Category: Poems

Before today, I hadn’t seen a starling dive
This afternoon, they clustered where the cars arrive
This bourbon and these cigarettes—
Now, they feel alive in my hands, and
am I to understand
that Arbor Ann is where Francophiles
can
survive,
exceed ideas of cheese and wine?

Deliver
by telephone wire
three animals in the barn
A yard of life
A drink and a dance
I think of luck and wisdom
And how close openness comes, how close

A golden night
A bouquet of stolen lights
Strung up in the mind
Caught in the flow
of soft electricity
Bells
The taking off of coats and shoes
Home, where it’s warm

This thing, if it be goad, God bless it
Aye marry, these nights are precious
Yes, let us three times bless
What we cannot yet embrace

I
The Mexican Heart 

I listen, Samuel Ramos, speak
I hear your voice, Octavio, peace
I sing, Corky, Rodolfo, Joaquin
I ask, EC, to share your dream:

You Mexicans wrestle with strength that you lack
But only because you hold your heart back

Your people are strong
The pachuco will fight to be seen, to belong
Because it is he that still hopes he will wake
From the fakeness of dreams, from the soul he can’t shake
To a land that will tell him just how to be free
And that he will be simply who he should be

Until then, he is just one of those who wear masks
Hiding his thoughts, he thinks what to ask:
What to wear, how to take what he wants, what he means
This task is his role in the slavery scene

You say that his name is Unico, yet
You tell us a story that’s hard to forget
And we know that in changing his lot he succeeds
If only by fruit of his ancestors’ deeds

He explodes in his manliness, howling at night
Tequila intestate, he lies, or he fights
He screams at the wind, at challenge he flies
He closes his arms and he closes his eyes
Never to slumber, never to rise
His sorrow is tender, but violently dies

This Mexican man, with Death as his friend
Has seen the beginning, believes in the end
His grave is of laughter, and covered with stone
His gods are the keepers of tempo and tone
He wrestles with gueros, who trample his bones
He never remembers and never atones

His mother, chingada, is hated and praised
For children she nursed, for the men that she raised
His fathers are many, from Europe they sailed
To spoil his inheritance, nurture his ails
And yet, among firstborn, brothers still hail
“Remember the wisdom, the gods who have failed”

The world to the Mexican: “I am your father.”
His response is to shrug, or to spit, or to, rather
Remove the conquistador, render his brains
To stand up and imitate all he contains
To wrestle with youth and injustice and pain
Until the unsettling silence remains

“Where are the gardens of faces and blood
That fed us our nourishing spiritual food
Guadalupe and Jesus have left us to starve
They fled after those in the mountains we carved
They followed our fathers, and all that is left:
Philosopher’s words and our people bereft”

Yet, from this soil, community springs
The struggle is spreading and solitude sings
If love and connection are what he desires,
An orphan reborn in the dance of the fire,
(They burned down his temple and built up a spire)
He tears down the walls as his freedom requires

Returning to myth, he catches his hope
Which was always just there at the end of the rope
That he braided with chaos, with shame and with fear
With worship and warriors, soldiers and tears
With losing and drowning and finding the years
With something like memory choking the gears

You say that his name is Unico, yet
You tell us a story that’s hard to forget
And we know that in changing his lot he succeeds
If only by fruit of his ancestors’ deeds 

II
The Mexican Man

From you, Mexicano, some may surmise
Estados Unidos is dust in your eyes
We hear the ranchera, we think you resent
The ways of the white man, the money he spent
That should have been yours, if treaties were meant
Let’s give back the river and land, we repent!

Sharing the power of mind and machine
The ways of technology, what do they mean
To people who come from further than Earth
Forlornly entranced with the source of their birth
Who borrowed the light of the French in their youth
Who suffer in struggle to realize their worth
In reaching beyond, exceeding your grasp
Illogical passions escape in a gasp
Of greed or uncertainty, standing aloof
You stand like a chulo, protecting the roof
“I have no place in this house,” is your truth
Your stubbornness gives you a tentative proof

In immaturity, boy tries to stand
To kill what’s before with the palm of his hand
And when he is found to be less than he claimed
The power to move doesn’t answer his aim
A sense of unworthiness spoils the game
And nothing can satisfy, nothing can tame

But you remembered the voice of the past
Forgiving your father, you come round at last
Delivering knowledge of family and kin
And balancing science with water and wind
Your poets and pastors, your saints and their sins
Your teachers and prophets, your women and men
Your poor and your ugly, the village of tin
You jump off the roof and invite them all in 

III
A Pan-American Future 

And now a corruption of character lingers
In hands of the government, rules of the fingers
Bribes are a commonplace measure of trade
Chipping foundations so ardently laid
Cartels are recruiting young men to get paid
The weak and the women are sorely afraid
Rewards are not given for what has been made
The planning of men and ratons is mislaid

A class of respectable peasants endures
Their manners are fine and they work for the cure
In deference to age and to telling no lies
Their love for their family and friends is their prize
They give who have nothing, and yet they devise
To shelter their neighbor from early demise

Protecting the people, invading the scene
They give up their riches to raise up the mean
Yet hope that will last still calls from afar
A vision of crossing the border by car
There’s nothing impeding their progress, no bar
Excepting that gringos keep closing the door

Some are successful, some legal, some not
And for some it’s as simple as not getting caught
They come here to find a new way to subsist
For food on the table and dollars in fist
For some who can stay, it’s greater than this
For some it’s a land that shakes hands, but no kiss

And, too, there are some who have training and time
Who come to our nation on visions and dimes
Collected in desperate searching for more
Than little in cupboard, little in store
Who lighten their loads as they brighten the shore
To the Mexico lost in the Mexican War

And those that are here, they’re proud of their home
The echoes of life sound like where they come from
While greed and injustice entangle the lines
There’s blood on the altar and fruit on the vine
And when it comes down to the things we define
This country is yours, this country is mine

 

 

 

I have an annotated version of this poem with explanations and attributions. Please know that I have utilized many sources for ideas, as well as some turns of phrase. Those men invoked in my opening really made this poem possible; their words inform and undergird this effort.

We are gods
And the damnable thing is

These are just stories—these are our stories
A plus moon is somehow an equation
to determine how to make us sleep
when what is required of us is to be
drained and drunk,
revived and reinstated

We are gods, I tell you
You must see that, it is everything
So that, knowing who you are
You also see how vile, how wonderful
When you croon at night, it is pitiful,
It is tragic, your longing, it is important
Because you are the offspring and the essence
The body and the blood
The gift and the child

One day we awoke to find
The drowning dream, the spark of mind
Connected in a line, sensational
To the divine, an umbilical cord

How did we get this way
How is it that I have awoken into life
to find that I am a god
I did not do this
My body is a reflection of their bodies
Mother + father
But surely this unending spirit
is a reflection of a greater father
a greater mother
transferring life through some
unseen connection

I had no desire to vandalize
It was an ecstatic destruction
Brought on by an ache of the spirit to
stretch, to laugh at things and their order
After the moment
Let everything be set to rights once again