can I imagine beyond these vast rock walls
with caves sculpted by wind where perhaps
Geronimo slept quite innocent of television
and when his three-year-old son died
made a war these ravens still talk about.
Easter Morning
On Easter morning all over America
the peasants are frying potatoes
in bacon grease.
We’re not supposed to have “peasants”
but there are tens of millions of them
frying potatoes on Easter morning,
cheap and delicious with catsup.
If Jesus were here this morning he might
be eating fried potatoes with my friend
who has a ’51 Dodge and a ’72 Pontiac.
When his kids ask why they don’t have
a new car he says, “These cars were new once
and now they are experienced.”
He can fix anything and when rich folks
call to get a toilet repaired he pauses
extra hours so that they can further
learn what we’re made of.
I told him that in Mexico the poor say
that when there’s lightning the rich
think that God is taking their picture.
He laughed.
Like peasants everywhere in the history
of the world ours can’t figure out why
they’re getting poorer. Their sons join
the army to get work being shot at.
Your ideals are invisible clouds
so try not to suffocate the poor,
the peasants, with your sympathies.
They know that you’re staring at them.
Corrido Sonorense
para la banda Los Humildes
Cuando ella cantó su canción
aun los conejos y los perros rabiosos escucharon.
Vivía en una choza de estaño
a mitad de camino de una montaña cerca de Caborca.
Sólo tenía doce años, criada por un hermano
que algún viernes se fue a Hermosillo
para engañar a los ricos y poderosos
que le habían robado su cosecha.
Tres días y tres noches
esperaba con el corazón en la boca
al final de su sendero al borde
del camino polvoriento que conducía a Caborca.
Hacía calor y estaba tomando el aire
en sollozos cuando un camión se acercó
y le tiró un saco con la risa
de un diablo frío. En el saco
estaban la lengua de su hermano y su dedo
con el anillo hecho de crin.
Ahora se convertiría en puta o moriría de hambre,
pero se cortó las venas para reunirse con su hermano.
Si deseas engañar a los ricos y poderosos
tienes que hacerlo con un arma.
Sonoran Corrida
for the band Los Humildes
When she sang her song
even rabbits and mad dogs listened.
She lived in a tin shack
halfway up a mountain near Caborca.
She was only twelve, raised by a brother
who one Friday went to Hermosillo
to cheat the rich and powerful
who had stolen his crop.
Three days and three nights
she waited with her heart in her throat
at the end of their path down
to the dusty road that led to Caborca.
It was hot and she was drinking the air
in sobs when a truck drew up
and threw her a bag with a cold
devil’s laughter. In the bag
were her brother’s tongue and finger
with its ring made of a horsehair nail.
Now she would become a whore or starve,
but she cut her wrists to join her brother.
If you wish to cheat the rich and powerful
Older Love
His wife has asthma
so he only smokes outdoors
or late at night with head
and shoulders well into
the fireplace, the mesquite and oak
heat bright against his face.
Does it replace the heat
that has wandered from love
back into the natural world?
But then the shadow passion casts
is much longer than passion,
stretching with effort from year to year.
Outside tonight hard wind and sleet
from three bald mountains,
and on the hearth before his face
the ashes we’ll all become,
soft as the back of a woman’s knee.
Los viejos tiempos
En los viejos tiempos no oscurecía hasta medianoche
y la lluvia y la nieve emergían de la tierra
en vez de caer del cielo. Las mujeres eran fáciles.
Cada vez que veías una, dos más aparecían,
caminando hacia ti marcha atrás al tiempo que su ropa caía.
El dinero no crecía en las hojas de los árboles sino abrazado
a los troncos en billeteras de ternero,
pero sólo podías sacar veinte dólares al día.
Ciertos hombres volaban tan bien como los cuervos mientras otros trepaban
los árboles cual ardillas. A siete mujeres de Nebraska
se les tomó el tiempo nadando río arriba en el Misuri;
fueron más veloces que los delfines moteados del lugar. Los perros basenji
podían hablar español, mas decidieron no hacerlo.
Unos políticos fueron ejecutados por traicionar
la confianza pública y a los poetas se les dio la ración de un galón
de vino tinto al día. La gente sólo moría un día
al año y bellos coros surgían como por un embudo
a través de las chimeneas de los hospitales donde cada habitación tenía
un hogar de piedra. Algunos pescadores aprendieron a caminar
sobre el agua y de niño yo trotaba por los ríos,
mi caña de pescar siempre lista. Las mujeres que anhelaban el amor
sólo necesitaban usar pantuflas de oreja de cerdo o aretes
de ajo. Todos los perros y la gente en libre concurso
se tornaban de tamaño mediano y color marrón, y en Navidad
todos ganaban la lotería de cien dólares. Ni Dios ni Jesús
tenían que descender a la tierra porque ya estaban
aquí montando caballos salvajes cada noche
y a los niños se les permitía ir a la cama tarde para oírlos
pasar al galope. Los mejores restaurantes eran iglesias
donde los anglicanos servían cocina provenzal, los metodistas toscana
y así. En ese tiempo el país era dos mil millas
más ancho, y mil millas más
profundo. Había muchos valles para caminar aún no descubiertos
donde tribus indígenas vivían en paz
aunque algunas tribus eligieron fundar naciones nuevas
en las áreas desconocidas hasta entonces en las negras
grietas de los límites entre los estados. Me casé
con una joven pawnee en una ceremonia detrás de la catarata acostumbrada.
Las cortes estaban administradas por osos durmientes y pájaros cantaban
fábulas lúcidas de sus pájaros ancestros que vuelan ahora
en otros mundos. Algunos ríos fluían demasiado rápido
para ser útiles pero se les permitió hacerlo cuando acordaron
no inundar la Conferencia de Des Moines.
Los aviones de pasajeros se parecían a barcos aéreos con múltiples
alas aleteantes que tocaban un tipo de música de salón
en el cielo. Las consólidas crecían en los cañones de pistola
y
cada quien podía seleccionar siete días al año
con libertad de repetir pero este no era un programa
popular. En esos días el vacío giraba
con flores y animales salvajes desconocidos asistían
a funerales campestres. Todos los tejados en las ciudades
eran huertas de flores y verduras. El río Hudson era potable
y una ballena jorobada fue vista cerca del muelle
de la calle 42, su cabeza llena de la sangre azul del mar,
su voz alzando las pisadas de la gente
en su tradicional antimarcha, su inocuo desarreglo.
Podría seguir pero no lo haré. Toda mi evidencia
se perdió en un incendio pero no antes que fuera masticada
por todos los perros que habitan la memoria.
Uno tras otro ladran al sol, a la luna y las estrellas
tratando de acercarlas otra vez.
The Old Days
In the old days it stayed light until midnight
and rain and snow came up from the ground
rather than down from the sky. Women were easy.
Every time you’d see one, two more would appear,
walking toward you backwards as their clothes dropped.
Money didn’t grow in the leaves of trees but around
the trunks in calf’s leather money belts,
though you could only take twenty bucks a day.
Certain men flew as well as crows while others ran
up trees like chipmunks. Seven Nebraska women
were clocked swimming upstream in the Missouri
faster than the local spotted dolphins. Basenjis
could talk Spanish but all of them chose not to.
A few political leaders were executed for betraying
the public trust and poets were rationed a gallon
of Burgundy a day. People only died on one day
a year and lovely choruses funneled out
of hospital chimneys where every room had a field-
stone fireplace. Some fishermen learned to walk
on water and as a boy I trotted down rivers,
my flyrod at the ready. Women who wanted love
needed only to wear pig’s ear slippers or garlic
earrings. All dogs and people in free concourse
became medium sized and brown, and on Christmas
everyone won the hundred-dollar lottery. God and Jesus
didn’t need to come down to earth because they were
already here riding wild horses every night
and children were allowed to stay up late to hear
them galloping by. The best restaurants were churches,
with Episcopalians serving Provençal, the Methodists Tuscan,
and so on. In those days the country was an extra
two thousand miles wider, and an additional thousand
miles deep. There were many undiscovered valleys
to walk in where Indian tribes lived undisturbed
though some tribes chose to found new nations
in the heretofore unknown areas between the black
boundary cracks between states. I was married
to a Pawnee girl in a ceremony behind the usual waterfall.
Courts were manned by sleeping bears and birds sang
lucid tales of ancient bird ancestors who now fly
in other worlds. Certain rivers ran too fast
to be usable but were allowed to do so when they consented
not to flood at the Des Moines Conference.
Airliners were similar to airborne ships with multiple
fluttering wings that played a kind of chamber music
in the sky. Pistol barrels grew delphiniums
and everyone was able to select seven days a year
they were free to repeat but this wasn’t a popular
program. In those days the void whirled
with flowers and unknown wild animals attended
country funerals. All the rooftops in cities were flower
and vegetable gardens. The Hudson River was drinkable
and a humpback whale was seen near the Forty-second Street
pier, its head full of the blue blood of the sea,
its voice lifting the steps of people
in their traditional anti-march, their harmless disarray.
I could go on but won’t. All my evidence
was lost in a fire but not before it was chewed
on by all the dogs who inhabit memory.
One by one they bark at the sun, moon and stars
trying to draw them closer again.
Two Girls
Late November (full moon last night),
a cold Patagonia moon, the misty air
tinkled slightly, a rank-smelling bull
in the creek bottom seemed to be crying.
Coyotes yelped up the canyon
where they took a trip-wire photo of a jaguar
last spring. I hope he’s sleeping or eating
a delicious deer. Our two little girl dogs
are peeing in the midnight yard, nervous
about the bull. They can’t imagine a jaguar.
The Little Appearances of God
I
When god visits us he sleeps
without a clock in empty bird nests.
He likes the view. Not too high.
Not too low. He winks a friendly wink
at a nearby possum who sniffs the air
unable to detect the scent
of this not-quite-visible stranger.
A canyon wren lands on the bridge
of god’s nose deciding the new experience
is worth the fear. He’s an old bird
due to flee the earth
not on his own wings. This is a good
place to feel his waning flutter
of breath, hear his last delicate musical
call, his death song, and then he hopes
to become part of god’s body. Feeling
the subdued dread of his illness
he won’t know for sure until it’s over.
II
He’s now within the form of a whip-poor-will
sitting on a faded gravestone in the twilight
while children pass by the cemetery
almost enjoying the purity of their fright.
Since he’s god he can read the gravestone
upside down. Little Mary disappeared
in the influenza epidemic back in 1919.
He ponders that it took a couple of million
years to invent these children but perhaps microbes
must also have freedom from predestination.
He’s so tired of hearing about this ditzy Irishman,
Bishop Ussher, who spread the rumor that creation
only took six thousand years when it required twelve billion.
Man shrunk himself with the biological hysteria
of clocks, the machinery of dread. You spend twelve billion
years inventing ninety billion galaxies and who appreciates
your work except children, birds and dogs, and a few
other genius strokes like otters and porpoises, those humans
who kiss joy as it flies, who see though not with the eye.
III
Years ago he kept an eye on DePrise Brescia,
a creature of beauty. He doesn’t lose track of people
as some need no help, bent to their own particulars.
No dancing or music allowed.
The world in front of their noses has disappeared.
Dickinson wrote, “The Brain is just the weight of God.”
We said goodbye to our farm and a stately heron walked up the steps
and looked in our window. I had suffocated myself
but then south of Zihuatanejo just outside the Pacific’s
crashing and lethal surf in a panga I heard the billions
of cicadas in the
wild bougainvillea on the mountainsides,
a new kind of thunder. He gave Thoreau, Modigliani
and Neruda the same birthday to tease with his abilities.
Waves
A wave lasts only moments
but underneath another one is always
waiting to be born. This isn’t the Tao
of people but of waves.
As a student of people, waves, the Tao,
I’m free to let you know that waves
and people tell the same story
of how blood and water were born,
that our bodies are full of creeks
and rivers flowing in circles,
that we are kin of the waves
and the nearly undetectable ocean currents,
that the moon pleads innocence
of its tidal power, its wayward control
of our dreams, the way the moon tugs
at our skulls and loins, the way
the tides make their tortuous love to the land.
We’re surely creatures with unknown gods.
Time
Nothing quite so wrenches
the universe like time.
It clings obnoxiously
to every atom, not to speak
of the moon, which it weighs
down with invisible wet dust.
I used to think the problem
was space, the million miles
between me and the pretty waitress
across the diner counter stretching
to fill the coffee machine with water,
but now I know it’s time
which withers me moment by moment
with her own galactic smile.
An Old Man
Truly old men, he thought, don’t look too far past the applesauce and cottage cheese, filling the tank of the kerosene heater over there in the corner of the cabin near the stack of National Geographics from the forties containing nipples from Borneo and the Amazon, tattooed and pierced. He carries extra cash because he woke up on a recent morning thinking that the ATM at the IGA had acted suspiciously. The newspaper said pork steak was ninety-nine cents a pound but it turned out to be a newspaper from last week and pork steak had shot up to one thirty-nine. He can’t eat all the fish he catches and sometimes the extras get pushed toward the back of the refrigerator so that the rare visitor says, “Jesus Christ Frank something stinks.” A feral tomcat that sometimes sleeps in the pump shed will eat it anyway. He read that his thin hair will continue growing in the grave, a nice idea but then cremation is cheaper. His great-granddaughter from way downstate wears an African-type nose ring and brought him a bird book but he’d rather know what birds call themselves. He often dreams of the nine dogs of his life and idly wonders if he’ll see them again. He’s not counting on it but it’s another nice idea. One summer night in a big moon he walked three miles to his favorite bend of the river and sat on a stump until first light when a small bear swam past. In the night his ghost wife appeared and asked, “Frank, I miss you, aren’t you holding on too long?” and he said, “It’s not for me to decide.” Last November he made a big batch of chili from a hind-quarter of a bear a neighbor shot. There are seven containers left and they shouldn’t go to waste. Waste not, want not.