines at a whimpering sky.

Murciélago

The handyman shows me a bat, murciélago, a chauve-souris who hung on the fireplace brick until he was baked as black as charcoal. What did this lost soul find in the fire’s treacherous embrace? How long did it hang there, in that dark space, longing for sight of sun and stars, for wind song under wing, for freedom to break from imprisonment’s spell? Many have gone on before us, human insects, their lives crushed underfoot. Live flies struggling in the nightmare spider’s web, they hang upside down and inside out to dry until the searing sun has cooked them for a summer barbecue. Now I have finished my washing and it dangles from the string I use as a line. The sun’s warmth catches me by the shoulders and shakes me until my teeth rattle. In the street below, people populate the shade and the sun is a no man’s land where no geese wander. Children stand in the shade as they hold out their hands. On the sands, at low tide, tiny claw marks, the striations of thousands of migrant birds, cut the beach into pieces. They stitch it back together again with the sewing machines of their searching beaks. Everyone is equal as they sink in the dust that blocks the sun and hides the explosive lurk of the volcanoes. Sometimes strange images arrive in crowds, like passengers swarming from a country bus; now, the man outside my window, knee deep in a red-gold foaming tide, holds back with a brush, the autumn edge of the sea. Anonymous birds in a nameless tree sing unknown songs to yellow buoys of light that float among the branches.

Quartet

What price this red and white barber’s stick, striped like candy, and held up like a Christmas cross before the cane curtain of my door? Four deer run across the road through my head then stop and stare. Eight Deer tears a leaf from the tree and turns a page of blank snow. What is this empty interior space that turns the landscape white with gessum? A deer hide, beaten flat on a stone, gives shape to my thoughts and the whiteness is covered with footprints of flowers that wander with their random promise of spring. The sad man combs his fingers through his beard and sits at the head of a long black leather couch. I want to put my feet up in the air and juggle my nightmares until, full blooded stallions, they graze on daylight’s grass and come running at a whistle. Can we bend reality like a stick in water? Two fingers, one at each corner of my mouth and I can whistle like the white wolf baying at the moon face dangling from the sky. The moon paddles from the sunset in blood red water. Once there was a beaver with a diamond tail, who gnawed at the tree at the root of the world until the entrance to the underground caved in and dead spirits walked on night’s waters. Now a fire red squirrel sparks at the feeder, turns his back to the snow, and tames the wild bird seed with chattering. Red seeds bleed on the sackcloth mountain ash and an American Goldfinch points an accusatory beak at the liberal wind. The snow funnels past the puffed up eiderdown of his plumped out body and his bright eyes sparkle. The cat’s round green eye stares out of the window and wills the world to end in darkness as a black and white god plays the piano, up and down, icy fingers on the scales notched into my spine.

Myth

As the nail draws from the flesh, the last dream founders and is lost. Ghosts flee from my bedroom door and star-spurned shutters clamp their darkness to my head. Last night, a shadow drifted to the deep end of my room and knocked on wood. I let the young girl into the biscuit tin of my mind, but I cannot get rid of the crumbs. She has spun me a tale of the sky’s innumerable stars where wild beasts walk and dead men tell no tales of grief and betrayal. She has long, black hair and sits on the sidewalk, castled like a king at an open window which she can never close. One day, on her birthday, a wicked wizard turned the key, locked all the doors, and left her there. At night she lets her long hair down, then winds it up like a watch spring, waiting for the clock to strike. One night, a tiny mouse scaled the fortress of her tresses and sang her to sleep with a lullaby so false it had to be true. Now she waits for a chocolate frog to turn into a prince so she can get her goodnight kiss from the nearest star. In her dreams she is surrounded  by coloured balloons that float away like nightingales on a midnight air. Underneath the arches, marimbas play a pastoral symphony of illusive delusion. Now she is afraid of mice, she won’t eat cheese and catches her hair, like starfish, in a net at night. She refuses to knit with pointed needles. She won’t light matches, nor will she leave them on the stove to smoulder into irascible flame. Red and green globes jump like sheep and she counts them as they clear the rooftops.

Viento Nuevo

Nueve Viento sits below the salt line on the wreckage of the storm and sees the sea’s wrack seize the beach. Sometimes the tree at Apoala is Tule’s millennial tree. The table is lop-sided. One leg is supported by inter-textuality. Beneath the other leg is a pre-Columbian Códice. Red and yellow and black, it logs the thoughts of the black dog dogging my mind. When the Doge of Venice set sail on the Seven Seas, did he think about the blue black ink that flooded the pen when storm clouds thronged the horizon? At Tracadie Bay one hundred and sixty seven great blue heron fish for elvers in the evening sunshine. A raft of loons joins a crêche of Eider ducks and the rocks at Anse aux Pilotes are overgrown with harbour seals. Sirius chases his flock of stars across the sky, barking tongues of flame. Last night, I pretended I was a sheep and you counted me again and again as you lay there, snoring. When I dug you in the ribs, my elbow said you were not asleep, just dozing.  Survivors climb the beach at Ste. Flavie where pumpkins are carved in the shape of wooden men and iron ships. When I dined in the Jardins de Métis, I wore a Hairy Potter shirt and it cost me twenty bucks. The Canadian Pacific Railroad forges its way up the Saint Lawrence River, past Pointe-au-Père, and I see The Empress sinking in the sea. If you prop your eyelids apart with matchsticks, you can light a fire underneath the crabs that crawl. We few, we happy few, we band of landlubbers that wander on the shore when the tide is low and cherry pick our mémoires from a host of lies. Ring-a-ring a-rosy: we are all plagued and when the issues that bind are Napoleon blown a part, we all fall down.

Bolo

“Bolo, amigo?” The boy stares at the dust on my shoes and wills me to permit him to turn each rounded toe into a shining mirror that will reflect the sunlight up into the branches of the tree where the sacred animals secrete their sundry Sunday places. Suddenly, a thousand musicians from a hundred different villages surge into the zócalo, flooding it with a tidal wave of sound, a merciless tsunami that tears at the ears and tugs at the heart sending it thumping like a ship’s sail held down by singing cordage. Notes, as white and as crazy as the snow birds, fly from the crotchety cornucopia throats of brazen trumpets to flap quavering across the square. A discrepant flock of tunes, they surf on waves of sound as the conductor brandishes his wand and the square is magically transformed. Each alone in the other’s arms, an ageless couple dances. Nothing exists save that one great world of ensueño, wrapping its a multi-coloured rebozo around them as they soar to unknown heights. This may be black ink on white paper to you and to me, but to them, it’s Monet at Giverny and they can waltz across the Japanese footbridge spanning dark water, features and faces liquid in the lily pond. Now they will squeeze forever the frieze of these impressions, the flow of midget eyes and rigid ears, the alcatraces fragmented across the canvas as marimbas, those hollow knuckled bones, fill now, swelling themselves out with rhythm and sound as notes are strung together and music’s ancient kite soars up to sever the clouds with a single shaft of sunlight. Forget the dancers dancing: they are beyond the tips of your outstretched fingers.