Click on the photos to see the full-size versions
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Potosí
Look, the night doesn’t fall like a curtain
or rise from any ground. In fact,
it doesn’t move at all.
It’s still there, even in the heat of noon.
Ay, Carnival.
Fields of dog grass.
We pass through that black purse
like stones through a gizzard,
grinding against each other, a currency
no sooner earned than spent.
Our features fade, rubbed smooth.
Veins appear just under the skin.
Strands of silver.
Ay Carnival,
bald as a nickname.
Now more than ever, I am nothing you’d
care to save. But night still rattles
with the dreams of poor Indians,
in their hats & shawls like broody hens
unwilling to abandon the egg
that will never hatch.
Big overblown Carnival.
__________
Lines in italics are taken from Quechua folksongs collected by Jesíºs Lara and translated by Maria A. Proser and James Scully (Quechua Peoples Poetry, Curbstone Press, 1976).
For background on Potosí, see here.
Festival of the Trees reminder
Tomorrow at midnight is the deadline to submit links for the second Festival of the Trees, which will be hosted by Roundrock Journal. Send links to any tree-related blog posts to Pablo: editor [at] roundrockjournal [dot] com. For more information about the Festival, see here.
In the Mountains of the Lion
Imagine having to go on with no way to touch.
Giving birth to the child of who knows which
stoned soldier, & never knowing the silky
feel of his skin, whether to caress
or to shove away, away.
I let him nurse to ease the swelling in my breasts.
I licked him like a cat — it was all the salt I could get.
Were they not terrible, those severed hands,
when they stood back up at last
& began to point?
Territory Folks
Click on the photo for a larger image
After mother remarried, her new husband
shot the horse that had returned
with an empty saddle.
It hadn’t let anyone but me ride it since.
You couldn’t slam a door or fire a gun,
it would kick down the stalls.
We’d put it outside during thunderstorms.
I’d hear a frantic drumroll of hooves
circling the pasture,
& something heavy — the Sunday roast — scraping
across a table. I mean, the way it sounds
from underneath,
crouching among the chairs, hungry,
keeping a wary eye on those tooled
leather boots.
New York Skyline
Forest
of glass stumps.
(He was an epiphyte.)
An over-crowded graveyard.
(Any damn stone will serve.)
Scraping not sky but smog.
(His dust taking root in a million lungs.)
Strange the sights
we have learned
to consider
inspiring.
__________
Prompted by the second photo in this post.
Slow
Who cares what
the slow
guy thinks?
I watched a slug
gliding over a rock
on its single
foot: water
flowing uphill,
Aladdin’s carpet.
I like how,
during a yawn,
my head fills
with the roar of
its own surf.
So much better than
those hiccups
called anger, pride,
shame,
or the fever
with which
my poor sam
pee-body — as
the sparrows say —
tries to rid itself
of that virus
love.
New departure
As a form of protest, I will stop writing in my own voice.
As a gesture toward reconciliation, I will begin writing in the voices of unnamed others.
The eyes are cowries; they smile in the shape of a frown.
I saw myself in the lorry’s rearview mirror. I looked farther away than I was, half swallowed in the dust storm.
Hold me, I said to the mask. Keep us together.
Mouth organ
Sally in the Garden, Whiskey Before Breakfast, Wind That Shakes the Barley, Money Musk, where do these damn tunes come from? They come from this little metal box, from its rows of tongues. From my own tongue and lips and throat. From the in-breath and the out-breath, the wings inside my chest fluttering however the notes dictate. From a change in the weather; from the flicker of lightning behind my eyelids. Fisher’s Hornpipe, the Rights of Man, Off to California, no two refrains come out the same. Grace notes grow into flourishes, flourishes into figures, figures into new tunes — reels, ballads, hornpipes — half the titles vanished from my memory, few lyrics (can’t sing and play at the same time in any case), only the tune, or part of it. I pace back and forth on the morning porch, cupping the mouth organ against my lips. Thunder rattles the windows behind me. The rain pours down.
Eye in the sky
UPDATE (July 29): According to a new article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the derailment in northern Pennsylvania was caused by speeding down a steep grade — the sort of thing that could have been prevented through better policing.Â
The main east-west railroad line in the eastern United States, connecting Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and Chicago, runs past the bottom of our mountain. Our only access to the outside world is down a mile-and-a-half-long road to a public railroad crossing that serves nobody but us and our visitors, railroad employees, and occasional train photographers. On the other side of the tracks, a hundred yards of township road lead to a one-lane county bridge across the river to the highway beyond. Fisherman, teenagers swimming in the river, drug dealers, and people involved in, shall we say, other kinds of activities frowned upon by polite society, all use the township road and the small patch of woods between the tracks and the river.
The day before yesterday, my brother Steve had just gone out the gate and locked it behind him when a train came along. While he waited at the crossing, he decided to go check out a stand of vetch about fifty feet down along the tracks to see if there were any good beetles on it. Just as the first train was clearing the crossing, another train came thundering through in the other direction. He was still congratulating himself on his decision to make good use of his time when a railroad policeman pulled up.
“What’cha doin’, buddy?”
“Uh, I’m an insect collector. I just thought I’d check out these weeds while I waited for the crossing to clear. How did you know I was here?”
“We saw you in the satellite pictures. We’re on high alert, and we’re under orders to investigate anything that looks the least bit suspicious. Homeland Security and all.”
Steve explained who he was, and that we lived here.
“So that was you we saw walking into town along the tracks last Thursday?”
“No, that was my brother Dave.”
Steve asked if they bothered to interfere in any of the various shady activities that go on the other side of the tracks. No, but they were very aware of them. The railroad dick chuckled about watching people get naked in little clearings in the woods, never dreaming that someone might be watching from above.
When Steve reported this conversation to us later that evening, I think we each had the same, conflicted reaction. On the one hand, it’s a shame that the authorities feel we have to invest so much time and money protecting ourselves from terrorist threats at the same time that they turn a blind eye to so many social and environmental ills that a little bit of money could go a long way toward easing. And while Norfolk Southern was keeping an eagle eye on its main line, just last week a branch line in northern Pennsylvania saw a derailment that resulted in the spill of 47,000 gallons of sodium hydroxide into one of the state’s best trout streams, killing every living thing for twenty miles downstream. “The cause of the derailment remains under investigation,” says Norfolk Southern. This is the kind of thing that can and does happen around railroads, terrorists or not.
Further, in the view, I think, of all Plummer’s Hollow residents, the increasing militarization and privatization of domestic so-called security bodes ill for the long-term survival of the republic. “Homeland Security” already sounded like a cover for creeping fascism to us, so you can imagine how thrilled we were to have direct confirmation of our fear that we were in fact being watched — and not even by people on the public payroll.
On the other hand, as conservationists, we abhor the runaway expansion of the highway system with all its attendant costs in pollution, habitat fragmentation and economically unsustainable patterns of human settlement. It takes 100 times less diesel to ship freight by rail than by truck. If the government ever decided to shift taxpayer subsidies away from the trucking and petroleum industries and back to railroads, I think we’d all cheer, despite the cost to us in terms of added inconvenience and danger.
As I mentioned, we live only a mile and a half from the tracks. We have a pretty good idea of the kind of nasty stuff that goes by our crossing on virtually a daily basis. A major mishap or terrorist strike could easily render Plummer’s Hollow — not to mention all of Tyrone and vicinity, home to more than 5,000 people — uninhabitable. And in the event of such a disaster, given that our only access is across the tracks, how would we evacuate?
So you can understand why, the next time I have to walk into town, if the sky is clear, I’ll be looking up and giving a big, friendly wave. Nobody here but us chickens.