HEADED FOR CHIAPAS

We rode the overnight bus cross-country, 

snaking our way from the coast up dirt roads, 

13 hours of hairpin bends threaded

up steep mountain passes like a tapestry.

You can only hold your breath for so long.

Near the Chiapas border we stopped at a pullout

to stretch our legs, while waiting for the engine to cool, 

clouds of fireflies circled us. We were so high up,

I mistook them for the stars overhead.

7/27/22 rev. 2/18

And when I don’t know which way to go, I flip a coin, freewrite (photo)

Yes, it’s come to this, flip a coin when stasis sets in. John the Ambiguous was always a great one for a coin toss. Have a kid, get married, whatever impasse flummoxed him was reduced to a 50-50 chance. 

A good thing that coins aren’t built like dice to increase the odds. Otherwise, we’d be all day setting up the parameters and permutations for radical changes in life. Or not. So once we were at Casa Bombeck in Chiapas, he flipped a coin either we go to the Lacondon, jungle, or, the Mayen village of Chamula. We chose our coins carefully. The Quetzalcoatl head came up on the antique five peso coin. Feathered serpent grinning at our feet. 

And so we rode green horses into the jungle, to the village in deep in the San Cristobál Mountains where gringos were still an anomaly. When I showed him the coin, the old man at the Mayan church took a shine to me, it must’ve been the aguardiente he was sipping—for strictly religious purposes. 

He gave us a personal tour of the church, which was once Catholic and the floor was strewn with pine needles. Their sweet smell unreproducible with chemical scent, the rafters draped with bolts of calico cloth, and all around the walls was an army of obscure saints all wearing smoking mirrors on their chest so that a worshiper saw themselves in the saint’s image. Self affirming. I recognized a few of the saints, but saw my face blazing on the pectoral mirror of each one.

The old man set up a small portable altar on a shoe shine box with Coca-Cola, copal and aguardiente. I put the Quetzalcoatl coin on the altar and he was pleased. We had somehow broken through the culture and language barrier. By that action, none of us having any language in common, other than the language of the oppression between us. All of this came down to a toss of the coin. The ringing sound of destiny on the floor. We never know what the wish was, or what it offered up.

9/10/2004 Writers’ Group

HUNTER'S MOON

HUNTER'S MOON

How many men have sworn undying love
under the last full moon of summer,
bartering for it like blankets in native markets
of the Andes, Oaxaca, orTikal? In Iqiutos,
where the Spaniards sailed upriver looking for El Dorado,
and dolphins are thought to be half-human,
men still rub dolphin oil on their pricks,
calling them bufeos, then fuck them for good luck.
The canoejueras, plying their profession from bank to bank,
who harvest gold with their porpoise mouths,
suck and lick the river with such skill, it is said
they can make even the dead come in the rocking boats.
A woman walked along the banks of the Amazon—
where truth becomes a seductive blur—
miscarried a small dolphin,
and they burned the poor creature
who flew up into blue smoke.

I believe in anniversaries.
If you want to talk, go back to that night
when the stars wavered under a moon so full,
there weren't enough arms to hold it,
and undo those promises made on the road to Oaxaca—
because something in my reptilian brain
still waits for you under the marriage blanket.
But an unseasonable seed sprouted
in my garden, and so, you wanted my death
in the Temple of the Jaguar at dawn.
I should have known darkness devoured each shadow
our feet planted and we never escaped the jungle.

The cats are fighting tooth and claw again.
At least each knows the other, and in this knowing,
the separate sheets of memory are shrouds
for the eventual death of stars and angels.
Something of the past resurrects in telephone lines,
satellites orbit loneliness and other notions of guilt.
After your call, the house rustles, things fall from shelves,
I think rats & opossumsóno, the earth is trembling again
and I blame it on my wildly beating heart.
Inconsolate weeping has little to do with why we failed.
And so, we wear this badge, our voices prayerwheels
carved from heartwood of felled ceiba trees.
Mending broken shards to tell the future by
is almost like reconstructing the past to fit our needs.
The cat does his laundry with his tongue.
Southern birds rub wings with a milder winter.
If you go south long enough, it becomes north.
One can argue almost anything but I'm tired & want to sleep.
This poetry which preserves us
is our final inheritor,
our final judgement.

11/5/1989

TALKING LEAVES

TALKING LEAVES
        Trabaja el mar en mi silencio.
             —Pablo Neruda

We watch the sky for clues.
Birds proclaim unchartered territories.
A certain slant of sunlight grows wings.
Keepers of the circle, we sit on a blanket,
listen to translations of wind in the sycamores;
palisades     summer grass      cicada song
and pass the drum. Someone hands me a piece of paper.
The source of my freedom is what I fear most.
Bluejays argue, scissor-sharp, which direction to fly.
Words fall from the mouths of bees,
deer hooves rattle—first breath or final inspiration?
It no longer matters what we believe in. It happens anyway.
Watermelon rind on the blanket—not the marriage blanket
where he undid me with promises under the stars of Chiapas
only to bury a child's eyes beneath the stones of Tikal.
From inside the drum of my heart I howled
under the solstice moon rising over Mt. St. Helena
and from deep canyons coyotes answered. What more do I want?
I wear trophies of where we've been:
Baja, Peru, the Galapagos. An equator of pain visible
to the naked eye takes on the green form of air above the pond.
I struggle for balance, drawn to obsession like fire to air,
and learn first-hand the meaning of words: betrayal, abandonment, she.
She stalks up the path; a pathetic fish skewered to her stick.
Taking my man wasn't enough, she had to kill the sunfish too;
not to eat it but to prove some senseless notion to herself—
because it was alive, an irridescent trophy. A bauble.
Its carnal colors bleed into the sky; drab corpse forgotten.
He will comfort her, call her a brave hunter.
They will build shining deceptions; whatever it takes.
Mirate, I hiss at her. Look at yourself.
The cardinal rule of the hunter: eat what you kill.
He devoured me clean down to gleaming bone.
The poets cloak me with feathers and shake the gourd;
they say the Tarot gave her Death mounted on a white horse.
I dream the medicine man uncovers a word on the photo—
heiau, and he asks me for silver coins to bury it with.
For the grandfathers, for your vision, he says.
On a yarrow stick, an "i," the letter of death
becomes a plumed serpent, Quetzocoatl.
He smudges me with wild tobacco smoke and sage,
kisses me, says, you will find what you seek.
I remember how it felt on the outside:
this circle becomes a source of acceptance.
I am the drum, I learn the drumsong.
We are standing on ceremonial ground.
A wobbly prayer lifts up, takes flight
across the valley. Heiau he way,
he noni noni ne he, heiau he way.
Oh!

9/18/89

ABORTED WORDS

ABORTED WORDS

In the Chiapas dust I have found stone

And from beneath the moon's gibbous face; bone.

Owl's feathers candle the sky into flight,

And the lactating stars witnessed that night,

A marriage blanket. We built a landscape,

Imagined futures to harvest and rape,

Though dew on the grass is primordial,

And memory transmuted into glass, real

As blood—the things said that cannot be undone.

And love we have killed before its begun,

Comes back to haunt us in our dreams, like birds

To ply the Icarus inside us with words.

In dust I've found the ancestor of stone.

It is this life we choose to live alone. 

2/27/1989 

TURNING STONES (after Layer of Marine Haze)

TURNING STONES

I am a mover of small rocks.

From Monte Alban I bring small pottery sherds

to Mount St Helena. I leave volcanic rocks

for my dead grandmother and take quartz crystals

from the mountain.

On the ridge facing the ocean

I've made a triangle of stone cairns.

Four vultures wheeling, circling as their want—

shiny black feathers in the deep forest

and blueschist

converging over my altar of stones—

I left them corn and bread,

water and sage smoke.

We invent ritual.

The elequence of necessity crystalizes all thought

into the single vortex of the sea

churning and rising like a cover

over sleeping bodies.

The sea answers, she is our mother.

These shells, these rocks are our gifts.

The passage of a soul is marked

in the muted silver of bracelets,

dentalium and jaspar.

In the firepit, rounded cobbles—

What quarry gave them birth?

I've begun to speak of things

I never knew I knew.

We are learning new languages to keep us on shore

and I am a camera facing the iris of my eye—

the diaphragm, open and close, open and close

like the contracting and expanding universe.

I dream of machine guns in the jungle

and of falling over backwards.

I dream of sickness

and of rolling with desire on the grass with wolves—

After all, we are pack animals.

On the day Robert Duncan died

I dreamed of the green meadows I am called to

again and again.

2/5/88

Mexico Journal: Aug. 19, San Juan Chamula on horseback (photos)

We rode to the village of San Juan Chamula on horseback, 6 miles each way. No roads. It's good to be back in the saddle after so long, but I'm sore. John's horse spooked when his rain gear whispered and flapped and nearly bucked him off. I nearly fell off my horse, laughing. The land is severely eroded. Red earth bleeding.

O

At Chamula, where you purchase the tickets to enter the church, is a stash of confiscated cameras. An effective warning. We are here on their terms. Photographs are forbidden.

Hybrid Catholic Mayan church, San Juan Chamula

Inside the hybrid Catholic Mayan church, large bolts of chintz material are draped from the rafters spanning the ceiling. There are pine needles on the floor. And all the saints lining the sides of the church wear shaving mirrors at head height to remind us. And the floor is lit with candles everywhere.

Mayans chanting. Copal burning. Coca-cola bottles, the gods' drink of choice and home brew. It is very spooky and is very holy. It is the center of power, you can feel it, we've been searching for this place without knowing it.

I was overcome with tears at the main altar. We offered up pine needles and rose petals and lit two candles, concentrating on the convergence.

At the altar of the three Marys we light another candle. And the soft voices of Mayans chanting in an alien tongue fills the darkness.

Outside, we greet the elders who give us permission to take photos of the outside of the church for 300 pesos. We offer them two old silver 5 centavo quetzocoatl coins. They are very pleased by this gift and don't let us pay the full price.We are no longer tourists, but long-lost friends. We shake hands several times to come to complete this transaction. It is sealed with aguagardiente.

The ride back home to San Cristóbal de las Casas was long and cold. But good. A long day.

This might have been Aug 18. I didn't date it.

Mexico Journal: Unharmonic Convergence

Last night, a series of nightmares plagued me. During the long night of the Harmonic Convergence, three green apparitions kept reappearing. During the first nightmare, I screamed. And woke myself up. But I could still see the greenish apparitions. 

The second time it happened, I was irate and wanted them to go away. But as soon as I fell asleep, they reappeared, coming at me until I was up, awake, screaming, and running around the bed, scaring the crap out of John. It was as if I was in a fugue state. I was tired and just wanted to sleep.

I showed John how one of the dream beings came to the foot of his bed —how it stood there, and how it moved. An older woman with grey hair in a loose ponytail, dressed in a jeans skirt, a baggy turtleneck, wearing Birkenstocks. Very Berkeley. I  mimicked her stance and mannerisms so perfectly, John said, That's Kayla, whom I didn't know.

By that point we were both thoroughly wide awake, so we spent the rest of the night sitting cross-legged on the roof. We sat back-to-back, with our elbows interlocked—facing east and west like mirror image Chaak-mools. The roof became our ceremonial square, the center, its navel. Forget the ley lines. We needed a midnight curandero ceremony to set the world right.

We watched the Milky Way whirl overhead, dazzlingly brilliant, watery stars—no light pollution. We worshipped the moon. We watched dawn break over the mountains, and the path-sweeper, Venus, fade on the horizon. Then we stumbled down off the roof to reclaim our murdered sleep.

The second presence was someone I thought knew, someone saying goodbye. (Later I would find out it was Dave Evans). We weren't sure about the third presence—it felt both insular and ancient, it was both good and evil. A dark animalistic Tzotzil Mayan entity? A bat god? Tzotzil means "people of the bat," 

I had trouble convincing myself (or John) that I wasn't making this stuff up. Or was it merely a dream, the aftermath of fever? Harmonic Convergence? I think not. The Katibak, the world of the dead was upon us. I dreamed of quetzal feathers, and wondered who my animal spirit was. How to reclaim my soul.

But there have been so many murders in Chiapas this summer. And it seems most of them were women. There is palpable tension between the Indios and Ladinos and the gringos. The unrest of the indigenous peoples is gaining strength, even among the Lacandón, said Trudi Blom, the Swiss anthropologist of Casa Na Bolom. 

San Cristóbal de las Casas carries a heavy psychic burden. It is not a place for the faint of heart.

Mexico Journal: Aug. 17, San Cristóbal de las Casas storm (photos)

17 August, Monday, San Cristóbal de las Casas.

Since Oaxaca, it's been a full schedule. Again, where to begin? Silvio Rodriguez is soothing our frayed nerves this morning. The Harmonic Convergence has been anything but. The dark side is strong here. We've been battling with the gods, and they have found me.

Yesterday we hiked up to the source, Ojo de Agua, the eye of water in search of the Moxíquil for the convergence. We're climbing straight up the steep hillsides. we had mucho fear of robbers the ladrones. The tall, stolid Anglo girl we met at the bus depot—her tale of being raped in the country three days ago, leaves us stunned. There's so much misogyny and hatred here.

The footpath is the only highway to the mountain villages. Tzotzil-speaking Indians. We adopt an elder indio couple for protection. Their Spanish is very weak and she warms up when I ask the names of plants. We tell them of the uses for a plant I recognize: Indian soaproot. He translates this for his wife. We have made a bond. I plucked white geraniums from the trailside.

At the trail of the three Ys, we turned right and the couple hiked onto their village, With many fond adioses and hugs, we sadly part. The trail to the right eventually leads to another village on the outskirts of San Cristóbal de las Casas.

Later at Casa Na Bolom, I learned from Trudi Blom that bunches of geranium with pine needles are gathered to dispel bad dreams. I must've unknowingly kenned that. All I needed were creen crosses and copal.

The boy driving the burros and the horse up the mountain doesn't know where the temple is. No one we meet does. We descend into the village an hour later and catch a collectivo back into town. There are so many people inside the van, we are riding shotgun.

We barely make it to the Santo Domingo church before the cloudburst. Hail. Hail the size of peas. Torrent after torrent pouring off the church gutters. Hail bouncing across the wooden floor during mass, and everyone taking shelter under the church eaves. The Tzotzil name for this place is Jovel, “the place in the clouds.”

Water runs down the streets as if they were canals. And we have to wade from corner to corner. Indian women barefoot, or in plastic sandals, plunge right in, heedless of the flood.

Mexico Journal: Aug. 13, Postcard from Monte Albán

Hello everyone, (to my grandmother)
These stamps are like the money here…You need lots to buy a little—25¢ equals 330 pesos. Once it was 12 pesos to the dollar. Regardless of inflation, prices are about the same once you get the English equivalent down. Oaxaca—Mixtec and Zapotec ruins. Monte Albán is very interesting. At Yagúl, is a labyrinth with hidden courtyards. Thunderstorms daily & mosquitoes. I got sick—tourista—in Puerto Escondido, like having a bad flu. Puerto Escondido was wonderful. Bright fish and coral—and the water is too warm. We ate octopus fried in garlic for a week. We’re off to San Cristobál. de las Casas in Guatemala. Mail is slow. See you September first. By the time you get this card, I’ll be home.

     Love, Baba

A DROWNING MAN (the stirring of something else)

A drowning man does not need to know

how to carry a staggering load

or that stars may go out

in a single gesture.

He does not need to know

the blue-red tint of his skin's

the color of angry twilight,

or that the foam spewing from his lipsó

the frenzied sea.

He does not need to know

my shadow that once had its sweet hours

in the grass is primordial in its loneliness.

That I wake myself up from sleep

to comprehend the idea of suicide

or that I began to write his poem

seven years before his own death

was predicted on a sunny beach in Chiapas;

his whole family bearing witness 

to the casual departure of life. The 

The men who failed to inspire him

carried his corpse to the waiting pick-up

like an inanimate sack of flesh and lard.

The wide disbelieving eyes

of his young daughters

as they watched their papá carted off

like so much meat from the butchers.

He does not need to know your eyes

repeat the wind's reckless secrets,

the sky fills up with jade beads,

and the stirring of something else—

another small life taken before it's begun.

1980                       7/10/1979?
rev. 88

 (This is from an earlier version so I posted it on the date when it was first written. Since I later witnessed a drowning man's death, the poem was changed to fit the events.)