Category: Poems & poem-like things

Shiwanna (1)

From their guard posts in the hills
around Shiwanna, the Twins
raise such a clamor

that the brotherhood of holy warriors,
gathering in haste, divides &
divides. Factions of three, two,

one angry voice raised against the others.
The Ahayuta–immortal teens–are always
for the extreme: the lightning strike,

the tornado, the hundred-year flood.
Their rancid breath boils in their throats,
offspring as they are of sun & foam.

But the Uwannami, the longbeards,
breathe from the bottomless ocean.
Their tobacco reed scrawls a complex
message across the sky.

From every town the rain priests gather
in their grand kiva, four walls in
from the sun. Tenatsali, six-hued
flower, herb with seven faces,

how have you passed your days?
The Word Priest inhales from the blossoms
as if they were open palms. We seek
direction. And Tenatsali in turn

calls for Datura:
Take a boy with unblemished skin,
between his first & second initiations.
Guide him to the edge of death.

(To be continued)
_________

I’ll try and keep notes to a minimum for this section; over-explication could suck the life out of it, I think.

Datura: The scientific name of this highly poisonous, psychotropic plant seems somehow more fitting than the common English name, jimsonweed.

Reader (4)

In all the land and kingdoms of Cí­bola, which includes many regions,
constituting a great country more than three hundred leagues across, reaching
all the way to the South Sea, all of it quite populous and containing an
infinitude of nations, there is not a single idol or temple to be found; they have
naught but to adore God in the sun and in springs of sweet water.
BARTOLOMÉ DE LAS CASAS
Apologética Historia Sumaria

The Zuni polity would appear to be heterarchical, indicating a lack of
unidimensional hierarchy and a presence of multiple and noncongruent sources
of power . . .
KEITH W. KINTIGH
“Leadership Strategies in Protohistoric Zuni Towns”

In the first period of the conquest . . . marvels were attributed to America’s
plants. . . . For the Indians, herbs speak, have sex, and cure. It is little plants,
aided by the human word, that pull sickness from the body, reveal mysteries,
straighten out destinies, and provoke love or forgetfulness. These voices of
earth sound like voices of hell to seventeenth-century Spain, busy with
inquisitions and exorcisms, which relies for cures on the magic of prayer,
conjurations, and talismans even more than on syrups, purges, and bleedings.
EDUARDO GALEANO
Memory of Fire, Vol. I: Genesis, translated by Cedric Belfrage

The living human or animal body is referred to in Zuni as the shi’nanne (literally ‘flesh’), while the life force, essence, breath, soul, or psyche is the pinanne (literally ‘wind’ or ‘air’). So, although breath is ultimately lodged in the heart and is thus a body-soul, under certain circumstances – such as during trancing, curing, singing, and dreaming – it can behave as a free-soul and leave the body. . . . Although the pinanne . . . arrives at birth and departs at death, it is never solely possessed by the individual during his or her lifetime. Rather, it remains closely connected to the sacred power suffusing the ‘raw’ world from which it came and because of this constant contact it acts as a strong moral agent.
BARBARA TEDLOCK
“Zuni and Quiché Dream Sharing and Interpreting”

Marcos (1) (conclusion)

He took him down, the Indian’s bloody
emaciated frame sprawling across his shoulders
with a strange weight he wouldn’t
soon forget. Cursed him
in the name of the Holy Trinity
for the first & as it happened
final time: Francisco gave up
the ghost sometime before midnight.
Hard to tell, the way he kept
his eyes open & teeth still bared,
the skin from too much fasting
already shrunk back against the skull,
like Death personified in one of those
chapbooks the beggars used to hawk
in front of the cathedral:
Death & the Maiden . . .
Death at the Banking House . . .
Death Goes on a Picnic With the Greedy Friar.
Who pulls his hat down against
the vastly more greedy sun.

Somewhere in the next dry riverbed,
he knows, his escorts are already
preparing the midday meal.

With some relief he notices
the sudden stillness: behind
as well as before & all around him
an almost otherworldly silence,
his own footsteps now the only sound.

Though this desert–he muses once again–
is never empty. Each bush,
each ground-hugging cactus
& flowering thorn tree sits apart
as if planted for a special purpose.

Here, one’s feet seem naturally
to fit the sober measure
of a pilgrim’s gait:
no ring-around-a-rosie.
No lost running in circles, thank God.
No tarantella.

Marcos (1) (cont’d)

So now (he murmurs) if I still lack
the equipoise of an elder–the requisite
wisdom of a presbyter in the Order–at least
I’ve found a sort of key to one
small puzzle: why Francisco seemed
so elated there at the end. Lent,
the season when a true Christian
should mourn, especially
with all his fellow villagers dead.

Hadn’t he been shunned when Marcos
first arrived? Hadn’t he kept
his medicine bundle (as it turned out)
ensconced under the altar, complete
with the friar’s long-lost mirror
& little tufts of hair
from each of the corpses they’d buried?
Sentimental, Marcos had thought
at the time. But now . . .

The village had followed Francisco
into baptism, as if afraid to let
him keep that grace to himself.
And their loyal servant
of Christ–Ha!–still ready to believe
he’d truly helped save
at least one soul–however
he might dislike the man–
                                            right up
until Good Friday morning,
when he entered the chapel & found
Francisco hanging, God (or the Devil)
knows how, from a new cross
in front of the altar,
crimson teardrop-shaped
flowers sprouting from his brow,
& more blossoms–yellow,
white, violet, blue–festooning
the arms of the cross, clusters
of thorns impaling wrist & palm.

Marcos (1) (cont’d)

                    The old woman
points back to the pole they’d passed
at the center of the village, bedecked
with dark tufts he’d taken for raven feathers.
I danced with it–Me,
in my old rags, my dry
breasts flying, she says, half
in pantomime,
                    laughing
at the white man’s grimace, his childishly
transparent face. The interpreter
tries to explain it: a widespread belief
that if you keep the crown
of the head in your possession
the soul of your slain enemy can’t leave
for the Land Below the East.
After the ceremony & the sixteen
days of separation, its owner–
this man–can fashion the scalp
into a homunculus, a slave
small enough to live in a basket
in the corner.

And reading de Niza’s expression
the interpreter signals an end to it, but
the friar steels himself,
persists: How do they make it serve them
without escaping–or slicing their throats
while they sleep?

The crone straightens, speaking quietly
the way an abbess he knew used to look
any time he tried to tease her
about her youngest charges.
They welcome him into the home like family.
Every day they feed him, even
sing to him at first so he won’t grow homesick.
He’s just like any servant–it’s only when
you forget to feed him that he starts
into mischief, seduces a daughter or a wife.

Marcos (1) (cont’d)

Only Francisco stayed strangely immune.
He outlasted what passes for a winter there
on nothing but thin gruel of maize
& for Ash Wednesday took a piece
of charcoal from the mission kitchen
& blackened the middle third of his face,
from eyebrows to upper lip, ear to ear.

That at least had always seemed to Marcos
a more-or-less Christian act–albeit taken
a bit too far–until last week, on the road
north from Vacapa.
                        As they approached
a farming settlement, the friar spotted
a figure sitting in the shade of a mesquite
next to the village dump, & left
the road to investigate.

The man gave no signal to acknowledge
their presence, motionless
except for his right hand, gripped
a scratching stick that seemed
to possess some heat-struck
consciousness of its own,
worrying an itch just below his wingbone
with such exquisite slowness, Marcos
felt himself blushing–put the apparent
parallel with Job to instant flight.

A clay bowl filled with thin corn gruel
sat untouched on the ground
in front of him, &
the bowed head, in shadow, hid
until they got quite close
the fact that this man, too, wore blackface:
a solid stain, perhaps
some tar or resin.

Marcos inquired (through two interpreters,
his own & a local woman) whether
the Indian meant thereby to pay
homage to his slave errant, Estebanico–
an object of superstitious fascination
among all these people.
But no, they said, He separates himself
from everything human
to atone, to get clean.
He has killed.
–Killed whom?
–Three of our friends the Enemy.
They loot our granaries
& kidnap our sons & daughters, so
we have to steal their medicine power
to stay alive.

__________

Estebanico: The diminutive form was used to connote social inferiority. (In this poem, by chosing to call him by the more neutral “Esteban,” I risk some confusion since “Estebanico” – or “Estevanico” – is how he has been remembered.)

our friends the Enemy: In native North America, relationships between “warring” tribes did not preclude periodic trading and sharing of rituals, and even violent raids were often conducted with the aim not of killing but of kidnapping children for adoption into the other tribe. And as I will endeavor to show here (and elsewhere), even killing can be construed as a form of adoption rather than, for example, as an attempt to dominate, humiliate or obliterate an anathematized Other.

Marcos (1) (cont’d)

Who but the Lord?
For idealists like Las Casas there’d be
few other options, denying Satan’s power
as they do. With a conjuror’s wave
Bartolomé used to dismiss all talk
of rivals to the Good Word:
Men need little help to lie,
to covet, to rebel. It’s
our conscious choice of the light
that makes us worthy of salvation.

He revisits the memory a second time
in a slightly different key, rehearses
the argument as it should’ve happened:
an articulate Marcos pointing out
that with malevolent spirits so strong–
their rites so various & seemingly ancient–
would it not rather seem the case
that these tattooed nations sprang
from none but Cain, first & most deceitful
of all marked men?

For not only sorcerers & idolatrous priests
but everyone, as he’d discovered–
everyone consorted with familiars.
In dreams they came chivvying,
dickering down the price of a soul
to little more than power
over a game of sticks,
success with women or the hunt.
And if not in dreams, in drugged trances.

Or merely through mortification of the flesh:
he remembered how as they died
they begged for hairshirts.

__________

first & most deceitful of all marked men: See Genesis 4:15.

Marcos (1) (cont’d)

Not that Marcos had ever sought
such loyalty: Christ shall be
sole Master of the New World–
that World, he still maintained, that is
Not Yet–& of course our father
& brother the shoeless saint . . .
Whom they took to, he realizes now,
for reasons that had little to do
with the Gospel, or a love of poverty.
They adored his bleeding hands,
his legendary converse with bird & beast,
with highwayman & angel . . .

One language? Francisco would warble, grinning
as Frere Marc de Nice struggled
in his barbarous Castillian to explain
the Pentecost. And how often then
they’d ask about the Canticle–
a mystery to him how the news of it
had spread. Perhaps the doing
of an unrepentant schismatic, one
of the so-called Spirituals. Or worse:
some unconverted Jew, a wolf
in friar’s garb.
Making sure every native priest & scribe
confounded the saint’s visions
with their own empty fantasies. The very
title of his hagiography, “Little Flowers
of St. Francis,” had they heard it,
could only have given credence
to Indian superstitions of a Flower World
awaiting the souls of warriors slain in battle.
He remembers the innumerable
late-night arguments: he and the Dominican
Bartolomé de Las Casas, self-appointed
advocate for the Indians, swearing
they had songs & stories to equal
the pagan Greeks, even making
excuses for their bloodletting,
their abominable sodomy–
How can a just Lord condemn them
if they’ve never heard the Gospel?

And Marcos tongue-tied as always
would simply nod. The clarity
that comes with strong convictions
was something he could only pray for.
Bartolomé had indeed been blessed.

But Who–he wanted to ask his friend–
Who sends the pox?
The fevers that merely sickened Christians
killed Indians like flies–
or like the Egyptians, when Pharaoh
refused to acknowledge
the divine Word.

__________

the shoeless saint: i.e., St. Francis

the Canticle: St. Francis’ praise poem to “Master Brother Sun,” “Sister Moon,” “Our Sister Death,” etc. Considered the first work of literature in the Italian language. Three different translations are available here.

Marcos (1) (cont’d)

He prays.

Breathe into me, Holy Spirit,
that all my thoughts may be holy.

Protect me, Holy Spirit,
that I may always be holy.

Holy. Sanctus. Such a gentle
coolness in that word!
A sweetness–
so testified our Seraphic Father,
whom God had taught through lepers
to love this pestilent world.
As in the famous riddle, impossible
to solve without inspiration:
Out of the eater came something to eat;
out of the strong came something sweet.

Though at the moment Marcos identifies
less with Samson than with
the dead lion, his braincage abuzz,

recalling how that other Francisco–
this one, nipping at his heels–used
to grin. Sycophantic, he’d thought
at first, & later as the sickness
culled by twos and threes the entire
rest of his flock, the two of them
reduced to digging communal graves
& saying masses for seven souls at a time,
he watched Francisco’s smile harden,
turn brittle. Just shy of a smirk–
more like the canine-baring grimace
of a shepherd’s dog facing down
some famished predator.

__________

Breathe into me . . . holy. Throughout the poem, I reproduce the modern, Vatican-approved English versions of Marcos’ prayers, rather than attempting my own translations (or simply reproducing the Latin).

the dead lion: Cf. Ecclesiastes 9:4.