One-Legged Dancer 9781609400293

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Critical Praise for Pamela Uschuk: “These poems make a sensual garden. The gifts of the earth can be found here: from peaches to lizards to rich earth that soaks up the spilled blood of history. There is the promise of rain and the sky filled with spirits of those we become. There is singing in this garden, and though it might be the end of the world, a new world is coming into view, just over the horizon of these poems.”

– Joy Harjo

“These poems are breathtaking, a triumph of language and spirit. . . . This book is a call to contemplation and action, celebration and a righteous anger that can transform the world we inhabit.”

– Demetria Martínez

“There is a position in yoga called ‘the shining heart.’ This is how Pamela Uschuk has approached her poems. Each poem is struck with the shine of sensuality and mystery. Whether she writes of the sexy quiet of marriage, the daunting thirst of the desert, the secret miracles of a woman's body, or the lacerating political rage that bursts out of many of these pages, Pam Uschuk maintains the light that burns in her chest. All the landscapes here – from the desert's rumpled floor to the poet's own bed to the torture chambers of Chile – are alive and vivid with this light. The book is long over-due.” – Luis Urrea “She is a skilled traveler in dry lands, a knowing observer of animal and human ways, gifted with a sure eye and the master of an idiom charged with meaning and feeling. . . . Finding Peaches in the Desert is a sturdy and striking collection that merits a wide audience.” – Parabola (One) of the most insightful and spirited poets today. – Bloomsbury Review “Pamela Uschuk's poetry is sensual, luscious and tasty. You can sink your teeth into the beginning of any poem and finish satisfied.” – Colorado Springs Independent

OL D

ne egged ancer

OLneegged D ancer Pamela Uschuk illustrated with photo emulsion prints by Lynn Watt

San Antonio, Texas ebook 2012

One-Legged Dancer © 2002 by Pamela Uschuk Cover photograph © 2002 by Pamela Uschuk Back cover photograph of author by William Pitt Root Illustrations © 2002 by Lynn Watt First printing 2002

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-930324-76-6 Ebook © 2012 by Pamela Uschuk ePub ISBN: 978-1-60940-027-9 Kindle ISBN: 978-1-60940-028-6 Library PDF ISBN: 978-1-60940-029-3 Wings Press 627 E. Guenther San Antonio, Texas 78210 Phone/fax: (210) 271-7805 On-line catalogue and ordering: www.wingspress.com

Cataloging-In-Publication Data: Uschuk, Pamela One-legged dancer / Pamela Uschuk. 102 p. : col. ill. ; 14 cm. Poems. ISBN: 0-930324-76-5 I. Title. PS3571.S35 O52 2002 811

This book is dedicated to the many who have lost their lives crossing borders and to the native peoples of Mexico. It is also dedicated with love to William Pitt Root and Jennifer Lorca Root, to Mary Ann Campau and to Regina de Cormier (d. Good Friday, 2000). And, as always, to my family.

CONTENTS DREAMING THE SOUTHWEST What You Thought Was Empty 3 Lying In a Hammock No Wind Rocks 5 Disturbing Dreams and their Cure 6 Dream Time 7 Brave Mr. Buckingham 9 Overachiever 10 Giving Up Eating Light 11 Adobadora 14 Dream Catcher 16 Sueños y Amor 18 DUE SOUTH Southwest Pieta 21 WITH ONE EAR TO THE RAIL She Waits For Amerigo 25 At The Baranca de Cobre 27 ¿A Dónde Vas? 29 Beggar 31 The Horse Appears As Any Cow Would 33 Keeping In The Sour Milk 35 Arturo y Esmeralda 37 Collision 39 Going Second Class 43 ONE-LEGGED DANCER Sharing Bread With Marta 47 In Memory of the Acteal Massacre 50 In The Domain Of The Serpent Jaguar Kings 51 Summer Afternoon Without Rain 54 Leó-te, Hello and Goodbye 55 St. Francis of Atitcatlan 56 One-legged Dancer 57 Climbing to the Moon 60

Facing the Center of Commerce and Prophecy in the Dead City Looking South Along the Avenue of the Dead At The Museo Antropológico

61 62 63

ALONG THE PATH BURNED BY THE FALCON Along the Path Burned by the Falcon 67 El Día De Los Reyes Magos 69 In the Afternoon Shade of Birds and Poetry 71 Breaking Images With Enrique Enriquez, Mazhua Poet 73 While You Ride to the Baranca 75 Third World Shade 77 El Cristo del Ciclon 79 In Puerto Peñasco 81 Snorkeling in the Sea of Cortez 83 At the Edge of the Volcanic Sea 85 Baptismal 88

dreaming the southwest

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An Aguilar Mermaid in Ocotlan

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What You May Have Thought Was Empty Perhaps no one was home so you went for a walk in the arroyo swaying with the sun’s dry current. Maybe you were restless, searching for a place to sit and watch your shadow stain the ground. While your feet rearranged broken feldspar like angry words you saw a black beetle, decapitated and big as your ear. You stopped, thinking it moved. But it was empty, a gutted desert nautilus. So, with your skin pricked by rose quartz, you froze while mica gleamed like constellations around your feet, around the beetle that was a shell. Perhaps you walked inside, spelunking ganglia gone to dust, prospecting the missing heart. When you woke, you wondered why you picked up the beetle and brought it home. Just a dead insect, after all. Maybe you were thinking about your lover or your children or what to have for lunch, and instead of answering the telephone that rang distant as a vireo’s solitary call, you sat at the table facing the beetle in the center of your plate.

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For a moment you imagined eating it so that indifferent husk would fill you but you could see there inside the thorax you thought was empty, a tiny light, sharp as the flash of animal eyes struck by headlights on a lonely road. Your hand opened.

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View from the Hammock No Wind Rocks Lying in the hammock rocked not by breezes that stir like carp fins the warm stream but by the suffocated pulse, the anxiety of calm breath, I watch our house from this small hill. It is like approaching a mirror that shows the backside sliding away, the arm turning from itself. The house is empty, adobe crumbling and thick, paste of mud and straw, mica and wind. How strange to watch our house where we walk, talk, argue or love, where we live like crustaceans hardening over our secrets. At this distance, mud looks dry, mica does not shine. Strange you’ve been gone so long, the dogs hidden in manzanitas, our house a home for strangers, and I on this hill waiting for signs – the subterranean clamor of your hubcaps, the applause of tires in the wash. I listen for the small swaying of houseplants, your footsteps as I rock safe but for the thrill of falling, the rare neon scorpion that drops from a live oak. What magnifies desert is light shifting with each turn of wind beginning to blow me back to old adobe and its secret walls scarred white.

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Disturbing Dreams and their Cure Morning builds a small fire in the clay chiminea whose mouth is the belly of a deer, head tiarred with clay antlers and flowers under the wall that holds the world’s snoring guitars in its adobe hands. Last night teen thugs pistol-whipped my nightmares in a school, where they sprouted black leather and semi-automatic sneers bitter as wasted coffee grounds I squeeze for an early mug. What use was there for classrooms? Which cracked-out mother or absentee father expected me to babysit? Angry as the nuclear feet of fire ants teens spilled from desks, insults richocheting off riddled blackboards until I finally refused those lowriders of cynicism for the tall shadow of a deer I followed skirting the upthrust fists down the fragmented postmodern halls of disillusionment, then squeezed through the metal detector and out the barred door. One young gangsta slicked with a Chrome 38 shrank back to a sweet-haired boy, begging, Why are you going, what makes poetry leave us behind? Something like a high-peak breeze claims my thick breast, my long-gone throat. Rattling the 12 point rack that crowns my heart, I lift the young Crip to this belly-borne fire, to poetry’s deaf ear, guitars crackling. Awake.

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ream Time D for Joy Harjo Last night while you bit off the head of the red pony you loved in that dream, I listened to coyotes scream and scream like witches as they broke after hysterical rabbits crosshatching the dry riverbed. I knew even as I sweat, tangled in sheets, another crazy time was here just when I thought I was settled and the lions of desire had padded back to their tombs to lick dust from their mad paws. Another crazy time. Crazy as blood swelling the tip of the tongue thrust between a lover’s teeth. So crazy I can’t stop dreaming, even today as we sit beneath the peeling mural of the toreador drawn up on his velvet toes before the bull impaled with seven bloody swords. Day and night they rattle like bracelets or the 4 a.m. bottles of loneliness in the brown paper bag of the heart. The bull’s sunfishing back is tattooed to the wall holding him that moment before death. My husband photographs us, friends holding each other, your thick Creek hair sticking to my Russian cheek in this humid Mexican cafe on 4th Avenue where homeless Vets panhandle dollars outside the food co-op, where Yuppies sip frozen Margaritas in the fern bar across the street from dealers who stop teens to sell crack, brown heroin cheap from Mexico. Every one of them is us. I want to hold you, to keep

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each plain and valley of your body’s landscape from erosion, from swords that hack the air above us. What I know are stories that spring whole from a chance glance, old as chipped obsidian blades sharp enough to cut out the tumor of sacrifice from our lives. Spinning like snake skins in times long nova, we trade hopes, fear, the currencies of our lives we’ve distilled from desire’s rough grain. Who else can I tell dreams that end in our deaths, the times we were warriors lanced out of this world like the bull, times we tried to hold what we loved while our arms twitched into dust, then light? Through the curve of your eye I see in one misplaced clap of lightning, that pony and its perfect trust turned to horror as it was beheaded by its owner, its lover. This is the dream of the history of the world. Don’t worry about its ugliness. The red mare is restored now like our lives we’ve dreamed lost in wars of passion and dread. From betrayal we learn everything – grief, anger, hate and love. It all comes together – the precise second the toreador develops the first twinge of arthritis in his wrist and slips. Or the day fear is finally impaled when we shed our body’s old silk, and we are hurled like spears burning for the heart of the sky.

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rave Mr. Buckingham B for Donley Watt Finger after finger, feet, hands, limb after red limb lopped off by the grace of misfortune, Mr. Buckingham smiled, ink figure Indian, grim and spinning your youth, a cartoon as ridiculous as Monty Python’s stump of a knight Neek Neeking his enemy. Through long frog-strung East Texas evenings, stoic Mr. Buckingham never failed to perservere even when he lost his eyes, then his head. I remember how we laughed incredulous as each limb dropped and you intoned That didn’t hurt! from the book that terrified your childhood with courage you’d need to survive fate that macheted your father, then mother like cane from Texas fields, that sent doctors to hack away your bad knee, fate that now blows in plaque like insulation into an attic blocking arteries to your generous heart. And we who love you are grateful you’ve survived again this time. Brave Mister Buckingham, I think as I prepare to fly east to Texas, hot damn. I can smell the smooth creosote of your voice, hear the long ago frogs that resurrect native song in your San Antonio pool soothing a steam-fried southern sky. Donley, dear friend, aren’t we all chopped up here, Brave Mr. Buckinghams, laughing at the amputated world?

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verachiever O for David Ray This droughty spring it is the only tree that fruits. City-watered yellow globes, hydrocephalic, snap slim grapefruit limbs to the desert floor. Not even starlings, those arch colonists, will stoop to steal the grapefruit’s sour meat, but next door the cactus sips its stash of old rain, inventing next year’s blooms.

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G

iving Up Eating Light

for Lynn Watt

Give me the decadence of buttery grease sliding a barge of pungent rosemary over my tongue’s awful need. The chicken skin is crisped brown as my love’s arm thrown over my thigh after making love in Puerto Angel the steamy tropic morning we spotted the rare citrine trogan perching with its long chiffon tail next to the ticking mot mot, elegant as a green sequined glove you might collect in the genealogy of your room. Tucked back from warm Pacific swells, I loved Cañon de Vaca with its reclaimed iguanas, its clean rainforest stream. Never mind the legions of malarial mosquitoes and their voracious appetites drilling siestas or the propeller that sliced nearly through the fisherman’s thigh after he flipped over the stern, tripped up by monofilament ripped by a huge blue grouper orphans would prepare for our tourist lunch. The captain’s nephew didn’t understand gears and, like us, heard panic as a constellation of confused sledgehammers so that he had slammed the old Evinrude into reverse. Strange, isn’t it, how everything comes back to love or its lack? Remember the story we told of the two military macaws uncaged in the dining palapa, parrots whose ripe tomato heads wove

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canny as cobras when my husband tried to teach them English before breakfast. He really wanted to test the strength of their yellow beaks, stuck out his favorite pen, and the male struck his finger like an ax into the trunk of a teak. So much for experiments before coffee. When Bill grabbed the red neck, squeezed and shook, the macaw awked a perfect ching-aah-dah until its beak cracked to free Bill’s bloody digit. He might have dispatched that brilliant bird to a soup pot had I not stopped him. After all I am a woman who measures years by flight, by months I was lucky enough to spot the turquoise primaries of a kingfisher diving into a Colorado creek or blue euphonias breaking hearts with their songs near Aqua Azul, the beaks of caciques yellow as the heart of a sunflower backed by black wings, even bats and their moth-swing back and forth across your San Antonio pool. This afternoon I bask in your kitchen, bite the tender muscle of a chicken thigh. Grease runs over our lips to our chins. We are two women with a week of no husbands, jarred from routine, reaching for piece after delicious piece of dripping roast meat we didn’t have to cook. Both going for the dark flesh at once, we watch white-winged doves mate in the artificial stream outside the window.

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Grease is the sweet song we lick from our fingertips, the memory of love bursting like rosemary at the back of our throats. We stuff our mouths full, surprised by the ache of our ongoing hunger.

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Adobadora On blistered feet, noon creeps past a hundred degrees, past muscled construction workers squeezed into the slim shade of a eucalyptus tree. They eat sandwiches in a desert that fries their jokes before they speak so they just chew as if lunch was another dirty job. I remember how my peanut butter would puddle, soaking through bread the summer of hallucinogenic heat I learned to reconstruct the crumbling curves of adobe walls the color of my sunburned arms. Some days I’d cramp, womb shot through and too fevered to pull myself up straight. There was no bathroom in sight. Buzzed by wasps I ducked behind a barrel cactus to pee, my blood’s temporary stain erased by mica and sand. At lunch I tried to steal a creosote’s skinny shade, often called down vultures or gave fire ants the nod to eat me from the toes up. Not even the sledge of migraines screamed me home. The only woman on the crew I didn’t complain, but curled over cramps, clamped my jaws on dizzy peanut butter, a half avocado if I was lucky, and prayed for a typhoon, a battalion of rattlesnakes, my boss’s ennui, any disaster so we’d knock off early and

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I wouldn’t have to trowel another pan of cement into an unsightly crack crazing a rich house. One noon I watched an entire fifty foot section of wall buckle like a sudden warp in the space time continuum or the curve of a calloused dark palm through a glass of cold water. I should have gone home, fallen into the frayed arms of the sofa. Instead, reeling through meltdown air, I leaned into the wall, tattooing wet concrete with runes of my own delusions. Even rattlesnakes and tarantulas cooled their skins under a full moon, and afternoons javelinas stopped foraging to sprawl in mesquite shade, while cicadas clicked and whirred like broken fans. What was this job paying for? Home, I fell into coma dreams – a great wall of China carved from ice, the baked love Anasazi women patted into bricks, that patience surviving Mesa Verde wind and heat that cracks rocks in Chaco Canyon. Sweat tracked acid scoring the back of my neck gone numb as paltry paychecks cashed for peanut butter and avocados that since I quit that exquisite torture have never tasted quite so rich.

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Catcher Danream elegy for Elizabeth Ott, watercolorist (d. 1992) Diving from the anthracite back of the crow-tracked sky nightmares scream in the sleeping ear so Ojibwes fashioned a web of sinew to net them like salmon in a seine tossing them back to morning to evaporate with dew, while, through the web’s center the watery vocables of dreams slip, reshaping the dreamer that wanders the circle of night. This morning a full cetaceous moon sets as I rise from oceanic dreams to coffee and the odd sight of you ascending, arms stretched like the Redtail’s fledgling wings as she practices her hunting whistle, perched in the maple above the racket of migratory birds. Am I crazy to see you hover above the yard distinct and burning like an autumn leaf here, at home among what flies? Who said you died? Your eyes are the same large rainforest pools, your hands poised with brushes of light. I can hear your voice clear as a xylophone telling me that before you can paint any landscape, you fall immediately to dreaming. It doesn’t matter where you are, in a desert surrounded by cactus and Penstemon’s flaming tongues or hip deep in the toucan song of Palenque’s rainforest or curled near the deer-colored stream running wild between sycamore trees in Pepper Sauce Canyon. Each time, the land enters you. Waking, your hands are able to paint.

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Oh, Elizabeth, the Oaxacan deer you gave us grazes the mantlepiece beneath your painting of the multiple depths of water that calms the cherrywood ghosts cooling the far livingroom. Today the full moon travels through Pisces, the mermaid of your heart. I can still feel your shoulders filling the curves of my palms, your body slight in time as mine. I finger the last photo of us, holding each other after the eagle feather ceremony in Oracle sung by the Huichol shamanka who showed up one day in my studio, miraculous as the cobalt lizard that rode her shoulder when she told us her initiation stories, then our futures singing about the blue deer that danced away the cares of the world. That you should have drowned in the bursting tide of your cells in a desert we shared is the nightmare evaporating with morning dew. Through the center of the dream catcher, light catches the spiral tilt of an expanding universe. Elizabeth, you would love this hawk that tests her young auburn-fletched wings. I can not say goodbye but kiss you in this living circle whose mystery is the flame that thrives in water you have entered and can never die.

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S ueños y amor I am dreaming of love again and a quetzel opens green stars illuminating jungle trees with the history of its long lacy tail the jaguar licks as it licks its own paws. I am dreaming of love again and calla lilies trumpet into the cloud forest opening to rain that fills their bells with its own fearless music. I am dreaming of love again and wild banana spiders sing like small winds stopping to see where they have traveled away from the temper of high volcanos. I am dreaming of love again the way the world turns its eyes to dawn and lets its sorrow slip back into the wide sleeve of night. I am dreaming of love again and there is no death large enough to eat the particles of light that lift like egrets from a body at rest. I am dreaming of love again and the red hibiscus unfolds its skirts in a folklorico that flings the galactic pollen of the heart wide.

Due South

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Mayan statue in Guanajuato

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outhwest Pieta S after the lithograph by Luis Jiminez Sacrifice is seldom what it seems. Take this virgin sprawled across her lover’s lap in Mexico’s wide desert. Which eagle dove to take her heart offered up for the Hummingbird God with innumerable other human hearts plucked so Montezuma could survive his own terror? Does the forbidden lover who cradles her corpse still taste blood caking his lips, blood crusting the Hummingbird’s sleek beak? The Mexican sunset is cerise as the arterial ooze washing between Popocatapetl, the mountain who smokes, and Iztaccuiatl, the white woman extinct; sunset that repeats the same shade as the gore-soaked headband constricting the lover’s ecstasy, his grief. Nearly smiling, the lover narrows his gaze beyond the sky that flames apocalyptic as his aura. Between the grounded eagle and the coils of the rattler dividing the vision of Mexico, the sacrificed beauty lies. What calls itself priest or devotion demands that the innocent heart trust the obsidian blade. There is no rage, just the smoking mirror etched on a sky that distorts each image it sees. And the virgin’s beautiful face is an exact mask replicating the lover’s –

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her muscular arms, leg curve, the living and the dead a circle of uncorrupted flesh. Siempre sige lo mismo – the sacrifice is the lover’s beloved twin.

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With One Ear to the Rail

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No al Fascimo in Ciudad Oaxaca

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S he waits for Amerigo Scaling the snowless Sierra Madres Amerigo drives the Chihauhau al Pacifico weaving together railroad tracks and solitary Tarahumara towns. Without tequila or cerveza, Amerigo drives the sober train through all seasons, his engine a black sheen of sure controlled muscle. Alert, inside a green cavern of sheet metal, his body is fetal and round, shoulders sloping like cinammoned dough to the ends of soft fingers closed around the throttle’s blue neck. Speed runs through his arm, enters the canal work of his body, surrounds the spawning flesh with a net of vibrating motion, orbiting as regularly as Cassiopeia does heaven’s dark crown. He shows me pictures of his children, nine satellites tumbling from his wallet like the excess credit cards of the inexcusably rich. Half-forgotten dreams, their names cycle in his memory. Last, he smiles at his wife’s face, moon-shaped and lovely, which rises

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above the mound of her belly polishing the jewel of the tenth unborn. Glowing from the summit of her massive peaks, she waits as leaves turn to ice, for Amerigo.

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At the Baranca de Cobre Estacion Creel Estacion de Juanita El Baranca – all day our train brays through tunnels, takes the sixty bridges that National Geographic calls the most beautiful track in the world lacing tiny stations where vendors hawk chicharonnes, licuadas, piñones, the exotic flavor of names. At the summit of Copper Canyon, we brake to refuel. The Tarahumara, whose name means flying feet, negotiate their crafts – tough grass baskets, bulls, birds and violins carved from the rough perseverence of pines. For them, everything, even tourists have souls. While passengers snap their photos, children trail me to the escarpment. Their voices clack like rhythm sticks speaking the unconverted tongue while I look into infinite layers of fog filling the canyon where, for ceremony or sport, Tarahumara run ecstatic marathons. Somewhere below water crashes in its fearless leap and I am less alone than I’ve ever been, hearing what names itself again and again, wearing down boulders or shaping sand bars, the current’s sure purpose.

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Children bring me back, tugging at my sleeves, giggling and pointing to my eyes with their smear of mascara, Cover Girl blue. Here each color is a separate creature that charms or cures. Their faces assume trickster masks as they streak my eye shadow across their cheeks. All but one girl who regards me throught eyes anthracite as the hawk’s who has learned to betray nothing of itself. She follows me past Baptist missionaries who unfold their latest campaign – a cardboard phonograph conceived by the fervent in Tulsa. It is as portable as faith. When the first sermon echoes in their language from a floppy 45 balanced on a stone, the Tarahumara break into belly laughs. Living between escarpment and canyon floor, they are used to centuries of Jesuits whose saints they’ve adopted, twin spirits to deer, trees, cougars, the volatile spin of stars. Leaving the Baptists to their games, I buy a green grass basket. The girl pauses beside me. A sudden gust lifts its cold trade with the dust, erasing gospels garbled as chickens gossiping behind us. When I ask the girl her name, her silence rises shrill as the hunting cry of the black-tailed hawk shearing clouds in the brilliant elevation of her eyes. Before the train whistles me back aboard I offer her sugar cane, a bag of piñones she refuses. What she must think of me when I disappear wholly into mist while the glass feet of wind flatten the train to dust?

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A Dónde Vas?

¿

Like bullets, cockroaches crack underfoot as we descend from the last train, joining camposinos who gather to sleep in the fruit-sweet dusk. We imagine ourselves refugees exiled, leaning against backpacks whose contents could feed these people for weeks. How conspicuous our blue jeans and pale skin. Around us banana palms darken and birds give their final screechings to jungle air, warm as broth. The one word we understand is gringo. Like moths who fly into bare bulbs overhead, these men wear unnerving white. Their sleeves flutter, disturbing us even before we close our eyes and imagine everything that shines might be a hidden knife. At first when Federales come, we believe the whine of jeeps a dream spinning gravel and midnight onto us. Laughing behind the bruised mouths of machine guns they raise clouds of camposinos who stumble into a single spotlight’s fevered glare. Federales need no joke to laugh at this easy prey. Their bandoleros growl commands.

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Bullets furrow the dust near bare feet that comply like good wives to entertain, circling the steaming dark. ¡Andale, amigos! Why hurry when there’s nowhere to run? ¿Dónde están los papeles de trabajar? Who needs papers when there is no work? ¿A dónde vas? A man goes no further than this leash of light. We are shadows paler than our skins as we watch rifle butts slam kidneys, cheekbones, white-shirted chests, our words broken as stone in the indecipherable night. It’s over quickly, the departing jeeps and drunk laughter silenced by vines, the thick dreaming leaves of palms as we look into shadowy faces whose eyes must deny the nightmare and refuse to meet our own. Heads bent like larvae, those accustomed to insult no longer resent the darkness that spits fists and impossible commands. Their averted eyes tell us we are all homeless in a world whose untranslatable rules are tides we are lost to, vulnerable as the moon whose white eye rises blind against us. There is nothing we can say, no comfort in the food we share with these men who take it as if it were finally being returned.

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Beggar You are a child leading a gang of children whose faces are the random predation of genes. With your back crooked as an Iguana twisting, you beg pesos from us as we detrain. From your whole body, an arm flies to the missing fingers that club the wrist into a knot tied by the blue ends of scars. You do not smile at the money you demand from our perfect hands.

The chosen one

a fat man whispers, his gold teeth obscene stars breaking stark dusk in this desert depot,

Hay muchos pobres, señorita. You can’t help staring. This is for you.

With a hand that isn’t a hand but a flap of skin that charges my eyes, you collect coins, butting aside the other children with your thin hip,

Dame dinero. PsstPsst. ¿Gringa, entiende?

Little extortionist, I understand how you rule this station with the tyranny of your terrible wound.

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Cocksure and hissing through teeth black as datura seeds, your face curses my hands blind, but how could I ever name you the villain when you are the rock that freezes my womb? I leave all my change on your palmless hand knowing you hate each of my fingers. The fat man says deformities like yours are often planned. Poverty is a razor that cuts its own skin. Tonight in the Vista Car, I listen to Brahms’ First Symphony, each resolution powerless to soothe land that turns sleepless while the train begs passage over its dark arms. – West of Ciudad de Chihauhau –

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The Horse Appears as Any Cow Would Sulfuric as hair fed to flame, the scream of what we hit overwhelms the train. Cameras slam our chests as it bucks then skids the whining tracks. ¡Una vaca! ¿Una vaca? ¡Pendejos! ¡Un caballo! Hooves split the air. From brakes sparks and blue smoke, then a horse head catapults past. All afternoon we chugged through papaya groves and jungle snarling the coast, trading complaints about bosses with these men who now drop their beers and leap from the train. Is it just the alcohol or some mean chink in the genes when they throw chunks of steaming horse at one another like bizarre snowballs in a kids’ fight? While a conductor argues them back aboard we strain to understand insults gattling between them, inexplicable jokes to break the montonous chatter of long miles in the second class coach. Running across the field, a farmer shakes a machete at the engineer who spits from the deaf cab, gauging the incline of mountains ahead. Chingada, cabrón. ¡Mi caballo es mi vida! While the engine revs, we watch his wife and children lug a dented washtub to the horse that now appears as any cow or we would rendered to meat.

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Back in our car, the men wipe their hands across tight jeans, order more Dos Equis. We brace against the sudden jolt of the tracks as we gain speed through this lush country given over to an indifferent moon, the onset of distant stars.

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Keeping in the Sour Milk Sour as old milk, Los Mochis leaks the sweet humidity of ruined fruit and raw sewage under a bloated moon. Hotels full, we’re stranded after being chased by drunken knives into the bus station. Midnight and a ragged starling man flits from seat to torn red plastic seats harvested from charred busses driven over cliffs into jungle ravines. Sketching portraits with his amphetamine hands this man books passage for all of us. All night, he bends to caricature dark-haired women with wet lips whose breasts he plants like mangos in mounds of rendered flesh. Las mujeres están todo el mundo. Twin fevers, his eyes drink our misery. He blesses even the cursed tongues of those who stop to mock him. As the gradual hands of night age to dawn, I commission my portrait. When he crosses himself, laughing, Dos mil pesos? Nada pesos? No problema. God will provide, I admire the tender cradles of his hands.

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Keeping in the sour milk, they hold my sketch sure as any lover’s. This late hour and nothing is out of place. Chasing flies from my face lost on his yellow pad, he turns to wait for fresh models to descend from the southbound express.

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Arturo y Esmeralda Love is shaped by naming his mother claimed so Arturo calls her Esmeralda, iris-eyed as Pasqua dawn – Esmeralda – a gem so cool she melts the unrelenting noon swords of desert sun slicing through the window display. Esmeralda wears the latest wedding gown, a fountain of lace and pearls. It is said that Arturo was engaged once before – that at the tragic altar of la Virgen de Guadalupe in the mining town of Cananea his bride’s heart burst just as the priest began the wedding mass. Like a copper gong struck by grief ’s dumb fist, Arturo rang for years as he wandered town after town. Then in Hermosillo he saw her, restored as Lazarus and chaste as dust, head cocked to greet him in the window of the Novias Elegantes Bridal Shop. Waxy as her cheek, Esmeralda offered her oath immortal as pink silk roses. Now shy and spindly as a Daddy Longlegs Arturo stands, daily squeezing invisible fingers that warm in his. Esmeralda does not mind his stained khakis, his infant-thin gray hair, his eyes watery and guileless as bird song.

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Her unfailing dignity is red wine that fills his empty glass. Her eyes tell him to endure hunger, thirst, the arguments of God and dust and wind, every humility except the pinche cabrón who gazed too long at her plaster face so that Arturo had no choice but to push the man through the plate glass. What we won’t do for love. When the police delivered him to the station, they advised him against illusion, but released him when he couldn’t pay bail. Arturo never gives up his vigil and even now composes songs to his bride at the Novias Elegantes. People are used to him, call, “¡Hola, Arturo y Esmeralda! ¡Salud!” as they drive past on the Boulevard Rodríguez. How can they resist toasting the couple for whom love never dies – the mute virgin worshipped by an aging groom who moves the sighs of salesgirls and customers alike with his devotion and starved arms. Even the Chief of Police doesn’t remove Arturo who repeats the vows that unwind his life refracted in the sunwarmed glass of Esmeralda’s gaze.

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Collision I. Just outside Hermosillo, heatwaves break Ocotillo, Organ Pipe Cactus, a Harris Hawk who dives through all that shifts on its sure black wings. As we lounge against the train’s irregular lunge, we watch smoking specks take form ahead of us, then billow scattered like a child’s blocks but random and wrong. Over the iron clank of the vestibule doors, we strain to hear the first whispers – muertos, ochenta personas, muy triste, feo. Ugly. A teenager in a mini-skirt pushes back from the open door to cross herself, staring straight into troops who balance M16s like armored toddlers on their slim hips. A Federale thrusts a machine gun at passengers who’d dare to jump from the slowing cars. Time is broken steel that screeches under our wheels, broken as the two scorched engines fused beneath a slow funnel of vultures. We recognize the pullman like ours, alcobas gutted by flame, shattered windows dealt like a bad hand of oily cards to the heat.

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Atop the pullman, a child’s patent leather shoes reflect sun beside a cowboy hat, its charred brim split. From another car, a cindered stump waves at the helicopter that radios in the dead. While workers clear the tracks dragging black plastic garbage bags behind them, the story reaches us, how the Express we should have taken last night, stopped on the tracks, with no flares or lights, so the southbound freight smashed into it like a cast iron fist. Who can say what the freight engineer saw as he broadened with tequila, what he might have dreamed as he opened the throttle, before his window exploded to the moonless blue. II. Just yesterday, late leaving Guadalajara as we crossed another river with no name our train stalled for hours on the same dizzy bridge where the previous summer three hundred died when their train derailled, soaring like a flaming metal spine into the canyon. Under us, each tie cracked like a brittle ankle bone while catfish held the flow, their wide mouths whiskering sewage from a feeder stream. Then this morning, another delay. Our train inexplicably died far from any depot.

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From the jungle, men and women sold cold spring water ladled from aluminum pails, then macheted fat papayas for us, ripe as yellow breasts. No one was surprised that the engine caught fire, but it was the villagers who put out the flames. Men from second and third class cars herded children through thick black smoke while conductors shrugged from their canvas stools. III. Now, we gather speed and pass two cars melted in length-wise embrace. Bits of cloth mouth the wind as rescuers search demolished third class cars for body parts. Everywhere flies attend them. After our wheels shriek over the last yards of shrapnel, passengers head back to the comedor for lunch. What else can they can do? In our alcoba, the dented fan loses power; the lamp shorts out. Miles past the wreck, we cannot stop the stinging pitch of wrenched metal as we slap at flies that drink our sweat. In journals, we number our luck, then the tragic body bags stacked in the backs of army trucks, chronicles of the living and what dies. Impartial as coincidence, flies cling to our fingers, forming

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their own democratic patrols, ignoring borders, their passports hungry, mirage-green. .

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G

oing Second Class

Eased by waiters who soothe this long journey with cerveza and clean white pillows, those with money ride forgetful as sloths closed in the night eye of the vista car. Just as their dreams fail to touch us in these rude seats, the train breathes across a land accustomed to the indifference of its passing. From children whose dark eyes are shy as velvet foxes in their beautiful faces, we buy sugar cane and piñon nuts, ignoring the way the benches argue with every muscle that bounces on their bruised frames. After a while we try to sleep, leaning into one another’s bodies for warmth, but splintering wicker baskets and the fretful luggage of caged chickens jostle us with each rough night track the train discovers. Even exhausted children wake at these bumps pushing time in jerky frames across fields they would dream. Behind us, someone starts to strum a guitar. At this hour that opens its mouth to all that is or could be, the slow bitterness of going second class halts its erosion of souls.

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Warmth drifts over the hurtling congregation gathered in the rush of dark as the women begin to sing.

– Sierra Madres, México –

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One-legged dancer

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One-legged skeleton in San Antonio, Tejas

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haring Bread with Marta S Now sun begins to chase the blue deer of the sky over the shapeshifting back of the cloud forest. Accustomed as you are to centuries of slaughter, even you, Marta, would find strange the place I’m bound to return to. Even now semi-automatic weapons tattoo hot city streets in gang wars where teens shoot to kill one another. Stopping by our table, a Dutch tourist warns us that hours east in Guatemala security forces are again shooting Indians. It is the same bullet firing all over the world. As we sit in this cafe, sharing bread and soup we exchange stories of the fiesta in your village, San Juan Chamula. There I entered the church, where copal burns carrying the prayers of shamankas who offer eggs, slim candles and the occasional chicken to twin animal spirits who have healed your mother and grandmothers for all time, healed Tzotzils who’ve survived the Spanish, the Catholic conversion, padrones who enslaved your mountains for coffee plantations. They taught the strict catechism of violence so Chamulans killed the Catholic priest and traded pews for fresh pine needles that understood the need of wild tongues and the sick in spirit and the sadness of mothers with tubercular babies who can find no real cures.

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Like a cocked pistol, the waiter stares as Josephina braids my hair and we laugh at the photo of us hugging our dog, Oscar de Leon, high priest of muddy sticks and stray tennis balls. Oscar, oso muy grande. When I order more bread, the waiter pretends not to understand, refuses to serve los Indigenos. I order again, ashamed for him, recalling Chamulan women who invited us into their huts to share scare tortillas. You kid me about my name – Pamela – too much like dessert you insist. María Pamela, you say, no Marchu, in Tzotzil, Marchu, syllables like you, determined and strong. Regálame, Marta, with your guileless smile that carries us beyond assault weapons and death squads, beyond the casual genocide of souls. Chak thunders up the mountain to burst clouds flooding the streets and you pull your shawl the color of sky close over your crafts. I will miss you and the clay dolls and fantastic beasts you fashion – especially the elephant you made me for luck, the elephant you conjured in an imagination that’s never seen Africa or TV. How can I convince you it is better you stay in these rare mountains where the Quetzel flies, spreading its long tail feathers like the emerald locks of the water goddess through the disappearing branches of ancient trees.

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I promise to keep fighting the burning of your forests even if I must kill a few priests. Keep your ways, Marta, and your language that clicks like stones rolled inside a clean stream. May your animal spirit run healthy and wild. From now on I’ll visit in dreams. I know your life will never be easy as long as bullets order the globe into parcels men believe they can own. I’ll carry my name carefully as eggs, Marchu, the woman who stands on the moon, Marchu, the woman with the jaguar in her heart. In my pocket, copal and this photo. In my blood, your laughter rich as the notes of the bone flute. In my hand this poem, a charm of love for your survival until the end of our common sky.

– San Cristobal de las Casas –

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I n Memory of the Acteal Massacre (December 22, 1997) The Day of the Dead and cathedral light bloodies a blue coffee can holding marigolds for spirits, then ice rain bullets corrugated roofs, floods cobbled streets. Pacing the zocolo, barefoot in shivering raw wool skirts, Tzotzil girls sell hand-woven Zapatista dolls. Just south, last year M 16s exploded pink huipils, lacing the spines of mothers who knelt praying for peace to their babies who slept their last dreams. Writing poems to the tone-deaf ear of the world, Zapatistas shift camp and lure armored helicopters from Lacandon villages. Jaguars disappear on their spotted paws, eaten by chainsaws that scream through uncountable miles of rainforest trees to fill Nafta contracts. Bruised bright as blood from women interrogated by the army at Ocosingo, runoff from clearcut slopes stains the waterfalls of Agua Azul. Like crickets on fire, marimbas click behind a young Mayan who braves a roomful of senators to read her banned verse. How long can her songs survive this ice rain, incessant as Humvee patrols that choke the globe’s dark throat?

– Chiapas, Mexico –

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In the Domain of the Serpent Jaguar King I. The Huichol jaguar mask is the beaded cosmos I hold as I walk from our bungalow in time to see a rare howler monkey whoop, laughing as he pisses through rubber tree leaves onto the Rutgers naturalist who photographs its hilarity here in the abused rainforest. The naturalist glares at his giggling son as we load cameras for a daytrip to Palenque, ruined Mayan capital, home of the Serpent Jaguar Kings. Love, my legs are still weak, thighs and mouth tingling from your kiss, your damp fingers as you entered me not unlike priests who entered the Temple of the Moon to dream of immortality. II. Inside the ruins, the stream we wade shoots clean between boulders and over swollen avocados we gorge on as we splash through the old stone culvert to the Queen’s bath. At melt-down midday heat, we strip sinking like pale tapirs into the current before tackling the hundreds of narrow stone steps that lead up to the Jaguar King’s tomb. From atop the burial pyramid, we can see blue butterflies circle the symmetry

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of stone calendars that wheel to the century’s end , friezes profiling slaves and kings, snakes skulls and gods, the entire layout of Palenque planned in the mythic world. Each leaf seems at peace until we pass through the narrow limestone key down the steep nautilus of slick stone stairs to the sepulcher, spiraling through the pyramid’s heart. I am not prepared for the smothering embrace of El Monstruo de la Tierra nor the way the tropic swelter compresses everything claustrophobic. It is the shape of sounds that slows my heart in its trough of memory and fear – booming funeral drums, the throat thrum of priests interpreting copal smoke as they follow the swollen body borne to the underworld. In mythic time, it is twenty years after the last Jaguar King’s death, thirty-five after his mother’s demise centuries past. When she kneels to lift time’s crown, she passes on to him the hoop of her eternal life. In mythic time, the future loops, intersecting the past with the apogee of a German tourist who half-crawls on her hands and knees as she backs down the stairs just ahead of me. Though tears river her cheeks, she refuses to give in. I would help her up, but I know her strength is learning the way for her hands to read the walls’ slippery mirrors. All the while, I keep you in sight, my palpable Jaguar man.

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Before I reach the sarcophagus, the glyphs of bas relief materialize even before I see them. And, when you reach for my waist, I wonder who, in some future moment, will recall my arm’s solitary curve, loneliness stitching our words to the stars? III. Now, back from Palenque, heat suffocates jungle. Undetected, monkeys and toucans nap as they cling effortlessly to thick branches. I come to you, Love, lost to your own imaginings dozing on the bed’s clean blue sea. Under the perfect circle inscribed by the fan’s lazy whirl, I trace the curl of your spine’s dark calendar. You bend to kiss my tropical hip while rain steams through the canopy, plunging through immortality our flesh already knows and we lose our minds.

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Summer Afternoon Without Rain At siesta in the cloud forest, Chak’s thorny thunder is invisible as the silk hands of wind sliding up from the Pacific. Flies and husbands and wives doze like giant sloths who inch one finger to itch the dark skin of another lethargic dream. On gnarly stalks tall as apple trees courtyard geraniums lip the too bright air for their afternoon ration of rain. Their disappointment is gauzy as a small cloud a husband inhales when he licks the cream of a woman’s thigh in the dream he will tell no one Tropic sun blasts his wife’s hair, a supernova of black light against the bleached pillowcase he reaches for. Without their fix of afternoon showers, cobblestones dry white as jaguar bones while umbrellas fold like bats in glaring doorways. Naps done, the vendors yawn back to unlock the stalls of their lives. The old rain god wilts inside hibiscus and calla lily throats. We walk out to promenade with couples and their secrets, who laugh arm and arm, into dusk that ticks across the sky.

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Leó-te, Hello and Goodbye The mossy ghosts of clouds climb volcanos older than serpents that belt the goddess of the moon. Mayan rolls like velvet stones against teeth or the click of studded tires on wet pavement. Pepe, our guide tells us Leó-te like aloha is the same for hello and goodbye. Tonight Cassiopoeia stirs night’s vast tureen. This rain forest ticks with cold tongues and once again I let quick obsidian slit my easy wrists. If I don’t hold my breath to count each step on the pyramids I could slip on don’t and why do you have to do. Shoulds sting my ankles like scorpions and I think of those Jaguar Kings who used the backs of slaves for benches, then cut out their hearts to feed the harpy eagles of terror. Every vertebrae in my spine fights against becoming a seat, but sometimes when rain cobbles the stars and the moon runs off with her heart in her teeth, my knees bend and I hear in my Leó-te the laughter of chipped white blades.

– San Cristobal de las Casas –

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St. Francis of the Aticatlan Who is the eroded saint whistling in the garden where Aztecs once walked, his stone lips pursed at full sun above crossed arms and bare granite feet? A carved jaguar leans, purring into the stiff cassock, crucifix razoring the wild feline cheek. No hand reaches to carress either saint or cat who smiles even when she’s ignored. The jaguar’s eyes slammed tight years ago as did the saint’s, blind and trilling to Mulberry trees who reciprocate with vespers of rustling leaves and novenas of sparrow gossip. Who is that saint kissing the breeze that sweeps from volcanic montains, and from whom does he protect his heart?

– Valle de Bravo, México –

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One-Legged Dancer Dawn canons shatter Sunday’s cobbled streets. Opposite the cathedral ringing in the faithful, I stumble from dreams into a sidewalk cafe for pan dulce and caffeine. Light lifts Guanajuato, city of singing frogs, city of mummies, colonial city beautiful as a medieval tiara tilting silver-mined hills. When I stir in cream, brass music and drums explode the square where Aztecs appear, stamping barefoot and rattling shell ankle bracelets, each step slapping raw stone. Crowned by pheasant feathers sleek heads nod to the beat. When they spin in flamegold loincloths, cerulean tunics, red-feathered breastplates, brilliant macaws fly. Snakeshaking the street hypnotic, they take the marble church steps. Their muscles sweat to the drum’s holy spirit, knees pumping, arms flapping as they clutch feather batons, strike sunrise for the ancient tempo that leads the fiesta of San Antonio through sweltering streets.

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Even this early, my feet cannot stop keeping their own time to this heartbeat, this bloodbeat borne up from earth. But it is the one-legged dancer, hopping and leaning on his crutch wrapped with electric blue tape, I would follow through this world. He twirls next to the Aztec beauty embroidered with a winged-jaguar in blue beads across her breasts. She matches each of his steps. When she smiles the street disappears, and it is only the two of them, a stiff-legged heron and his calm warrior queen. Without speaking, he whirls, brushing her shoulder and lifting the crutch as he would his missing leg, while she dips left, pulls right, then touches his thigh with fingers slicked by indefatigable heat. Sacred with passion their feet clap the rhythm as they dance side by side surviving the labyrinth of streets dug by Conquistadors who razed shining cities, burned parrots and divine eagles alive in aviaries but could not singe what flies in these dancer’s eyes.

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Restored beyond amputation, the one-legged dancer and his partner are the son and daughter of Montezuma, full of grace once again on earth and everyone stops, amazed to watch –

their smooth sculpted faces whirl without effort,

without panting, their breathing like panthers easy in the sun of their ancestors who danced to the pyramids, to the heartbeat of drums, to the singing of frogs, to the sacrificial knife, their flesh belted by gold.

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limbing to the Moon C for Bill While I climb the steep stone steps to the Temple of the Moon, three tiers of volcanic rock ground by priests and girls ecstatic to lose their hearts to their lunar mother, my husband climbs the taller Temple of the Sun. Half a mile to the south, I watch his khaki legs and camera vest take the extreme vertical slope. From the sites of sacrificial altars, half-way up, we wave to each other as we scale twin gods to reach the supreme imagination of the Aztec sky. We carry our hopes for holiness or blasphemy, the two faces of each soul growling at the other, breathless at times, awed and dizzied by the ascent older and steeper than the two volcanos smoking the horizon. Even at this distance, I admire the form of my love just as I love each stone whispering its singular lunar song across the dry lake bed, across Teotihuacan, dry as wind-jittered corn husks or the empty rattles of a snake’s tail, a symphony that remembers the blood-soaked light of the womb and its grim, fanged twin.

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the Center of Commerce and Prophecy Facing in the Dead City Like the quick buzz of killer bees, the four languages of tour guides fight for sovereignty at the temple’s base guarded by plumed serpents and their bared stone fangs. Cameras click like rosary beads ignored by the unfurled ears of sculpted conchs listening for Quetzalcoatl to predict the sacrifice that could mend fear’s cracked and smoking mirror. Vanished the vast blue lake, the white shining metropolis, the hammered gold shields that blinded Cortez to everything but his own greed. From Mexico City drifts the colonial legacy – toxic ash and enough auto exhaust to scar each pyramid, smog that mutes notes fluting from clay pipe replicas vendors hawk. Through old masks of dried blood, the strange abalone faces of clowns grin atop sacrificial blades. Is it possible we hear invisible feet kick the wind obliterating alien words that fail to interpret their lives into Japanese, French, English, and German, a cacophony of syllables smashing grass and infuriating the sky? At the temple of Quetzalcoatl, sun bastes the temporary codex of our footprints disappearing from the amphitheater that faces the center of commerce and prophecy in the dead city. Single-file, we walk back to our lives, staring into the ancient promise we’ve avoided all these years held firm under the serpent’s split stone tongue.

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Looking South Along the Avenue of the Dead From the eroded crown of the moon’s temple I take my first steady breath with women from all over the globe. Some sit cross-legged, yogis misplaced, others chant or pray, while, winded from the climb, one teen lights a Marlboro, eyes tearing on smoke that backlashes into her face. She turns her back on her father desperate to entertain her with small jokes she will ignore for many years. Looking south along the Avenue of the Dead, I inhale all the women who bared their hearts as they walked to the knives of priests over these ecstatic volcanic stones. Their molecules hover like the cries of Aztec birds burned alive in their cages by Cortez. Even among strangers, I am never alone except in the smoking mirror of my heart that I’ve cut sure as any drugged priest from a chest I’ve too often failed to treasure. Sometimes I am my most faithful sacrifice but atop this temple I chose to breathe into the fading face of the moon. At a short distance, Quetzalcoatl preens the feathered ghosts of his fears while I blow mine down the long avenue, down the steps of this steep journey blessed beyond the blade’s awful need.

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At the Museo Antropológico In the city of volcanoes and jaundiced air that tastes like pesos soaked in gasoline, cathedrals sink like gullible hearts into the lakebed of the old Aztec capital. Lining the steps of the Museo Antropológico the great-grandchildren of Quetzelcoatl beg, palms thrust up like soiled altars beside their mother wrapped in a blue rebozo who looks at the world through one bruised eye. Inscribed in the black stone jaguar’s back the Aztec calendar predicts the end of the world. Polished from the blood of winners, this jaguar smiles above her thick granite legs. Death was the prize for the best Mayan ballplayers, so ecstatic they were for cross-eyed knives impressed with abalone teeth to cut out their hearts for the endless appetites of gods a dentro de las guerras cosmicas. Here in the city of traffic and earthquakes, children sink like stones into hunger’s vast lake, begging a peso or two from those who rush past to view the terrors of the ancient world, Mayan steles – Serpent Jaguar kings sitting on top of slaves, the Moon Goddess belted with rattlesnakes, skull-headed El Monstruo de la Tierra – or the shimmer of Quetzelcoatl’s blue feathered crown nodding to each of us that passes by.

– Mexico City –

along the path burned by the falcon

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Santa Semana in San Miguel de Allende

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long the Path Burned by the Falcon A for Bill and Ignacio The fountain is the tympanum that remembers dawn near the grove of Dolore trees where five red chicks peck impeccable grass for worms or seed at the feet of the green grave that guards the blackberry’s serene dew. Over coffee, we wrestle news – government helicopters strafe Indian villages, killing five more in Chiapas – our consciences eased by blue plates heaped with ham, tortillas, cheese and black beans. Fueled by winter verse, our days are hung on the hooks of tropical stars, the loose metrics of roses, metaphors gauzy as hibiscus, the political wrangling of azaleas and bougainvillea. Even on a sunny morning like this who knows what might turn sun into screams? On the tape player, the violin grieves for dawn who’s escaped on her steaming feet across the far volcanic hills, leaving the taste of blackberries and grapefruit scouring the backs of our throats No witty turn of phrase, no Nobel book of poems can deter the falcon from his schedule when he plunges from the top of a near pine and, with no malice in the clicking hunger of his talons, lances one pullet hen from the five scattering chaos across the serene grass.

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How ridiculous we three poets, nearly overturning the breakfast table, trailing bright napkins and straw hats as we run along the path burned by the falcon through the forest’s swift design, as if our aching concerns and slim words could save the most resourceful chick or clip the falcon’s wings.

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l Día de los Reyes Magos E for Ignacio and Josie In our shoes outside the dawn door, we find the gifts – a small bottle of Bourdeaux, a bar of dark chocolate, the natural loufa to scrub away dead skin, a rectangle of aromatic herbal soap to bring back raven flight to gray hair. Heavy dew tongues the fig tree, blackberries, limes, tangerines and the orange hummingbird vine where tropical hummingbirds drink. These days at Rancho El Sereno high in the cerro of Central Mexico gallop past urgent as the horses racing after each other or like hot winds tearing spiderwebs from the morning corral. This morning of simple gifts peels another rind from the tangerine of lies grown in my country north. What is a border but a lie drawn by the cartography of fear, a dull blade that slices the belly of land. In any language cinnamon and cloves can spice each loving tongue. All day we celebrate the old tale of three Wisemen who navigated deserts, fields, rivers and mountains across every border in their known world to find a child who might save them from the deadly ink of judges and kings, treaties and borders men draw in sand,

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those false gods whose gifts poison the innocent and murder the foreign names of stars that might guide their own.

– Valle de Bravo, Mexico –

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In the Afternoon Shade of Birds and Poetry for Mariclaire Acosta, Mexican human rights activist who helped establish the first Indigenous women’s weaving cooperativa in Chiapas

When I have bled to death light and clear my life will be like a river, loud and transparent freely will flow the imprisoned song.



– Alaide Foppa

In the house that once was a priest’s you shore up old adobe to create an eagle’s nest, room after simple room bulletproof, overlooking the lake and pine trees that march off across the hills like soldiers hunting Zapatistas in Chiapas. Your neighbor still complains about the priest’s mistress who lived under the pious guise of a housekeeper, licking the inside of his cassock clean. Your laughter rings above the cathedral bell that clangs the quarter hours, colonial bell that claimed the city center from Mazahuas five hundred years ago. Wrapped in the valley’s fantastic mist, we inhale this rare free afternoon, while your ears tune to a grunting bulldozer that flattens a camposino’s casita while the displaced look on. Siempre, siempre money buys the best lake view, and who, in their right mind, would call this terrorism?

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Old Marxist in a world that’s disowned Marxists, what match might char the privileged flags flapping above maquilladoras, where hard labor and slave wages are the iron-soled boots of free trade. Mariclaire, enemy of the state, you dared dream the weft and warp of a woman’s life woven by her own Native hands. Hermana, held now in my heart’s garden, I raise my plain glass of table wine to toast you in Valle de Bravo, Mexico City, Chiapas and in all the suffering places where birdsong and poetry scream against global treaties that brand Nike, Sony, Reynolds, McD’s, Ford, a million logos of misery onto the sweating arms of our hemisphere. May the bullet of any accusation aimed at you fly like a killer bee back to the mouth from which it was born, and may each kernel of hatred grind down to masa patted into tortillas by the hands of all the world’s forgotten women who have so much hunger to feed.



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breaking Images with Enrique Enriques, Mazahua Poet On the sundrunk slope, he waves us in. At seventy, his eyes are shrewd sextons gauging the distance between our greetings. Yo vivo adentro del pueblo con mi madre. She is ninety, his voice is sly as tequila in a blue glass. Pero, cada hombre tiene sus sueños. Through his dream we walk, room after room plastered together like a wasp’s paper nest, this house ascending the volcanic hillside. From the balcony, we watch afternoon waves of silver cobwebs that break from pines to blow past our faces. Each day Enrique strolls with El Patron, the bay gelding too old now to ride, and Lobo, his wolf-eyed Akita, sniffing the fenceless forest, without collar or rein. Scaling story after story, we pass his life’s collection of boulders, wood sculptures, cornices lopped from old colonial buildings, and tables hewn from the hearts of rainforest trees ringing with the ghosts of all the women he loved the decades he macheted roads through the rumpled belly of Mexico. In his garden, we rest on stone benches, and for each shot of Herradura he pours, Enrique demands a metaphor he tests as he would asphalt

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for depth, plasticity, tensile strength. ”Look at this table leg. Why is it the only one shaped like a man’s?” Pleased as an owl sighting a mouse beneath night leaves, Enrique swivels to my husband’s tale of the pirate doctor who carves the table’s peg leg, a mate for his own missing limb. After supper, Enrique offers his poems, onionskin pages inscribed with Victorian script. In heroic couplets, Elizabeth ladles fresh water from a cool clay jar by the Oaxaca roadside, where he “drank from her crystals” as he planted kisses on her “neck’s dark agriculture.” In the bed of a sonnet lies the shy woman from Chiapas, her face a stoic lily lit by “the black eyes of the jungle,” each verse a ruby cut from his heart. Like an exploding cinder, the final poem blinds him, Line after line incinerating Louisa, his betrothed, the beauty whose callous leap into another bed paved his long bachelor road. Even a half-century cannot stop his tears. Before we drive off, Enrique embraces me three times for luck, saying, Poeta, I’ve loved many women, but they are not altars I kneel at. He cocks his head at the fly caught in the spider’s tough silk. Listen for his song. Listen.

– Valle de Bravo –

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hile You Ride to the Barranca W for Bill I climb the two flights of rough log steps to the tower studio sleepy with afternoon sun and the banging of Isabel’s mop on her bucket as she disinfects the house of ailing spirits. I think of you climbing through long-needled pines on Olivianada, the chestnut mare speckled by tropical insect bites, who loves too much to race like a heart out of control. Who’d ever think that a bear could ride a horse? When the hooves of this final year of the century clattered on cobblestones and night rocks leading up the steep incline to the cliff overlooking village fireworks, I kissed you for luck. Now as you ride away from me up the same path to the top of the mountain and the rest of your life, I can only imagine how your soul like a falcon must fly from the barranca hunting the valleys and forests of your own dreams. How can you imagine I forget you here, writing inside the glass brain of my tower that sees in all directions, writing among fly gossip and the afterschool laughter of children. There are some things souls never forget – the wet green agate of your eyes or the deep riverdrift of your voice turning words into wind slipping through

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the primaries of a hawk’s wing, words dislodging the irregular bark of pines or your laughter like phosphorescence catching the underbelly of a wave as it stretches to consume a beach or the way you reach for me sometimes with your fingers, rough and delicate as a mechanic’s fine-tuning a rare old Cadillac. You are the Centaur whose clattering reshapes the hills I write in, love I would ride beyond the cliffs of my life.

– Valle De Bravo, Mexico –

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Third World Shade No police sirens jangle the synapses of stars in Aticatlan, no helicopters lop the ears from the tops of patient mulberries. No terrorist signs his name with a 357 Magnum chrome barrel of contempt aimed at the hearts of teens who laugh the length of lazy dust on the sunset road. No metallic clouds hammer blue air to strangle the valley’s green throat. No flat sonic booms from fighters deconstruct the songs of purple finches calling down dusk, nor does chlorine in its yellow chemical boots trample clear-sighted spring water drunk by campesinos working organic fields. Live spiraling rubies, vermillion flycatchers strike mosquitoes from the tropic sky, and white spiders spin whole webs silver as the thousand-paned stories taken by the dark hands of the afternoon breeze strumming down from volcanos. Midnight’s obsidian wings lift the murmur of owls that talon mice near the river. And sometimes the quivering pulse of a guitar cries for love from the stars, kisses the cool belly of the moon.

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In Aticatlan, we’ve zoomed centuries back to the future stripped of yakking televisions, the stern bombings of headlines, surfing the Net’s brain, the bump and grind of Wall Street. Here no satellites gladly predict catastrophies. Dragonflies apprehend the downdraft of sun on corn horses munch while chickens duck hawks in slow third world shade. What technology do I miss? What advanced computer chip guiding a missile can scent dew on blackberries each dawn or measure the profit of papayas fattening on hazy unsprayed trees?

– Rancho El Sereno, México –



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E l Cristo del Ciclón In a church we mistake for an old airplane hangar Christ tilts the cross, arms rocking earthward, feet nailed to peeling gilt boards. Beside the font of holy water, a faded brochure tells how in 1971, Hurricane Lily slashed the coast, ripping the paper hearts of bougainvillea and hibiscus from branches easy as she did tin roofs from shacks, terrifying parrots, chickens and townspeople alike. Filling the pews, people begged Christ to save them from berserk waves that slammed hotels, casas, crowded back streets, even the gold tourist beach, but like sins, the winds increased until the homeless Indian girl blew in and fell to her knees. That moment, the wind ceased and Christ thrust out his miracle arms pushing Lily’s rage back to the sea. Barra De Navidad was saved. Now, from the back pew, I regard children with babies slung in rebozos neon-bright as hummingbirds kneel beside their mothers to cross their small chests with faithful fingers. What do they pray for? I think of my young nephews back home in public schools, learning that the rhetoric of evil depends on the proper conjugation of the verb “to hate” with the noun “enemy”.

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Counting history’s multiplication tables of revenge, who will teach that war, no matter how good the cause, is still only the dumb division of prime numbers? I light candles for all those I love, wondering what petition could ever turn that cyclone of righteous vengeance from terrorizing what would be the peaceful shores of our lives. Before we leave, we note the mutilated wooden hands turned out to the faithful and curious alike, to pilgrims who pray down from jungle trails on bloody knees, to last night’s drunk contrite with pounding fidelity, to a young woman, pregnant and seeking a safe delivery, to us who gawk at the warped arms of an old savior in a quonset hut, where miracles and the prayers of children are still believed.

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In Puerto Peñasco Lost to saline streets, we drive behind the backfiring roofless Plymouth whose engine kills every few feet. Ahead a boy kneels, his bare knees scooping filthy sand as he scoots a sheet of frayed cardboard toward the bulge-eyed cat run down in front of his corrugated metal home. My husband says the boy smiles too wide, gratified by horror, but I believe his grin is not so much amusement as a scar that splits his face. Shivering, his sister hugs a thin sweater to her rheumatic chest and shakes her head at her brother’s awful excavation. The cat stinks. Huele como pan dulce viejo y los licores ricos del mar. Perhaps the mother hanging out wash in the side yard has ordered her son to get rid of the carcass gagging the wind that circles her laundry tub. Who can blame her? Through raw air, her chapped stare stabs past her several children to the daughter’s ragged grief that’s flown like a crow far beyond her disapproval. The girl’s miserable eyes hook mine, telling me it was her cat, the sole beauty of her life ruined,

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and I’m thrown back to her age, my legs thin as a mantis and awkward in my skin the snowdown December morning I discovered my kitten frozen in the granary where the barn owl slept, that kitten just another loss on our Michigan farm. Silky innocence destroyed, her jaw cocked open, elegant pink tongue stuck to dirty straw. My arms drained, too weak to lift her from winter’s frozen heart. Out of work for months, on strike against the Oldsmobile plant, my father built all our Christmas presents. Mine was the one gift from childhood I would remember, a writing desk planed from rough two by fours and painted white as the frozen road that led away from home. Today we drive past the girl’s sorrow. There is nothing I can offer her but this poem she will never see, an amulet against anger and the sweet bread of death we all must eat.

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Snorkeling in the Sea of Cortez at El Coyote Beach From salt warm shallows we kick, swimming between boulders to the cutting edge of the reef, above the shy escape of the one puff fish, its corneas thick and refracting eyes firing blue as gold-shot opal. Rock-mimic, a blimp with drunk rudders, it rolls rotating its ridiculous small fins through an outrush of tide. Its kind has survived centuries of conquistadors. Now it flees from transparent paths we make as the current sucks us out to the sea and its deep blue heart. There is something familiar about this salt bath silking our skin, and the easiness of breathing underwater so we are found creatures in the dream of home. Nearly weightless, we fly above the black blades of razor anemones that could puncture a plundering hand or heart, fly over gorgeous red flowering coral and lobsters curious in their neon armor jousting from caves that split a rock shelf. Before us, tropical fish scatter like fluid bits of prisms shattering clear essence of grape, blue pungent as ozone, and red sanguine and cold as glass. From my fingers, a school of angels, yellow with black stripes, a tiger’s explosion from the inner eye of the cat. Somewhere beyond the lagoon, we part and I watch the sleek seal lines of your body disappear

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in a cloud of crystal tracers seeding our liquid atmosphere. Free floating with tide, alive I flip like a dolphin, then catch sight of a Coronet fish, its eyes huge as heated coins. You and I meet to trade tales of what we’ve seen. We swim a while together, holding hands over live rock that is the floor of this wilderness we need. This is the way I’d love you always, separating in dreams of exploration, coming together, nomads discovering passionate irregularities in coral or navigating gentler surf. The suction and draw of tides tugs us back to aquamarine shallows from the sea and its deep blue heart of longings we release to hold.

– Baja California –

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t the Edge of the Volcanic Sea A for Don, Lynn, Judi and Ken Rising from its bed of inky tide, the wolf-skulled moon crosses desert, crosses us as we set up camp on a ledge of volcanic rock edging the sea. The full moon shakes loose its tattooed veil of stars that turn to salt on our tongues. Polished as mercury waves wash headland rock under constellations tossed into the wide black lap of night. We forgive the dust that swallows us. In Puerto Lobos no churches nor stores mar the beach, no city hall nor traffic lights, just pinched cactus, the long devotion of waves licking ragged rock and the Seris who fish or carve animals from ironwood’s chestnut flesh, who gossip with family and despise enemies, who sleep on rope beds strung under night’s astral husk. Dark armadas of pelicans and cormorants cut shadows across the moon’s cheek, across surf like love’s sore fingers that overreach themselves, then sizzle back into their watery gloves. Blue sea wishes steer a platinum fishing boat of wind as we share a late meal of tortillas and cheese – wishes cast for the Saturday night drunks in a belching truck that spins out as it downshifts taking the hill to our remote camp, wishes for the dented blue pickup with one working headlight cocked up at heaven like the prayer of a dying man,

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wishes for each knocking piston, each bald tire that finds traction on generations of coral ancestors camped on to fathom the language of tides, wishes for us, dusty refugees seeking peace for bruised bodies, our wet and lonely mouths, blue sea wishes for all of us that collide here intersecting moon arc, salt wind, and the sea’s anthracite shine. Tonight all things are possible; these strangers could be muggers or drug dealers or just star-drunk fishermen escaping their lives. There is only the blade-tip threat etched by our imagination as the men kill the engine, stumble from the cab, then insist we join them for beer. Whatever they want has little and everything to do with us, gringos that flaunt halogen headlights, camp stoves and iced beer in portable coolers. Their words break like glass around us until we are all finally reduced to the visas of our common laughter. When midnight drains the last bottle, the fishermen stagger back from the cliff they piss over before gunning their engine defiant. Grinding gears, they jolt down the road back to wives who have already left them painted by the lunar pollen of their separate dreams. The moon swallows our tongues as we kiss salt from our lovers’ skins.

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Santa de amor. Santa del silencio. Santa del mar.

Like a vulva, moon seizes us, blown on this long journey to the sea we would dream.

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aptismal B for Judi, Ken, Terry, Albert and Bill With the moon, Venus plunges into the flat black back of a midnight sea while we scan low tide offshore, caught by the wave’s sudden ectoplasm flashing lime its entire length as if the heart of a ghost has burst inside. Out over the reef, we trip, our nightblind bodies gashed by the jagged teeth of igneous rock. As if noise alone can save us, we splash until we lose the bottom to currents warm as black silk. Slamming onto the sandbar, we rise inside a mirage crackling like photons or radium dials. None of us can explain our toes, ankles, calves, thighs slathered by tiny green galaxies. Wherever waves touch us, we seem to ignite. Amazed, my husband strips, tosses his sparking suit. Like Ursa above him his bear-shaped torso glitters while through his thick chest hairs, constellations river to catch in each intimate follicle. Along his shoulders and arms, stars nimbus morphing his entire body, and when he dives underwater, he is a meteoric grizzly haloed by green fire. What use are scientific tags – warm water phenomenon, bioluminescence, phosphorescent algae – to describe my hands waving through giddy spume where each finger blooms an entire universe?

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Gauzy as the xray of a humpback whale, the Milky Way breaks over us and I watch my sister’s spin, her auburn hair showering the Pleadies, then the brilliant supernovas that spangle my own breasts. My brother-in-law rockets constellations as he leaps again and again, dolphin-man who’s discovered the supreme connection of all universes nestled inside each of his cells. Under transparent waves, our radiant feet kick like gods through the galaxies as we burn like ecstatic tongues, understanding dumbly, perhaps, the way a sea cucumber feels the intent of salt water allowing it to survive the intense blast of tropic sun, that there are no real words to translate this, except as a glimpse of the infinite clinging to our skins. This is the mystery we’ve waited for all of our lives, the vision we can’t explain except to say one night we got lucky to swim through the stars despite death glittering beneath the waves.

– Puerto Peñasco, México –

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acknowledgments Thanks to the Scottsdale Art Center, Scottsdale, Arizona, for comissioning “Southwest Pieta” to accompany the painting of the same title by Luis Jimeniz, and to Mesilla Press for its pamphlet, Loving the Outlaw, edited by Ray Gonzalez, in which “Going Second Class” and “Lying in a Hammock No Wind Rocks” appeared. My deep appreciation goes to Ignacio Gómez Palacio and Josie Palacio for providing writing accomodations at their ranch in Valle de Bravo, México, where several of these poems were written. I a grateful to Maggie Morrison for her help with the back cover photograph (taken by William Pitt Root), and to Graciella Lucero Hammer for advice on Spanish grammar. Thanks also to the Tucson/Pima Arts Council, who gave me a grant that helped me to finish this book. No “thank you” is enough to express my gratitude to friends who are there when I need them, who have listened to and given invaluable suggestions for poems in this book, especially Joy Harjo, Mary Ann Campau, Charlotte Lowe Bailey, Teresa Acevedo, Don and Lynn Watt, Holly Bergon St. John, Stewe Claeson, Ignacio Gómez Palacio, Demetria Martínez, Rick Jackson, and William Pitt Root. Special thanks to my editor and publisher, Bryce Milligan, for his continuing hard work on behalf of poetry. My thanks also to the following publications for including my work in their pages: The Artful Dodge: “Giving Up Eating Light;” can we

have our ball back: “Climbing to the Moon;” Denver Quarterly (Intro 19): “A Donde Vas?” eleventh Muse: “Dream Time;” The Harbinger (White Rabbit Poetry Prize): “Snorkeling in the Sea of Cortez;” High Plains Literary Review: “Brave Mr. Buckingham;” The Journal (London): “Overachiever;” Liberacion Cultural: “Sharing Bread with Marta” (reprint, Malmo, Sweden); The Lucid Stone: “Sueños y Amor;” Mid-American Review: “Beggar;” Poet & Critic: “Going Second Class;” Poetry Miscellany: “Looking South Along the Avenue of the Dead;” Out of Line: “Third World Shade,” “El Día de los Reyes Magos,” and “At the Museo Antropologico;” Red River Review: “Disturbing Dreams and Their Cure;” Seattle Review: “Collision;” South Coast Poetry Journal: “Barranca de Cobre;” Southwestern Review: “Keeping In the Sour Milk;” Wildwood Journal (Wildwood Prize): “Sharing Bread with Marta;” and Yarrow: “She Waits for Amerigo.” Thanks also to the following anthologies: Crossing the River: Poets of the American West, ed. Ray Gonzalez, “ What You May Have Thought Was Empty;” The Book of Healing, ed. Birgita Jonsdotir (Iceland), “One-Legged Dancer;” and The Book of Hope, ed., Birgitta Jonsdotir (Iceland), “Third World Shade.”

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About the Author in 2013 Called by The Bloomsbury Review “one of the most insightful and spirited poets today,” Pamela Uschuk is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, including the award-winning Finding Peaches in the Desert, One-Legged Dancer, Scattered Risks, Crazy Love (recipient of the American Book Award) and Wild in the Plaza of Memory (all published by Wings Press) and Without the Comfort of Stars (Sampark Press, New Delhi and London). Scattered Risks was nominated for both a Pulitzer Prize and the 2005 Zacharias Poetry Award (nomination by by Ploughshares). Joy Harjo and other musicians joined Uschuk to record a CD of Finding Peaches. The author of numerous chapbooks, her work has appeared in well over thee hundred journals and anthologies, including Agni Review, Calyx, Future Cycles, Nimrod, Parabola, Parnassus Review, Pequod, Ploughshares, Poetry, O Taste and See, 48 Younger American Poets, etc. Uschuk’s literary prizes include the the Struga International Poetry Prize, the Dorothy Daniels Writing Award from the National League of American PEN Women, the 2001 Literature Award from the Tucson/Pima Arts Council for Finding Peaches in the Desert, The King’s English Prize, as well as the American Book Award and awards from the Chester H. Jones Foundation, Iris, Ascent, Sandhills Review, and Amnesty International. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages, including Albanian, Bulgarian, Czech, Spanish, French, German, Korean, Macedonian, Swedish, Russian, and Spanish. She has been a featured writer at the American Center in New Delhi, India, the Prague Summer Workshops, the University of Pisa, International Poetry Festivals in Malmo, Sweden and Struga, Macedonia, the British School in Pisa, Italy, Vilenica in Slovenia, Split This Rock, Gemini Ink Writers Festival, the Meacham Writers Conference, the Book Marks Book Fair, the Scandinavian Book Fair, the Deep South Writers Conference, the Universities of Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, Tennessee, Lund, Gothenberg (Sweden), Oregon, Montana State, Colorado State and California State Universities, New York University, Juilliard, Hunter College, Vassar College, SUNY New Paltz, and numerous

colleges and book stores. Uschuk has taught creative writing at Marist College, Pacific Lutheran University, Fort Lewis College, the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center and Salem College. She also spent many years traveling to teach creative writing to Native American students on the Salish, Sioux, Assiniboine, Flathead, Northern Cheyenne, Blackfeet, Crow, Tohono O’odham and Yaqui reservations in Montana and Arizona. Before moving back to Colorado, Uschuk was the Director of the Center for Women Writers at Salem College, where she has also taught Creative Writing. Pam Uschuk is now editor-In-Chief of the literary magazine, Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts and a professor of Creative Writing at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. She makes her home with the writer William Pitt Root, their two dogs, Happy and Zazu, and the queen of cats, Sadie. About the Illustrator Lynn Watt has a degree in art history from UT Austin and an MFA in studio art from the University of Arizona. She has participated in numerous group shows throughout the country and has been a guest lecturer at several universities and colleges. The photo transfers are from slides she took while living in Oaxaca, Mexico. While there, she had a one-person show of collages at the Galeria Cultura Ricardo Flores Magnon, made possible by a grant from the Partners of the Americas Program. She lives in San Antonio with her writer husband, Donley Watt.

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ings Press was founded in 1975 by Joanie Whitebird and Joseph F. Lomax, both deceased, as “an informal association of artists and cultural mythologists dedicated to the preservation of the literature of the nation of Texas.” Publisher, editor and designer since 1995, Bryce Milligan is honored to carry on and expand that mission to include the finest in American writing—meaning all of the Americas, without commercial considerations clouding the choice to publish or not to publish. Wings Press attempts to produce multicultural books, chapbooks, CDs, DVDs and broadsides that, we hope, enlighten the human spirit and enliven the mind. Everyone ever associated with Wings has been or is a writer, and we know well that writing is a trans- formational art form capable of changing the world, primarily by allowing us to glimpse something of each other’s souls. Good writing is innovative, insightful, and interesting. But most of all it is honest. Likewise, Wings Press is committed to treating the planet itself as a partner. Thus the press uses as much recycled material as possible, from the paper on which the books are printed to the boxes in which they are shipped. As Robert Dana wrote in Against the Grain, “Small press publishing is personal publishing. In essence, it’s a matter of personal vision, personal taste and courage, and personal friendships.” Welcome to our world.

Colophon One thousand copies the first edition of One-Legged Dancer, by Pamela Uschuk, have been printed on non-acidic paper, containing fifty percent recycled fiber, by Williams Printing & Graphics of San Antonio, Texas. Text and titles were set in Bodoni type. The first twenty-five copies off the press were numbered, signed, and dated by the author. All Wings Press books are designed by Bryce Milligan.

On-line catalogue and ordering: www.wingspress.com Wings Press titles are distributed to the trade by the Independent Publishers Group www.ipgbook.com and in Europe by www.gazellebookservices.co.uk

Fine multicultural literature since 1975.