Category: Poems & poem-like things

Esteban (4) (cont’d)

While the woman stretches curious fingers
toward the beard, the wondrous hair
like gourdvine runners trailing
down his back
& the dizzying sheen, until
they alight upon a point of interest
precisely where any woman’s gaze
would tend to end up. She gives
a strange cry. Esteban smiles
to himself, knowing she’s never
seen a circumcised penis–
purified of its female covering
as God intends: a covenant
through which this imperfect Nature
can be completed, redeemed–

but she recoils, eyes narrowing,
making the signs
for Earth / Sacrifice / Taboo.
–What? She thinks
I’m a sacrificial victim who managed
to escape? Then with curled lip
extending her arms out straight
she claps her wrists together–
Slave–the half-clenched
fingers forming
an inadvertent heart.

No–right palm across his face,
shouting Hay una carta,
aquí­, clutching where the brass
locket would hang on his shirt,
the hand language failing
as his vision clouds &
he lunges, clasping a forearm,
reaching for her hair.
But she twists
unexpectedly inward,
against him, plants her teeth around
a neck tendon, moaning
low in her throat in a burlesque
of pleasure, raking his back
& side with her nails while
he writhes, howling, until
she finally releases him

& he leaps back, loses
his footing, falls.

Esteban (4) (cont’d)

In the fading light
he finds footprints across the dry
streambed, traces their contours
with an index finger: young, female,
unburdened. One way out.
From somewhere on the rim
a jackal’s laughter, ricocheting up
& down the canyon.
Coyotl, he corrects himself.

A few minutes later he rounds a bend
& stops short: a small campsite
in the cave formed by an over-hanging
lip of rock
where a woman stands smiling
behind a fatwood fire.

He hadn’t realized until now, with
an almost painful jolt
in his chest, how lonely
the lack of this very smile had made him.
It’s never been a question
of hunger alone–
thirst perhaps? he wonders briefly
as she lets her cloth dress fall.
No, not that simple, he decides
as they stand fully naked,
the shadows from the fire
playing across their lean forms,
making their skins shimmer & ripple
like obsidian mirrors, he thinks,
remembering a hidden idol
wreathed in incense.
Like the surfaces of two
flood-swollen rivers about to join.
This has so little to do
with the merely animal.

Moving like dancers, both of them
trying to minimize awkwardness,
they glide on contrapuntal feet,
touch toes as
his arms pivot at his sides,
bending slightly so the palms
face up, & in the long moment
before she moves in against him

it’s as if–yes–as if his whole
body is united in
this gesture,
a response to hers–the gift
her own body presents.
And the voice of disembodied Reason
once more proclaims in its tinny voice
This is it, the one thing

worth seeking, this
Word: original sign
freed from all symbolism, the body
now & always as it was
in the beginning–pure Will . . .

Esteban (4)

Right at dusk–his quick meal over,
the men settling into a game
of dice played with bones
(whose original owner he decides
not to inquire about) the African hears
what sounds like flute music
trickling down a side canyon
a quarter mile off. A brief phrase
ending in a question mark.
Again.
Once more.
Each separated by a slightly longer pause.
The exact blend of exaltation
& sorrow, he thinks–someone
like me.

And no one else pays it
any mind–no one looks up,
there’s not even a twitch
from the dogs’ ears.
They raise their heads only
when he gets to his feet:
Stay. I’m just going to take a leak.

Which might have been true,
had he not caught a glimpse
of a figure darting between shadows
up by the first bend of what,
he guessed, would turn out to be
a cul-de-sac, a box canyon.

(To be continued.)

Reader (11)

If silly men pursue me and make songs
About me, it may be because they’ve heard
Some legend that I’m strange. I am not strange–
Not half so strange as you are.
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
Tristram

[T]hese women are to proper females as devils are to proper males. They
live in the wild, are active at night, and stand for something “bad” about their
sex.
DONALD BAHR et al.
“Piman Songs on Hunting”

Dorris, flushed, looks quick at John. His whole face is in shadow. She seeks
for her dance in it. She finds it a dead thing in the shadow which is his dream.
She rushes from the stage. Falls down the steps into her dressing room. Pulls
her hair.
JEAN TOOMER
Cane

Shiwanna (3) (conclusion)

The last color drains below the west
& the last jars & water baskets
have ridden home on
their owners’ heads–or
on shoulders of boys
trying desperately not to trip on
the suddenly unfamiliar streets.
At first light the gossips will make
their rounds counting sandals,
take note of the doorways near which
some luckless man’s possessions sit
neatly piled, or tied up & topped
with an elegant knot.

But for now this night, early
in the Nameless Moon, is given over
to the soft backbeat, cadence
of fear & consolation,
of tangled limbs. Muffled
fragments of glossalalia,
loveliest of songs.

The grandmother sleeping in
the next room is awoken,
turns over on her mat;
the grandfather’s steady snoring
momentarily ceases.

The Priests of the Bow
keeping watch from the rooftops
hear it & smile, despite the threat.

Even the medicine priest
of the Great Shell, four walls in
from the open air, for all
his abstinence & fasting, feels it.

Allows himself a shiver,
a loving thought.
The People will continue.
__________

the gossips: A slight exaggeration, going by ethnographies from the last hundred-plus years. Serial monogamy and female power to initiate and terminate sexual relationships are so solidly entrenched in Zuni culture that who is sleeping with whom is not even thought worthy of gossip. In neighboring pueblos, though, sleeping arrangements apparently do excite the attentions of gossips in the manner I’ve described. And given Zuni’s multicultural origins, it’s possible this was the case there, too, at one time.

Shiwanna (3) (cont’d)

–Maybe witches can play
with death as they do
because it’s not real to them,
murmurs one young woman,
who until then had been content to listen.

–But for us Ashiwi, this present life
must remain precious.
For only here
can we all live together:
only here can we share
the feast, hold dances,
entertain the spirits.
Afterwards, everyone follows a different road.

Murmurs of agreement:
–May it always be so!

–Or at least (comes
one mournful voice, presumably
a young man whose longing looks
have missed their mark)
until that day, as far
from now as we are here
from the Emergence,
when the world becomes

so old & dry & hard
that nothing can grow, either
on its own or with the help
of human prayers.

When all tools & weapons,
egged on by the witches, stage
a bloody revolt against their owners,
& everyone–eaters of raw food
& eaters of cooked food,
the People & the witches
& the Apacha alike,
everything burns up
in a yellow rain.

Shiwanna (3) (cont’d)

–It can be anyone, a member
of any priestly order.
Live long enough, they say, &
you’ll see the most upright elder
whom no one would ever suspect
become suddenly unbalanced
with hatred, try & take a life . . .

–Sometimes the very one
whose unaccountable luck threatens
to split the People with envy
is himself a witch. Even
a member of the clan of witches
that some say still survives,
still meets in secret.
Whose founder appeared at the Emergence,
so the storytellers recount . . .

–But that First Witch, they say–that thing
helped civilize us, back when
we still had tails & webbed toes,
webbed fingers, extra sets of genitals
on top of our heads . . .

–It gave us yellow corn
with one hand
& death with the other, taught
the trick of turning grain
into food, food into life,
life into other life, presto!

–Crossing back & forth
between beast & human . . .

–The chasm that divides
those holy persons
who devour their food raw
from those who need to cook it
like the refined creatures we have
now become.

Shiwanna (3) (cont’d)

Slowly the town
returns to motion
on a lower key. The boys
have forgotten their vigils
& the girls have lowered
their jars to the ground to talk,
forming clusters big & small
throughout the town,
chewing over the news.

–A witch can be anyone,
anyone with a double heart,
muses one young woman
to her circle of companions.

–Someone prospers
in crops, in clothing,
in the knowledge of secrets,
gets bigger & bigger
until a neighbor notices
& without thinking starts to feed
an extra heart with envy . . .

–The same way the priests feed
their icons, another cuts in.

–It makes that second heart
with more and more malicious intent.
Wrapped in corn husks, daubed
with black mud from the Beginning,
tended lovingly in some bowl
in the back room . . .

–You can spot a witch
when it plants prayer sticks at
the wrong times, with
the wrong kinds of feathers–
or none at all.
The medicine societies must always
keep their guard up: how strange it seems,
that a witch should practice medicine!
But that’s just part of
their double-dealing.