Series: Cibola

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)

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) (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.

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

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.)

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) (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)

It was never clear who decided
that they should all play doctor:
probably, again, the Indians.
But the same strange enthusiasm
gripped all four. A fever.
He remembers the first morning
after their escape, how the air,
suffused with floating tufts
of cottonwood down,
turned to fiery gold through
the sun’s alembic. They took
deep lungfuls of the stuff.
Praise God–the world’s nothing
but pure Spirit! Castillo exclaimed,
& for a long time thereafter
everything that happened seemed only
to confirm that inspiration.

Though now, plagued
by second thoughts, he wonders
why he never considered the obvious
opposing proposition: that this so-
called spirit simply masks
holy matrix, uttermost matter.
Which might’ve been closer to the views
of their various hosts, who saw them
clothed in power despite their nakedness
& their condition as virtual hostages,

unshod & shuttled from tribe to tribe
like the sticks or balls of rag
in an Indian relay race, propelled
by deft maneuverings
of toe & instep.
Twice entrusted to old women
as they bridged borders
between hostile nations,
too delicate a thing for male
guides to try. And not quite
as galling as he would’ve thought:
the women were chosen because
they had nothing to prove.

He can still recall that first
sensation of power, ocotillo wands
crackling in the faintest breeze,
a slow fire unfolding at the tips
of a leafless palo verde,
the sound of water dripping
in a dry land. And each night
when the sick & wounded
crowded in to be cured, the gourd
whispering in Arabic transported him
back before the Fall, to the place
where earth & sky come together
at the source of four great rivers–thus
the old man who gave it to him
described its origin.

To use it, he’d had to learn
how to sing from the Beginning,
how to act
as if the world were still
somehow in essence a garden:
it lurked like a troupe of angels
in the wings. Waiting for the curtain,
the shroud that cloaks the East
to rip, to fall . . .

Esteban (3) (cont’d)

He remembers Cabeza de Vaca’s sermon
on Ash Wednesday, the date
revealed in a dream–or so he claimed.
The Ever-Present, Dios, speaks
through fire. This day recalls
a time his Word walked
like a man, even went
through the motions, the agonies
of death, solely to heal us.
To keep us from burning
in the lights of primordial Wisdom,
stronger than a thousand suns.

Had the four of them not been traveling
from the east, he often wonders,
would they have been so welcomed?
And could the lack of such orientation
explain in part why his present
journey pales? For now, too often
his medicine stays in the gourd–
or bottled up in some high canyon–
& in dreams he chases trails of smoke,
teasing clouds whose rain
never reaches the ground.

Three years in that squalid
ruin of a capital have made me soft,
that’s all. Most days his guides
leave him in the dust, & lately
even the women seem impatient.
Take this one:
at first she didn’t want to,
then when she consented, pinched
her lips tight against all kisses,
rode him so grimly he was afraid
his heart wouldn’t keep up
with his over-taxed lungs–
would liquefy, or fly to pieces
from a misplaced blow.
                              He pictures
the smithies he hung around as a boy
in the Black Quarter of Azemmour,
learning to operate the goatskin
bellows with his feet, pumping
the master’s signature rhythms–
in counterpoint, sometimes, to the wives’
steady rain of pestles
in the yard–& all the ghetto’s
apprentices joining in, the smiths
grinning as they toyed
with the soft white metal.

Esteban (3) (cont’d)

When had he ever felt like this before?
Homesick! That
was no home for him, not really . . .
Yesterday evening the village elders
had cut him off, politely–
they were always polite–when he tried
to present his credentials
by giving a full account of the Journey
From the East. It’s too late
for stories, they said.
The sun’s already past the midway
point on its northward run,
& all the banded tribes that creep
on their bellies–they’re awake,
they hear everything.
                          Earless,
a snake can hear through its scales,
belly to belly with the earth–
where all words sink that don’t
follow paths of cornmeal
or tobacco smoke.

And like any shaman, the snake’s rattle
can bring a rain of sickness
if you cross him.
The blow tubes in his teeth
can bury festering darts, invisible
bullets, in the body of one
who gives offense, in the dirt
outside his house or in his fields.
In the Land of Summer, it is said,
the serpent thinks all beings
belong to him.

And Esteban, recalling his mother’s
stories during harmattan
about the great snake that made
& unmade Wagadu–
Four names to the city four times born
on the shores of the great Sand Sea—
finds it hard to listen to the calabash rattle
without his own head
starting to spin
along with the patients’. And feeling
as if their symptoms somehow
have something to do with him.
Whatever the complaint–
a shooting pain in the side, a tightness
in the chest, a throbbing under
the scalp, stabbings in the joints
of the hands, the wrists, the feet–
in the few moments it takes them
to tell it, it registers
in his own body.
__________

It’s too late for stories: In much of native North America, casual storytelling – outside of a ritual context – is reserved for the winter months. The belief that snakes will punish those who tell stories is similarly widespread, and may be related to the cult of the plumed serpent.

Wagadu: Legendary capital of the medieval kingdom of Ghana. According to West African oral tradition, a large serpent once destroyed the city when regular human sacrifices were halted.