Category: Poems & poem-like things

Esteban (3) (cont’d)

Yet Esteban too had had an entourage,
just as on the present journey: at times
in the high hundreds, more numerous
than all three of theirs combined.

He remembers the deer drives
staged in their honor
as they threaded the sierras,
the circle dances & all-night sings,
the masques performed at midwinter
to entice the animal masters
to lay down their burdens.
One whiff of sage or cedar
still summons up what seems
in memory now like a three-
month-long feast, & his head
swims again with strong tobacco,
soft laughter, firelight dancing
in rings of smoke-brown eyes.

All the same, they barely
slowed their headlong flight,
even when the Indians presented them
with the now-famous six
hundred hearts of venison.
Beyond accounting were
the armloads of loot–pelts
& pots, rugs & baskets–they had
to refuse. And their stature grew
with each refusal, each festive
plundering: the host villagers, usually
outnumbered, had little recourse
but to take the raiders’ places
as members of their entourage,
try & reacquire a set of household goods
at the next town. Thus it grew,
Esteban & the others awed
& a little frightened by their role
in something so big, so hard to unpuzzle.

They hid their confusion with
frequent sermons on holy charity
& the transience of earthly things,
trusting Esteban’s quick wit
& divine inspiration to somehow carry
the meaning across.
His hands mimicked birds when
they spoke of the immortal soul;
eternity became a very great number
of winters. And a Being who lives
in the sky? Well,
that part they all seemed to grasp.
Everyone knows the Sun is a stern father.

But Cabeza de Vaca would make
the sign of the cross, commend
their souls to Christ
& the whole assembly would smile
& shower them with still more gifts.
Blessings, Esteban realized, were
the one thing that always translated well.

Esteban (3) (cont’d)

He lies back, resigned to insomnia’s
non-stop digging, the incidental maze
left by the quest for seeds,
for kernels. Gnawing
at his gut . . .

To assert, for instance, that nuggets
of gold–or the tremors of a beautiful
woman’s chest–can in fact
be counted, starting
at some arbitrary point, assumes
such things are uniform, interchangeable.
One breath,
one grain can be traded
for any other. The greatest
despoilers of land & men
are eulogized for their wisdom
in introducing uniform weights
& measures: what had been
whispered against as theft
through simple sleight-
of-hand becomes
a system, right as rain.
Fully elaborated,
they called it al-jabr: the Reduction.
The logic of the slave market.

How strange, then–if this clunky
chain of thought links up
to some simulacrum of the truth–that
a merchant & slaver should’ve embraced
a system that dismissed such logic . . .
or maybe not so odd. For if
on the other hand you base
all calculations on the premise
of universal interpretability, then
the numbers don their own wings, & then
every object & event becomes
not only unique but also fated.
Irrevocable. The obscure
will of a sovereign Master . . .

His mind wanders, going back
to that ballyhooed time
when he’d been only one
of four, & the man
whom he had ceased by then
to consider a master–don Andres–
straggled far behind with Castillo
& Cabeza de Vaca, telling each other
Estebanico‘s service as
their spokesman made them appear
more powerful to the credulous natives . . .

Esteban (3)

For those who know, the road to paradise
is as short as the distance
between two breaths . . .
Who said that? He murmurs it
again in the voice of the sententious
old fart who taught him Nahuatl
& catches himself, repeats it
in Arabic, then in his mother’s Manding,
his gaze lost in the ceiling’s
contest of lights.

From somewhere in the next room
a wash of sun: by the lack of color
close to noon, he guesses.
A slow-burning log throws up
an intermittent flame–figures
of the moment stretching
grotesque tangles of arms & legs,
the ambient light turned shadow,
a sudden ground.

Dear Mother, I am beginning
to distrust these reports about
the Seven Cities. I am wearing doubt
like a vulture’s ruff of feathers
at the base of its naked red neck.
Down along the desert coastline
all the people dressed that way,
but here they are modest in cotton–
master spinners. In either case,
they treat me well. I’m
no longer so good at sleeping
directly on the ground.

He half-rises on the reed mat
to examine the form at his side,
count the even swells that make
her breasts rock gently at anchor.

What new worlds might be unfolding
beneath those eyelids? He peers
more closely, as if (despite
the obvious glow of health)
to diagnose. Watches how
her lashes flutter, pulsing:
a walker’s rhythm. By this
& the breath count he divines
a heavy load, or perhaps
a steepening path.
The number of breaths between pauses
grows steadily shorter: 49, then 42,
34, 25, 13.

Ah, what patterns–what science his far-
off step-father could’ve
teased from such an accounting!
For this is one hole in his knowledge
Esteban regrets: the art of seeing
through numbers.
He’d been too young, resented
the endless restrictions imposed
by inauspiciously numbered days
& hours. Now he wonders
if the omen-reading, the numerology
hadn’t had something to do with
the insight that the world itself
eludes enumeration?

(To be continued.)

Reader (8)

The possibility of entities and occurrences being regarded as basically similar is
very intriguing to the western mind in view of the Aristotelian tradition of
opposing these notions. . . . Both . . . can be characterized in terms of distance
and boundedness . . . [It’s possible] that some events are regarded by [Tohono
O’odham] as having will . . . In the analysis of Papago nominal number, having
will was shown to be the distinguishing attribute of animate entities.
MADELEINE MATHIOT
“Papago Semantics”

My heart turns giddy
I wander in a daze
hai-ya my heart
an unbearable feeling
running toward this toward that
an unbearable feeling
ANON. PIMA (AKIMEL O’ODHAM) ANT SONG
(adapted from the translation by Lloyd Paul and Donald Bahr of a 31-song
sequence assembled and sung by Andy Stepp and Clair Seota)

The hero is only welcome on troubled days.
MALINKE PROVERB

Shiwanna (2) (conclusion)

The holy warriors of Shiwanna
descend to the slaughter, sparing only
a single pair of children.
They smash the fences, free
the herds of deer & mountain sheep
who need no prompting to escape
back into the wild.

Such a one-sided victory is dangerous.
As long as the Ashiwi live at the Middle Place
they must look after this tribe of ghosts.
They feed & clothe them, sing
their songs word-for-word
& dance their dances. The two
survivors carry their name forward
as a thirteenth clan.

Everywhere a warrior falls
the Earth Mother in gratitude
sprouts a miniature pueblo,
a rainhouse made from sand. Ants
of whatever color will fill
the priestly offices. In the end
very little gets resolved in the way
one might expect. The dream
follows dream-logic, & the roles
with all the romance belong
to the others. But with each reenactment
something vital is restored.
Freed from their wardens
the animals return to the wild, yes,
but the ones with claws & canines
are already there–& there—
& here . . .
__________

a miniature pueblo, a rainhouse: In the stylized art of Pueblo Indians, rain clouds always have a rectilinear and stepped appearance. It struck me as I was studying the literature on the Zuni and their neighbors, for whom so much public religiosity seems focused on bringing rain, that their very architecture represented an attempt to attract the favor of the rain gods through mimesis. The collecting of scalps (in a communal scalp house, in the case of the Zuni) was also connected with rain-bringing magic, as indicated by a quote in the last Reader section. The top of the head was homologized with cloud-covered peaks. Thus, cloud, mountain, pueblo and head were analogous nodes in a dense allusive web. Ants and ant-mounds were seen as microcosms of the human world.

Shiwanna (2) (cont’d)

Thump unthump the great
      &nbsp clay drum out of time
thump unthump however they stop
      &nbsp their breath or cover
eyes & ears & mouths they can’t
      &nbsp unthump miss
      &nbsp       &nbsp       &nbsp this
UNTHUMP the skipped heart-
beat UNTHUMP the unraveled
tapestry UNTHUMP shapeshifter’s hoop
the twisted spine UN-
THUMP.

The road unwinds clear
to the fontanel, open fist
someone’s sister has anointed
with yucca suds, bloom
unclenching once in
a hundred years. The gods
are forever unfinished.
Always at the Beginning
they are auguring themselves
from the waters above,
below . . .

But what about those dirty-
faced heroes? They are acting
like the rawest of raw recruits.
They make a game of everything,
killing for sport. And on

the fourth day, from
their shrine beside the little lake
within the younger of the cones
inside the Salt, the hero twins
at last unriddle it: where the sorceress
hides her vital spark. A stone
among stones. On this lake-
within-a-lake, they see it
in a literal flash.

Now they are racing each other to the battle scene.

Now the elder brother hurls a rabbit stick & misses.

Now the younger gives it his best gambler’s cast.

Now he scores a hit.

As the stones spill from
the split gourd
the Chakwena topples, the wind
roaring from her chest.

Shiwanna (2) (cont’d)

Chakwena Woman,
black-skinned ogre,
runs back & forth in front of her white-
robed warriors, catching the arrows.
Her calabash rattle is in constant motion
like a hive of hornets. When the Ashiwi
advance with their medicine priests
she directs her followers to plug
their nostrils with cotton, breathe
only through a cloth.
By the third day the Kyanakwe
seem invincible, even capturing
four of the Ashiwi gods–
though one escapes, & one remains
so obstreperous they think
he must be part female, put him
to grinding corn. Make him don
the dress the Chakwena scorns.

But what happens then
is a thing of genius:
one half of his hair coils up on his scalp–
squash blossom, hummingbird wing–
while the other half still hangs
straight, like a man’s.
Thus from this contest there emerges
something good: a wholly new part
in the sacred repertoire.
__________

black-skinned ogre: As mentioned elsewhere, black and red represent cosmic polarities for a large swath of native North America. White is also often included as a stand-in for black. Presuming that “red” stands for all animating colors (via the association with blood, ergo heart/breath), the two yin-yang poles might better be thought of as black-and-white vs. color.

a thing of genius: This incident is indeed the mythological origin of the berdache or third gender in Zuni cosmology. Notice that in this matrilinear, matrifocal society, women are perceived as being just as strong as men, albeit in a different way (they possess innately those qualitites that boys must strive to acquire through initiation into the priesthood). In a sense, the presence of a socially accepted transsexual figure is one very good measure of sexual equality. In the last 150 years, some of the most influential members of the Zuni tribe have been berdaches. Their position between genders appears to make them especially adept at bridging the gap beween White and Indian ways, without feeling that they have to choose between the two.

Shiwanna (2) (cont’d)

The Cactus Society, the Ant Fraternity,
the Hunters, the Bow Priesthood–
in each of the six towns
they tie feathered willow wands
as bait for the spirit beings.
For four times four days & nights
they mix their medicines. Some
for nightmares, some for seeds
of panic. Some to bring rain
to loosen the enemy’s bowstrings, & some
to turn the water in their springs
to liquid fire.

The Salt belongs to herself alone–
how can she be hoarded?
The game animals go only to those
who know the protocols, whose hearts
are clean. How can they be penned?
Sorcery on such a scale
cannot go unanswered.

The medicine priest of the Big Shell Order
of the Helix Society
paces the kiva, growling, snuffling,
blinking his Black Bear eyes,
clacking his teeth.
He drags a claw counter-sunwise
around the prayermeal painting
in front of the altar: gouges
a four-fold road that spirals in.
Where the predator spirits lead
the warriors can never falter.