Category: Poems & poem-like things

Reader (2)

Tied in sacks they brought us, in the camel bags,
And they sold us in the wool market.
May God pardon them.

GNAWA FOLK SONG FROM MOROCCO
(translated by Paul Bowles)

*

Who of the desert has not spent his day riding at a mountain and never even
reaching its base? This is a land of illusions and thin air. The vision is so
cleared at times that the truth itself is deceptive.

JOHN VAN DYKE
The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances

*

Where one mountain sits on top of another
we turn the basket upside down
and sing a holy song.

We are in great peace.
We are in great peace.

It is not true
but it will confuse our enemies,
and none can sing the dead back again.

RICHARD SHELTON
“Navajo Song”

*

The mountains move and fly away.

AL-QUR’AN 52:10
(translation by Ahmed Ali)

Beginnings (conclusion)

Every day a new feast: venison,
bread made from mesquite flour,
wild tepary beans. Roadside shelters
are strewn with a riot of blossoms
from the freshly watered desert,
no less miraculous for being
an annual event. Stick figures
balloon with sudden blessing,
a haze of green. Marcos preaches
honey from the rock, oil from
the flint-hard ground, & the ragged
survivors kneel at the foot of
the cross. The strongest medicine
always belongs to the enemy.
Marcos & his Indian oblates
can’t perform enough masses.

By the end of March they’re traveling
through lands no Christian before them
has reached–& despite the no-doubt
terrible rumors, they still find
a welcome. It may be
that the story of the Four
has taken wing. And these two
with their sharply divergent looks
& ways are a new marvel,
go together as day follows night.

__________

honey from the rock, oil from the flint-hard ground: Deuteronomy 32:13

Marcos and his Indian oblates: For the purpose of the poem, I imagine Marcos traveling in the company of two Indian oblates, donados given to the Franciscan order at an early age to be trained as friars (which there was still, in 1539, every reason to believe would soon be possible for Indians). In fact, one contemporary source does refer consistently to Marcos as one of three priests on the journey to Cibola, so my supposition is not entirely unwarranted.

Beginnings (cont’d)

But the dark-skinned one is not a stranger here.
Three years have passed since his first visit,
the most famous of four medicine men
who were said to have come straight
from the Sun, His daybreak house.

Eight years among Indians, living in
Dios, had taught them well: Esteban
& his companions knew how to make
an impression. But when they called
themselves by the dread word, here
in the soon-to-be province of Nueva
Galicia, their hosts trembled.
Cristianos had come to mean slavers,
metal-clad horsemen of apocalypse.
How could these four be cross-wielders?
They laid hands on people solely to heal,
refused all offers of payment.

The Black Shaman had sat apart
from the others as a war chief might,
though his words were never few.
Through him flowed power
that the oldest of the four guarded
like an underground lake. Together
they sought to show that the cross
could be used in more ways
than one, putting a stop to soul-
stealing by those who killed
& kidnapped under its protection.
Esteban had talked the elders down
from their mountain redoubts
for a diplomatic parlay, & Cabeza
de Vaca extracted a vow of peace
from the abominable Nuño
de Guzmán. And Guzmán indeed
waited a month or two
before sending his son to resume
their terror campaigns.

But now he’s come back, this man of power.
Bringing hundreds of native sons
& daughters, just released
from captivity in far-off Mexico.
And with him also this time
a holy man, a priest, whose headship
& hesitant way of talking
attract many who distrust
the other’s charisma.

__________

the dark-skinned one: Esteban is described by Cabeza de Vaca as “negro alárabe, natural de Azamor.” The latest word on his origin and likely ethnicity (Sahelian rather than Berber) may be found on pages 414-422 of Volume 2 of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez, by Rolena Adolfo and Patrick Charles Pautz (University of Nebraska Press, 1999). They make a good case for interpreting “negro alárabe” as “an Arabic-speaking Black.” (For the purposes of this poem, I assume a Malian ancestry, which is highly plausible given the nature of the trans-Saharan slave trade in Morocco at that time.)

But would Indians necessarily have thought of Esteban as “black”? What would it mean if they did? For indigenous peoples of this region – Mesoamerica and the greater Southwest – red (or sometimes white) and black were sacred colors representing complementary, dual principles of the cosmos. My contention here and throughout the poem is that, since Esteban had become so acculturated and so adept a shaman, the color of his skin would have been seen as similar to, or symbolic of, the black dye or stain that many Indians applied to themselves when seeking power from the more dangerous, disorderly, male principle of the cosmos.

Beginnings (cont’d)

In the beginning, the spirit dancers
came in person, they say.
In Shiwanna they still remember
how dangerous that was, the way
the women were always going crazy
for their devilishly good looks
& exotic costumes,
their power objects,
their dances, & every year
a few more would follow them
back to their homes under the waters
& drown. Until finally
the elders got fed up & told them–
these ancestors, these
whatever-they-were–
not to come back except
as masks, as human dancers, & then
only at the proper times.

But one day in early March 1539
Marcos de Niza & Esteban de Dorantes
set out from Petetlán on the Rí­o Fuerte
where they leave Marcos’ only
white companion–a lay brother
known as Honoratio–
to convalesce from a sudden
mysterious ailment.
They explore northward along the coast
for the new viceroy
whose order of manumission
& a halt to slaving goes with them
like a parchment flag.

Since they left San Miguel de Culiacán
they’ve passed through a famished land.
In the river valleys the fields sprout weeds,
the irrigation ditches are blocked
with debris, the ghost towns only now
echoing with voices once again
as the news of their arrival spreads.
Armies & epidemics have rendered
some valleys in this northern cusp
of the Spanish realm uninhabitable,
so overpowering is the stench
of rotting flesh. From their brush-
walled huts in the hills, eyes bulging
in hunger-shrunk heads, the survivors
emerge. One last time
they assume their role in the game
of guest-&-host. Strangers, like all
dangerous beings, must be fed.

__________

Petetlán on the Rí­o Fuerte: My primary guide to the route and details of the Marcos/Esteban decubrimiento is the historical anthropologist Daniel T. Reff’s revisionist paper “Anthropological Analysis of Exploration Texts: Cultural Discourse and the Ethnological Import of Fray Marcos de Niza’s Journey to Cibola,” American Anthropologist 93:636-55 (1991). See also his book of the same year, Disease, Depopulation, and Culture Change in Northwestern New Spain, 1518-1764 (University of Utah Press).

Beginnings (cont’d)

While in their kivas at Shiwanna
the medicine priests preserve
their most arcane chants
in a foreign language, songs
attributed to the ancient Founder
of the healing arts: a gambler,
a vagabond chased from town to town
by stone-throwing children,
disappearing at last into the invisible
realm of the spirit animals
in the mountains to the east:
Shipapulima, city of mists.

And the friar Marcos–by all accounts
a man with a wretched ear–
commissioned to search out
the Seven Cities, hears
in answer to his obsessive query
as he forges northeastward from
the Gulf of California: Cí­bola.
A place of great riches, a fabled city
somehow linked to sevenfold
Shiwanna, itself
a site of pilgrimage for Indians
many leagues to the south,
who join his mission in droves:
the act of traversing the land
helps keep it young.

Toss cornmeal out before you,
straight, like every holy intention.
Smoke tobacco so prayers will have
their own road. Follow the sacred
transect running north.

Power is like water:
it flows where you want
only if you make a proper channel.
It has its own ideas.
Plant your prayer sticks
wherever you want it to slow,
wherever you want its fertile blessings
to sink into the parched earth.

*      *      *      *
__________

chants in a foreign language: Keresan, the language spoken by Zuni’s nearest neighbors to the east, in Acoma and Luguna Pueblos. The Gambler story seems to originate there, as well, and some historical anthropologists see it as a mythologized account of the rise and fall of the Anasazi culture centered in Chaco Canyon, not far to the northeast of Zuni.

Cí­bola: The word first appears in Marcos’ account of his and Esteban’s 1539 journey, and in the writings of contemporaries after Marcos’ return to Mexico City. The suggestion that it might derive from Shipapu(lima), instead of – or in confusion with – Shiwanna, is entirely my own guess. Subsequent explorers, beginning with the conquistator Coronado the following year, applied the name Cí­bola to the Zuni confederation, whether or not that was in fact what Marcos thought he “discovered.”

plant your prayer sticks: The homology between prayer sticks (basically, effigies for the petitioner) and the sticks used to channel flash floods in desert farming is, again, something I came up with on my own. I could be mistaken.

Beginnings (cont’d)

In the cities on the lake
in Mexico, too, the Aztecs
wax nostalgic for a fabled past–
a story they may have stolen,
like everything else, from those
they sought to surpass: how
their fathers once inhabited
seven caves far to the north
& half the tribe remains there
while the rest wander southward,
shunned by everyone.
When they rise to power
they strip the chronicles of all
competing accounts. This world
needs to be flayed. But in
the songs, the Flower World
beckons from every horizon,
true home of jaguar & eagle.
The knife-winged vulture
casts one eye
toward its former haunts.
__________

Flower World: The chromatic, flower-laden spirit world in pre-Cortezian and 17th-century Nahuatl poetry. Versions of the Flower World also occur in oral literatures in many other Uto-Aztecan languages, including Huichol, Yaqui, Piman (O’odham) and Hopi, as well as some of their neighbors, including Zuni.

knife-winged vulture – Knife-wing, in Zuni cosmology, is the guardian of the Zenith.

Beginnings (cont’d)

Where memories fail,
where the chroniclers fall silent,
songs spring up to fill the void:
Seven bishops set sail on seven ships
in the year of our Lord
seven hundred & fourteen,
fleeing the African invaders,
the Moorish warriors for a new faith
irrupting in the heart of the old.
Thus the Iberian balladeers
for centuries keep stringing out
new verses: the freedom-seekers
settle in the West,
rebuild their Seven Cities
on the blessed isle first envisioned
by pagan Greeks. Antilla,
growing in the minds of errant
knights & vision-questing friars
until it occupies most
of the space on the globe
between Portugal & Japan:
unspoken goal of Columbus,
Vespucci, Cortez.
A kingdom without a king, marked
by all the purported virtues of
the early Church–peace,
brotherhood, charity. No use
for jails, no heretics,
no famished lions.

Beginnings (cont’d)

And according to a few accounts
in the chronicles of those who entrust
their memories to nihil obstat
& the notary public’s India ink,
way back a half-millennium ago
when the Old World irrupted
in the heart of the New, two men–
one African, one European–
appear as suddenly as rivers fed
by far-off storms,
with their hundreds of Indian guides
surging north from the newly
conquered province of Nueva Galicia.
The Spanish call them Esteban
& Marcos: ciphers, almost,
names evoking the incense
of another desert–olive, terebinth–
& another beginning,
back when Christianity was still
a sectarian group of Jews

& St. Stephen–San Esteban–
played out his role as original martyr
of the Church-to-be: A man full
of faith & power, who did great wonders
& miracles among the people (thus
the circle of scholars authorized by King James).
And they stirred up the people &
the elders & the scribes & came
upon him & caught him
& brought him to the council.
And set up false witnesses, which said
This man ceaseth not to speak
blasphemous words against
this holy place, and the law . . .

And St. Mark: first
among missionaries, traveling
with Saul & Barnabas,
climbing with Luke & Matthew
into the thin air of history.
The very model of a pilgrim,
however sidelined by the bellicose
Santiago. Retaining even now
his rightful patronage among
the Catholic Indians of the Yaqui
River valley, who honor San Marcos
as a messenger, one who is sent ahead
to scout things out.

*     *     *     *
__________

Nueva Galicia: Originally a separately administered colony from Nueva España, it comprised roughly the modern Mexican states of Jalisco and Nayarit and the southern half of Sinaloa, with its capital (after gaining its charter in 1548) at Guadalajara.

a messenger, one who is sent ahead to scout things out: This is a direct quote from Felipe S. Molina, Yaqui Indian co-author, with anthropologist Larry Evers, of Yaqui Deer Songs, Maso Bwikam: A Native American Poetry, University of Arizona Press (1987). In that context, he is referring strictly to folk belief about the Christian saint and not making any connection to the historical Marcos de Niza, about whom there is no specific oral tradition among the Yaqui, to my knowledge. Yaquis likely formed a significant part of Esteban’s and Marcos’ respective entourages when they entered Hohokam/Salado territory (modern south-central and southeast Arizona).

Beginnings (cont’d)

But the dry lands survive
through concentration. The original
nations persist, despite the epitaphs
their would-be partisans have
so often composed. Though the dreams
served up on satellite dishes are more
& more entrancing, a few old-timers
still share stories around the stove
on a winter’s evening, whenever
their grandchildren start to get
too wild:

Back when newness was made–
they say–the earth was still soft
& yielding as the crown
of an infant’s head. Wherever
anyone stepped, the footprints
would fill with water. Back
when the spirit beings still mixed
freely with the people–the Zuni,
A.K.A. Ashiwi, or Ashiwanni–who
after years of wandering, had
discovered & settled the very
center of this six-
faceted world at
Shiwanna . . .

The Flood had come & gone
& the people newly made were talking,
chittering & chattering all the time
like mockingbirds, so that even
Coyote couldn’t sleep, & the God
the O’odham used to call Earth Doctor
divided their hearts, half for the day
& half for the night, & gave
the power of dreaming to
the dark half, so they could travel
in their sleep & gain wisdom. And
so they would have something
of greater note to mull over
in the heat of the day.
__________

as the crown of an infant’s head: This simile is my only departure in this selection from the recorded myths of the Zuni and O’odham as they appear in the scholarly literature. Outright metaphors are exceedingly rare in their respective oral traditions, but this doesn’t mean they aren’t present in a more hidden form. As with Sufi teaching stories, part of the considerable art of Native songs, stories and oratory lies in the way their lessons slowly ripen in the listener’s mind over the course of months or years. When metaphors are made explicit, meaning is channeled in one, main direction – a direction that may be right for part of the audience, but can’t possibly be what every listener needs to hear. (The notion of One Best Truth for Everybody is, let’s remember, unique to the totalizing World Religions, and foreign probably to over 90 percent of all other belief systems ever invented.) I am quite sure that my interpretations in this poem are, at best, woefully inadequate – an outsider’s glib attempt to reveal a single facet in order to communicate at least the potential value of a gem.

this six-faceted world: the Zuni – like the O’odham, but unlike some of their closer neighbors – include zenith and nadir for a total of six sacred directions. Sometimes they also include Center as a seventh “direction,” and thus the number seven appears to be a more perfected form of six in Zuni numerology.