Category: Poems & poem-like things

Reader (6)

For a sixteenth-century European audience avid for adventure stories in exotic
places, the wanderings through oceans, rivers, deserts, and jungles were not just
traces on the face of the earth . . . but . . . events with a transcendental
significance. Indeed, explorers and conquerors wrote and designed their
narratives anticipating that allegorical meanings would be drawn from the
events. The conquistadors knew that their feats would be read as if they were in
themselves inscriptions in golden letters on the pages of history.
JOSí‰ RABASA
“Allegory and Ethnography in Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios and
Commentarios”

Those whom God begins to lead into these desert solitudes are like the children
of Israel, when God began giving them the heavenly food which contained in
itself all savors and, as is there mentioned, changed to whichever taste each one
hungered after . . .
SAN JUAN DE LA CRUZ
The Dark Night

Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new?” It has been already, in the
ages before us.
QOHELETH
Eccl. 1:10 (RSV)

Esteban (2) (conclusion)

An hour later he runs into his guides.
The locals say they know
the best road north. They only ask
you stay at least two nights:
it’s planting time, not everyone
can make it for tonight’s session.
You’ll need the intervening day
to sleep; the leading men clamor
for the privilege of putting you up.

Another town of brown mud houses
clustered above the floodplain–
from this distance nearly invisible
against the hills–where
his ambassador the medicine
gourd awaits. From each patient
it will take the flutter of a wrist,
the throb in a neck or flicker
of a guilty eyelid. Esteban has only
to hear & diagnose.
Less heart than liver, he muses.
A blotter pad for all bad blood.

The saint, the cross,
the paper in his pocket–these
are small voices, rarely
an audible chorus. Like his own
ears & eyes they sometimes fail.
But the gourd is as good as
the hand that holds it: & these
hands of his can talk, can read,
can draw forth the body’s secrets,
the hidden hurt.

Esteban (2) (cont’d)

Sending his thoughts
ahead of him like this, Esteban
startles. Sunlight glances
off something way out in
the middle of the scrub, & rounding
a covert, he can make out
a crumpled shape.
A body.

He picks his way slowly over:
if a plant isn’t brandishing spears
it’s set to burst underfoot–
willing to wait beyond death itself
for ecstasy.

Curled up like a fawn on
the bare ground, a boy of ten
or twelve, eyes shut, mouth open.
Esteban lays two fingers against
the throat just below the jaw
& counts. At three the first
weak beat, the next at seven.
No sign of an injury. Laid out
at his head & feet & to either side
four crystals: black to the west,
blue to the south, translucent
to the east & to the north
a rose-colored quartz–the one
that glinted.
Esteban sees it then: a trap,
the boy both bait & hunter.
He backs away.

__________

black to the west… These are the colors associated with the sacred directions in O’odham/Hohokam cosmology, not Zuni cosmology

The individualistic power quest on the part of shamans and shamans-in-training was a feature of O’odham (and presumably Hohokam) religiosity; in Zuni (Shiwanna), such an extra-institutional quest would almost certainly be identified with sorcery

Esteban (2) (cont’d)

For with the right roots & powders
all things are possible, as even
Galen admits. Any would-be
sorcerer could slip
something in his food,
activate it with a few muttered words.
His best protection lies in
the gourd, his feathered
medicine rattle, instrument
& emblem of a doctor–curandero
by the grace of the Great
Whoever–& thereby
safe from attack, the gourd
both guide & passport,
an envoy even through the thick of battle.

And it speaks, this calabash,
a voice he knows from earliest childhood
in the slave quarters of Azemmour:
a call no drum, no exiled Jinn
can ignore. When the stones
in its belly murmur
the copper bells on its feet
start to shrill,
& when the stones holler
like a woman in labor
the shakers cry like a newborn,
& Esteban attending keeps
the thin stick body firmly
in his grip, while its skirt
of red & white feathers
flies like the crown of a palm tree
through the heart of the sky.

Esteban (2) (cont’d)

Before he got sold to the Spanish
he used to play hare-&-jackal in
the back alleys with the other
slave-children & never lost,
whichever role he took. In Spain
they’d never heard of that. No jackals,
he supposed, meant
they only knew how
to be mean like wolves–
or dumb as sheep. At any rate
he was almost too old for games by then
& don Andrés didn’t want a hunter,
it seemed, but a personal servant
& an amanuensis. Taught him
to chase down words in four
more languages. Said
an astrologer had told him he’d someday
need an interpreter, a master of the Word.

True enough: without him, Dorantes
& the other two would still be slaves,
toiling naked for savages
in those godforsaken
mosquito-haunted saltwater swamps.

Instead, mutatis mutandis
he bears a letter
from the viceroy,
a commission to lead this brownrobe
north into lands unknown, to claim them
as a conquistador for the crown,
to plant crosses & the gospel hope
in every town & village, up to
& including (if need be)
the Seven Cities.

He’d grimaced at first when he read
through the almost impenetrable legalese,
a tangled rot of ill-begotten synonyms–
Castillian by way of Bologna
& Salamanca, great troughs for pigs
& pig Latin–but ended by folding it
into a little wedge that just fit inside
an old brass locket. Sewn into his shirt
it nearly balances the weight of the image
of the Holy Child of Atocha,
patron of all who travel on foot–
a parting gift from the ever-more-pious
don Andrés before he set sail.

These–& the gold cross & the leather
pouch of tobacco–he continues to wear
long after having handed the breastplate
over to one of the porters, because
however much they chafe, it somehow seems
they keep him safe at least
from forgetting himself,
from one day stripping naked again
& wandering into the sunset . . . or
running after some heat-addled vision
of Saint James astride his stallion
tall as a thundercloud . . . or snatching
a blade & running it through
the nearest native–be it nothing
more than a toddler–on a sudden
Moor-killing frenzy.

Esteban (2) (cont’d)

Perhaps his father was
a hunter like that:
abstinent for a week in advance so
the game animals wouldn’t smell it on him
& grow jealous, camping without food
for days beside a game trail
while the raiders came to his village,
seized his pregnant wife–Esteban’s mother–
and took her off with the others
across the Sahara.
Your father was a hunter
she used to hiss in his ear
whenever he cried as a child–be it
a single tear track down the dust
on his cheek.

Your father was a hunter
& a singer of hunter’s songs.
He owned so many amulets
his clothes clanked when he walked.
With his harp & with his powders
he made the game stand still
he brought the big cat back in his bag
the gazelle alive in his pocket, ah–he,
he was a hunter!
So she sang (in lieu of other comfort)
one time when his step-father was away
in Marrakesh.

Reader (5)

El negro les hablava siempre y se imformava de los caminos que querí­amos
saber. Passamos por gran numero y diversidades de lenguas. Con todos ellas
Dios nuestro Señor nos favoresíió, porque siempre nos entendieron y les
entendimos. Y ansí­ preguntámos y respondí­an por señas como si ellos hablaran
nuestra lengue y nuestros la suya . . . Y desta manera dexamos toda la tierra [en
paz] y dixí­mosles por las señas, porque nos entendí­an, que en el cielo aví­a un
hombre llamávamos Dios . . . (The black man was always conversing with
them, gathering whichever information we wished to know concerning the
roads ahead. We passed though a great number and variety of languages. With
all of them our Lord God favored us, since we invariably understood them, and
they understood us. And thus we queried, and they replied, through signs, just
as if they’d spoken our tongue and we theirs . . . And in this manner we left the
whole land [in peace], and told them in signs–since they understood us so
well–that in the sky there was a man we called Dios . . . )
ALVAR NUÑEZ CABEZA DE VACA
Naufragios (Valladolid ms.)

Your lordship is to call to mind how this Negro which went with frier Marcos
was wont to weare bels, & feathers on his armes & legs, & that he caried plates
of divers colours . . .
FERNANDO DE ALARCON
Relación (translated by Richard Hakluyt in The Principal Navigations)

I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle made of a single diamond, or of
a very clear crystal . . .
SAINT TERESA OF AVILA
Interior Castle

Shiwanna (1) (conclusion)

These swallowers of men plant prayer sticks

One who denies death

As the boy draws back, his vision expands –
A line of these cross-boned prayer sticks

the sorcerer loads his reed
                                         & here
the slow toneless voice of Datura halts.

The priests, watching intently, see
the boy’s eyes under his lids
float upward & lie motionless
like minnows in a poisoned spring.

His uncle shouts for the antidote,
blows it up his nostrils, pumps his chest.
At last they feel his heart flutter
& he coughs, once, twice, three times

& ends with a sigh. Time
to sing him back, to begin
four days & nights of healing.
Let the Twins mutter

in their six grottoes, in their seven caves.
Let them howl.
They’re war gods: they can wait.

__________

prayer sticks: As mentioned earlier, Zunis and other southwestern peoples use small effigies, fashioned by almost every adult male at set times and for set purposes, instead of sacrifices. These consist of willow wands from a hand span to half an arm’s length in height, tied with feathers of various birds and planted on the outskirts of the village with appropriate prayers.

war gods: this is in fact the term preferred by modern Zunis themselves when speaking in English about the carved wooden icons of the divine twins. They attribute the theft and subsequent misuse of many of these icons by museums and collectors as a primary cause for the world wars and other disasters of the 20th century.

Shiwanna (1) (cont’d)

The rain priest of Hawikuh has
one nephew just past his seventh winter,
his youngest sister’s child & the one
he favors to succeed him. At his suggestion

they bring the boy into the kiva,
turn him naked in a circle
& sixteen pairs of eyes can find
no mark or scar. They ask him

Will you do this for the People, for Shiwanna?
It’s dangerous! But he says Yes.
They turn him to face each of the six
cardinal points, including zenith

& nadir, have him lie down on
a deerskin pelt & drink the acrid
tea of sacred Datura.
His breath slows, goes south:

A place where the mountains smoke
he murmurs.

Corpses bob in every lake & river

an albino’s ensorcelled eye