Series: Cibola

Shiwanna (3) (conclusion)

The last color drains below the west
& the last jars & water baskets
have ridden home on
their owners’ heads–or
on shoulders of boys
trying desperately not to trip on
the suddenly unfamiliar streets.
At first light the gossips will make
their rounds counting sandals,
take note of the doorways near which
some luckless man’s possessions sit
neatly piled, or tied up & topped
with an elegant knot.

But for now this night, early
in the Nameless Moon, is given over
to the soft backbeat, cadence
of fear & consolation,
of tangled limbs. Muffled
fragments of glossalalia,
loveliest of songs.

The grandmother sleeping in
the next room is awoken,
turns over on her mat;
the grandfather’s steady snoring
momentarily ceases.

The Priests of the Bow
keeping watch from the rooftops
hear it & smile, despite the threat.

Even the medicine priest
of the Great Shell, four walls in
from the open air, for all
his abstinence & fasting, feels it.

Allows himself a shiver,
a loving thought.
The People will continue.
__________

the gossips: A slight exaggeration, going by ethnographies from the last hundred-plus years. Serial monogamy and female power to initiate and terminate sexual relationships are so solidly entrenched in Zuni culture that who is sleeping with whom is not even thought worthy of gossip. In neighboring pueblos, though, sleeping arrangements apparently do excite the attentions of gossips in the manner I’ve described. And given Zuni’s multicultural origins, it’s possible this was the case there, too, at one time.

Reader (11)

If silly men pursue me and make songs
About me, it may be because they’ve heard
Some legend that I’m strange. I am not strange–
Not half so strange as you are.
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
Tristram

[T]hese women are to proper females as devils are to proper males. They
live in the wild, are active at night, and stand for something “bad” about their
sex.
DONALD BAHR et al.
“Piman Songs on Hunting”

Dorris, flushed, looks quick at John. His whole face is in shadow. She seeks
for her dance in it. She finds it a dead thing in the shadow which is his dream.
She rushes from the stage. Falls down the steps into her dressing room. Pulls
her hair.
JEAN TOOMER
Cane

Esteban (4)

Right at dusk–his quick meal over,
the men settling into a game
of dice played with bones
(whose original owner he decides
not to inquire about) the African hears
what sounds like flute music
trickling down a side canyon
a quarter mile off. A brief phrase
ending in a question mark.
Again.
Once more.
Each separated by a slightly longer pause.
The exact blend of exaltation
& sorrow, he thinks–someone
like me.

And no one else pays it
any mind–no one looks up,
there’s not even a twitch
from the dogs’ ears.
They raise their heads only
when he gets to his feet:
Stay. I’m just going to take a leak.

Which might have been true,
had he not caught a glimpse
of a figure darting between shadows
up by the first bend of what,
he guessed, would turn out to be
a cul-de-sac, a box canyon.

(To be continued.)

Esteban (4) (cont’d)

In the fading light
he finds footprints across the dry
streambed, traces their contours
with an index finger: young, female,
unburdened. One way out.
From somewhere on the rim
a jackal’s laughter, ricocheting up
& down the canyon.
Coyotl, he corrects himself.

A few minutes later he rounds a bend
& stops short: a small campsite
in the cave formed by an over-hanging
lip of rock
where a woman stands smiling
behind a fatwood fire.

He hadn’t realized until now, with
an almost painful jolt
in his chest, how lonely
the lack of this very smile had made him.
It’s never been a question
of hunger alone–
thirst perhaps? he wonders briefly
as she lets her cloth dress fall.
No, not that simple, he decides
as they stand fully naked,
the shadows from the fire
playing across their lean forms,
making their skins shimmer & ripple
like obsidian mirrors, he thinks,
remembering a hidden idol
wreathed in incense.
Like the surfaces of two
flood-swollen rivers about to join.
This has so little to do
with the merely animal.

Moving like dancers, both of them
trying to minimize awkwardness,
they glide on contrapuntal feet,
touch toes as
his arms pivot at his sides,
bending slightly so the palms
face up, & in the long moment
before she moves in against him

it’s as if–yes–as if his whole
body is united in
this gesture,
a response to hers–the gift
her own body presents.
And the voice of disembodied Reason
once more proclaims in its tinny voice
This is it, the one thing

worth seeking, this
Word: original sign
freed from all symbolism, the body
now & always as it was
in the beginning–pure Will . . .

Esteban (4) (cont’d)

While the woman stretches curious fingers
toward the beard, the wondrous hair
like gourdvine runners trailing
down his back
& the dizzying sheen, until
they alight upon a point of interest
precisely where any woman’s gaze
would tend to end up. She gives
a strange cry. Esteban smiles
to himself, knowing she’s never
seen a circumcised penis–
purified of its female covering
as God intends: a covenant
through which this imperfect Nature
can be completed, redeemed–

but she recoils, eyes narrowing,
making the signs
for Earth / Sacrifice / Taboo.
–What? She thinks
I’m a sacrificial victim who managed
to escape? Then with curled lip
extending her arms out straight
she claps her wrists together–
Slave–the half-clenched
fingers forming
an inadvertent heart.

No–right palm across his face,
shouting Hay una carta,
aquí­, clutching where the brass
locket would hang on his shirt,
the hand language failing
as his vision clouds &
he lunges, clasping a forearm,
reaching for her hair.
But she twists
unexpectedly inward,
against him, plants her teeth around
a neck tendon, moaning
low in her throat in a burlesque
of pleasure, raking his back
& side with her nails while
he writhes, howling, until
she finally releases him

& he leaps back, loses
his footing, falls.

Esteban (4) (conclusion)

She’s gone. He collects
his scattered clothes–through
what magic had she
recovered hers? And
his thigh still tingles from
a sudden brush of fur.
He kicks sand
to put the fire out–to hell
with any more tracking–& feels
his way back in the half-
dark of gibbous moonlight,
avoiding the shadows.

When he slips into camp
everyone’s asleep & the fire’s
down to coals, as if it’s been hours.
One of the greyhounds works his jaws,
whines a little. Esteban kneels,
reaches down to stroke his head

& stops, noticing that his eyes
remain shut & his feet twitch
in sequence–the unmistakable
rhythm of the chase.

Reader (12)

We lift our songs, our flowers,
these songs of the Only Spirit.
Then friends embrace,
the companions in each other’s arms.
So it has been said by Tochihuitzin,
so it has been said by Coyolchiuhqui:
We come here only to sleep,
we come here only to dream;
it is not true, it is not true
that we come to live on earth.
ANON. AZTEC, 16th century
(adapted by David Damrosch from the translation of John Bierhorst, Cantares
Mexicanos 18:39)

The honored men are singers. The man who has fought for his people gets no honor from that fact, but only from the attendant fact that he was able to “receive”–or compose, shall we say–a song. . . . What of a society where the misfit, wandering hopelessly misunderstood on the outskirts of life, is not the artist, but the unimaginative young businessman? This society not only exists but has existed for hundreds of years.
RUTH MURRAY UNDERHILL
Singing for Power: The Song Magic of the Papago Indians of Southern Arizona

All Piman songs, regardless of “way” or type, are formed in the same song language. We may draw the implication from this, that for Pimans “song language” is the lingua franca of the intelligent universe. This is a Piman manifestation of a theme common among North American Indians: In ancient times the animals and men talked the same language. Among Pimans they still do and that language is song. A further implication is that this lingua franca is now spoken in dreams, for that is how singers get their songs. Presumably the linguistic transcript of a dream, if such were possible, would be largely in song language.
DONALD BAHR et. al.
“Piman Songs on Hunting”

The Friar’s Camp: Song Contest

Sated with flatbread & venison,
men & women laughing
in a half dozen languages
fall silent when the chief elder stands up
beside the newly erected cross.
He speaks in a low voice,
just above a whisper–wind
in mesquite leaves, rustle of the first
fat raindrops in the dust. The sound
of power. The crowd stops
being a crowd; listening is a thing
each person does for herself.
Hands lie still in laps. At length
the elder returns to his seat, his last
few words breathed rather than spoken.

Then the town crier–a much
younger man–gets up, wielder
of plain words. His speech takes
half the time, even allowing
for rhythmic pauses. Each phrase
passes from language to language
around the square.

Your coming has honored us.

For it is only through songs
that the hearts of all creatures
open fully, flowers for night-
flying moths . . .

With this, the polyglot susurration
swells to a hum: A singing contest.
The rest of the speech is lost
in gathering excitement.

The friar’s party gathers in a knot.
A nobleman from Texcoco
agrees to join the three oblates–one
a half-breed raised in Spain, the other two
donados: given to the Order as children
for what their terrified parents assumed
would be a sacrifice.
They have between them songs enough
to challenge the town’s best.

Meanwhile the women too
have been whispering: now
a grandmother stands up & says
that since none of their number
wishes to compete, they’ll be willing
all together to act as judges,
hold the stakes.

Relieved murmurs sweep the plaza.
This way each side will be able to save face
& munificence alone will shape
the outcome, it seems,
since women have never been able to agree
on a single thing since the world began–
a fortunate thing for men
& all their whims, their roguish heads
aswarm with desires, the lice of envy
itching, itching, grown plump
with the scalp’s own blood.

* * *

Marcos slips off to begin his evening prayers
while all eyes are on the singers
gathering at one end of the plaza.
Six translators sit in a semicircle at the foot
of the cross & pass a reed cigarette.

The smoke spirals to the west:
May your words
strengthen all hearts.

(To be continued.)

The Friar’s Camp: Song Contest (cont’d)

1. El Donado Marcos de la Sierra

Day after day
the lizards dance on the sand.
When the sun climbs high
the mountains won’t
sit still. Even the tortoise
toiling as little as he can
moves in time with the maguey’s
sharp-tongued shadow.

Sun. Tree. Stone. Sky.
The will to circle in the wind.
To walk like Lucifer up
& down in the earth
or lope like Coyote, always
one meal from the end.

Let the fullness without
break the drought within–
the way all teeming
prayers & curses seem
to seed the clouds,
go stepping out with feet of rain
on a Galilee of air.

This very day I too
will begin dancing.

The Friar’s Camp: Song Contest (cont’d)

2. White-Feather Priest

straight along the western edge of the land
I went where the great birds cry
wheeling
alighting on hills of sand
on hills of sea

*

the sun just down
through the waves
a dark road opens
ai ah this pounding in my chest

*

there my guardian comes
with his white cane
there he strikes me
& drags me under

*

four kinds of water
he gives me to drink
a bitter brew I fly
on a bitter wind

*

then I hear then I hear
what the gulls are crying
then I gather
songs

*

at the still
center of the land
something pounds
something threatens to break

__________

This section draws its imagery from translations of O’odham song cycles and speeches associated with the once-annual salt pilgrimage to the Gulf of California. (I am not entirely certain who or what the spirit guardian represents.) It’s impossible to say how much of later, O’odham religious tradition echoes the priestly religion of their ancestors the Hohokam, but I imagine that basic elements of worldview have remained intact, including the notion of water as both dangerous and essential to life, and the conception of the earth as surrounded and underlain by it. This idea is too widespread in the broader Meso-American cultural region to have been derived from similar conceptions in the Hebrew Bible. And in what is now the desert southwest of the United States, such a belief system seems especially apt, given the perils of both floodwater cultivation and irrigation, which the Hohokam perfected to a degree elsewhere matched only by the desert agriculturalists of coastal Peru.