Category: Poems & poem-like things

Marcos 2 (cont’d)

Abruptly he feels a motion in his chest,
as if something had just been thrown
open: some secret opening, the gate
to a neglected millrace. Wheels
creaking to life in floury darkness.

Eyes closed, the friar becomes
intensely aware of the ground
beneath his knees: How miraculous
that it should BE,
should last,
should bear us up!
The untold riches that lie
right under our feet–where they belong.
And the Kingdom:
at hand, almost . . .

Thank you, Lord. Thank you.
I believe.
And I choose to alter nothing!
Make me the first or the last: in You
they are one & the same.
Whether this road leads to Jerusalem
or to Nineveh . . .

And joyfully Marcos realizes
all ways are clear: his Luck lies
unveiled–a Salome,
an Abishag–within this new
mansion of the mind.
But I will have no one before
You.

His guides seeing
his lips move, fall silent,
respecting as always the power
of unpronounced words. How
manifold are thy works he whispers,
gazing through the solemn faces
& out over the thorn scrub,
the ocean of heat.

__________

Salome: According to the Gospel of Mark, one of the three women (with Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Jesus) who watched the crucifixion and anointed Jesus’ body for burial.

How manifold are thy works: Psalm 104:24 – “O Lord, how manifold are thy works! In wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches.”

Marcos 2

Rising from his midday rest, the friar
rinses his face, tilts back the onetime
wineskin for a drink
of tepid water. A hint of sulphur.

Ye shall drink
from the cup I drink from
he murmurs in Latin, & passes
it back.

Again that dream from the wilderness
of the Old Testament:
the brass serpent God ordered Moses
to affix to a desert snag
as prophylactic for a plague of snakes–
Gaze upon it & live. This time

the tree’s a green giant, stout
buttresses armored with spines like
a church turned into an engine of war,
branches like arms bent at the elbows,
upraised–the by-now familiar gesture
signing Welcome:
we are unarmed (true),
we have nothing worth taking
(a diplomat’s strategic lie).

Just below the top there’s a hole,
a gaping hollow, where
a pair of gold coins shimmers
& blinks. The little owl
shall also nest there he thinks,
recalling the prophet’s sketch of desolation
with a smile. Further evidence
Scripture anticipated these lands
unknown to Aristotle or Seneca.

(To be continued.)
_________

the brass serpent: see Numbers 21:9

The little owl shall also nest there: Isaiah 34:14

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