Waiting for Grace

We are waiting, waiting with, waiting for... Prepositions aside, we are always a juxtaposition. Just suppose.  I’m waiting, something I’m not very good at. Not a happy camper. So I learn to be a modified bag lady for the infrequent doctor visits, I hate the waiting room. True Godot. Where is Estragon when you need him? 

There are so many forms of waiting, we hardly notice, we are so programmed. Patient sheep. I usually bring a snack, some water, a novel, a notepad, receipts, handcream. Anything to keep me entertained. Not a purse, mind you. All the purse-like vitals go into my front pocket. A purse is a big target.

The deal I had made with myself in order to be an artist in residence was to carry the absolute minimum. Be at the ready because danger, though always present, was never clear. I travel through so many dicey neighborhoods. Hunter's Point is the absolute worst, not a good place for white folks to aimlessly wander. 

My second cousin, Pat D'Arcy, a redhead who lived in the dicy hood, gained serious street cred and respect when he pulled out a chainsaw to cut up some cardboard boxes. They gave him a wide berth after that. 

I drove a rickety old truck named Blue Lazarus, the back filled with art supplies. I had no cell phone, no way to contact the outside world if things went south. But the deal was I could walk into the school with whatever I had in my pockets. My backpack was merely a decoy. The goods were always on me. 

Always carry your money close. Something I picked up in South America. Keep your valuables in your front pockets because the razoristas were true artists and they could slice a back pocket open in seconds and you couldn’t feel a thing. No blood. Backpacks were an easy target. We wore our daypacks in front like kangaroos pouches. There’s always a lot of waiting around when you travel, in transito, todo el Mundo. 

One time we were traveling from the Petén jungle of Tikál enroute to El Salvador, but the US invaded Honduras. Tegucigalpa. And there we were, stuck in transito, call it purgatory, and everyone was on the move, with nowhere to go. Nothing like a little US sanctioned banana republic war to spice things up. We waited a very long time in the Guatemalan airport greasing the palms of airline clerks with morditas to get a seat on the plane to anywhere. We weren't choosy. 

Guatemala City was already uneasy, seething with hostility—and twice now, grace waited with us. Once, outside Atitlán, the guerrillas were disappearing tourists and the Guatemalan Army was pulling people off buses and shooting them. They pulled over the bus in front, and the one behind, but not our bus. We walked with grace. We were allowed to travel onward. In the Petén Jungle the Guatemalan Army stopping us again but we were allowed to continue onward. We were waiting with grace there too. 

At the airport luck followed us a third time. We bore witness to first, and second-hand stories of the ones who were not so lucky. The man who gave us a lift out of the Petén Jungle after our taxi man abandoned us 40 km from civilization. He was searching for a sister who is a nurse. We never found out if she was one of the lucky ones or like us, or one of the disappeared. 

The journey goes ever forward and we will never wait we never waited for Grace. We kept moving on, Grace was within us. But for years I couldn’t stop dreaming of snipers in the jungle waiting for us. We were walking charmed life 

6/16 2006 Writers' Group

An Uneasy Truce: family

My publisher asked if I loved life, for he was held at gunpoint, & he questioned where all that passion came from. I’m not sure which passion he was referring to, living, or the taking of a life. The question came on the eve of my uncle Bill’s death, his funeral was on the day I left for Russia, I didn’t cancel my tickets, I wrongly assumed I was exempt from grief because he was an enemy. He once tried to sell my grandmother's house and land behind her back “for her own good” because she was “getting on, and I was growing up too wild.” 

My uncle Bill made her cry, bullying her with that first-born energy. My grandmother was a strong woman but a son is next to God in an Irish family. In a white-hot rage, I attacked my uncle, pummeling him with my small fists, a skinny 12-year-old who once wanted him dead. I felt nothing when I heard the news of his lung cancer. Now he’s dead, and I was surprised to find myself in a fog, suffering from grief because I discovered that blood is indeed like the cliché—thicker than reason or emotion—no matter how disfunctional the family. I will learn this lesson again when my parents die.

I’ve never been held at gunpoint, other than at a roadblock deep in the Guatemalan jungle—with no witnesses. Does that count? We were lucky to escape with our lives. I have never been held at gunpoint, but I watched the campesinos sleep with studied indifference as the soldiers practiced kickboxing with Uzis slung over their shoulders. I did count how many. 

Back home in the safety of America, I will have nightmares about snipers. In Peru, we came upon the body of a lawyer dumped in front of the Chorillos tunnel in Lima—his crime, he was a brilliant lawyer for the other side. I cannot shake the larger images of war from my mind, it wasn't my own life I was worried about, but the perpetual genocides committed by both factions in the name of liberty—for whom?

I am the grand-daughter of a revolutionary but I keep an uneasy truce with those roots. My grandfather, while working for the San Francisco city jail, shipped suitcases of guns to Ireland during the Rebellion, he knew Parnell and the executed Liam Mellows first hand. We have photos of him and Mellows in the field below our house in Forest Knolls. Did he know Michael Collins? Probably. My mother’s cousin is named after him.

My grandfather and my grand-uncles met in safe basements, filed serial numbers off the guns confiscated by the police force, and shipped them to a contact in New York. To Liverpool, and then onto Cork. A grand-uncle missed one serial number in the muzzle, and the shipment was traced back to my grandfather. When the feds tried to intimidate my grandfather into a confession, he said, just try and prove it, for he knew his law. Some vow there will never be peace in Ireland until the fifth field is no longer in British bondage. My aunt Jane helped airlift Irish kids out of Belfast so they could experience a normal life, if only for a summer.

My grandfather was a thorn in the side of the English. When the Germans fought the British in WW1, he was an acting German Consulate for San Francisco. We don’t know the details, he was a closed-mouthed man. When India struggled for independence, he was involved. When Indians were not allowed to own land, bought Fresno farmlands for them. 

A grateful Jahn Singh (Singh means lion) sent us crates of oranges and raisins every Christmas. My grandfather must’ve sent guns to India too. I came across an engraved invitation from the Indian Consulate dated 1945, inviting my family to the Independence celebration in San Francisco. A thank you letter from (James) Seamus Mooney, an infamous political prisoner of the ’30s who was held responsible for the death of a longshoreman during a union riot (I was surprised to hear a lawyer, speaking of ethics, refer back to the Mooney case). 

My grandfather took the city on, suing them and winning the landmark case (he was his own lawyer, having “read” the law, the Bar didn’t exist) when they discriminated against him, passing him up for promotion to High Sherriff in favor of someone else. My family emigrated to America after the Famine, so, we know no other passion, other than to survive.

My second cousin, a mathematician, was whisked off right out of high school to Chicago, to White Oak, Tennesee, to Alamagordo, then to a PO Box address in New Mexico. When she died of cancer, the story came out.  They said Manhattan Project. Fermi Institute. In Santa Fe, I stood at the bridge where the Rosenbergs were captured, and shivered in the sunlight, Born during this age of Light, I have no choice but to weave the stories. Nor could I stop crying at Los Alamos—what we've done in the name of an idea. Remember the Bay of Pigs? The scars go deep, and I cannot stop writing about it. Bearing witness—it is this writing I cannot get published because it's too dark.

Yes, I am uneasy about the new Russia, as I am about the new Latin America. Now that we've had our cake, we (who really do see the other side of the coin) have the audacity to tell them they can't have it—when we've set up the wish list of ultimate attainment to begin with. I know we can't convince the Olegs of the world—they are incapable of seeing out of the trench of their miserable lives, and there's something in the Slavic character, that will continue to hold them there—the root word “slave” speaks volumes and needs no interpretation. 

 

What traits I admired in Oleg while we were in the Ukraine quickly evaporated on American soil. Oleg's limited vision and inability to look inward for root causes is a microcosm of the whole; have we deluded ourselves into thinking that the ideals of communism (vs. anti-capitalism) or another system could overcome some basic human traits? He seem to think America owed him something, he could sit back and take life easy.

No matter the country, it's the same old story—war between the sexes, only I'm no one's footstool. I love life because I love my art—and every man seems to want that space for himself. And having been the victim of men's desire, I know first-hand of death, having nearly died because of the babies I gave back. I was the product of a divorce; I saw my mother go crazy (and the suicide attempts that followed), an aunt and drunken husband & co. where violence and poverty was second nature to breathing—to know better than to leave myself at the mercy of society as a single mother. I've been the psych wards from the inside and have no intention of becoming an inmate.

I love life because I know how easy it is to abdicate—the way my 17-year-old cousin did at 4 a.m. in downtown Santa Rosa on a Harley at full throttle. Maybe drugs were involved. I don't know. But when he died , I was there with him in my dreams—and I never wanted to wake up to hear the news. I dreamed the darkness, the fog, and the red light of my cousin's death—only we're not supposed to remember these things during our waking hours. My mother banging on the door to wake me with the news, but I refused to waken, because waking was worse than the nightmare. There are things I tell no one, but it comes out in my poetry; sometimes I worry about there being too much death in my work, but I am a witness.

Perhaps that’s why I teach poetry in the schools. I search for the bright ones—and despair when whole classes show nary a shining star. I sometimes wonder why I bother, the work is so exausting, but ultimately I have faith. The brilliant gift of a 2nd grader, Trevor Yeats (great-grand-nephew to William Butler Yeats) sustains me:

This body is to ask
this question of the mind:
Is the sun to shine on the day of my death?
Is the hole in the universe to stay as big?
Tell me, tell me, where is the answer?

Where is the answer to lie in today’s hands?
This is the breath, to breathe this air.

Trevor Yeats
2nd grade,
Higham Family School
Santa Rosa, Ca

© 1996 revised 2000 Maureen Hurley

Sonoma journal: war stories

After David Bromige and Gerry Haslam's reading, we all go to the Redwood Café and tell horror stories. David tells us of Jim McCreary's stint being William S. Burroughs' secretary.

Jane McPherson and I spin yarns about the guns we've met on the Gringo Trail. I tell Guatemala stories,  the war, the roadblocks, the Guatemalan army. Trying to find a decent place to sleep in Panajachel, it was either two dollar dives or three-star $40 digs, with nothing in between. Jane said she had a tantrum when she was traveling, her boyfriend traveled only on the cheap.

I tell Jayne of the Nazi place we stayed at in Panajachel, the bungalow was the only place available. But he gave us the creeps with his twin Doberman pinschers, his black leather boots, riding crop, and the eyepatch. We lasted one night as it was Gestapo Central.

Steve Tills is trying to write this piece entitled #69 and can't. And we become ribald. Maybe it's in context – the other pieces will support it as a title. As the complete poem. We segue off into personal tirades of bad relationships, love gone wrong in all the odd places. I don't mention how John liked his bondage. I can finally talk about Latin America without any mention of John at all.

I like Tom Kelly a lot, we have a lot in common. He's a married man with two kids. He tells Old Eureka stories, and we both went to church last Sunday—to our great surprise. Everyone turns to us and asks Together? We laugh and say, no we've only just met, no in different towns, Eureka and Nicasio.

Tom Kelly encourages me to write more of the old West Marin, saying he liked my Nicasio piece so much. I said I wasn't a writer back then, so I didn't hold onto the details in the same way. But here we are anyway, chronicling and channeling the past.


November 2, 1995 (excerpt)

BUDDHA MOON

BUDDHA MOON

When Neil Armstrong first walked across the face
of the moon twenty years ago did she tremble?
When the astronaut came back from space he was a changed man.
Nothing mattered any more. After all, he'd seen the earth unveiled,
turned a little crazy, and it was like looking into the face of the gorgon.
He saw what we've done to her in the name of civilization,
making the first imprint in thick lunar dust.

In Guatemala, I held a Mayan smoking mirror in my hand,
a piece of fallen star, but you'd already planted another seed.
Did the moon shudder, the way you expect me to nowó
like Chac-mool, who ripped the heart from an unborn sonó
only to wonder why the smell of death greets us in the chaparral?
I am a vessel empty of light. I should have known better
than to trust the sun. When you walk across me,
Luna cries in a language you'll never understand.

Newton said, for every action there is a reaction.
We cannot reconstruct the past to fit our poetic needs,
nor to  ease guilt. Footprints remain after 20 years,
as if it were yesterday, or, only moments before.
Perhaps we should never have crawled out of the broth.
I want to tell the gobies and mudskippers there's been a mistake.
Go back into the ocean, your mother. We can't live on land,
nor breathe the air. In the Galápagos, evolutionary myths
crawled out of the precambrian mind of the sea.
Our lives pass before us in geometric exponentials.
Long after we've gone, life will continue;
another blastopore, in all its variations, germinating.
The goddess is made of basalt like the sea floor.

Off the coast of Japan, two rocks got married
with golden ropes, but the waves threaten to take one back.
They fortifed the islet with steel girders and concrete,
trying to halt another kind of progress.
You understand the bondage part, but not love itself.
The gods of dailiness have swept us bare.
Fallen off from ritual, who are we then?
Danger chose to walk in the form of a pigmentary default,
likening your eyes to the sky. You've found the cliff
to throw me from, and still not satisfied,
you want to barter exquisite corpses for forgiveness.
Your father is dead—his blue eyes beneath the Sea of Cortez—
tell him everything. Perhaps the sea will take you back.
No questions asked. But then, you already saw to that,
shuffling the tarot cards with a dealer's ease
from the bottom of the deck.

5/22/89

In Tikal

In the jungles of Tikal, I collected parrot feathers, small red flames or bright blood embedded in the grass. There is a cacophony of screeching and racuous laughter ringing through the jungle. Toucans carrying their beaks of burden, shiny black and yellow trumpets, eye us from the tops of trees by the ancient reservoir. 

The incessant thrum of insects is so loud it goes right through you like an electronic sound, amplified. The walls of vegetation hiding imaginary speakers that vibrate. It’s so loud, the surface vibrates the loose cotton sticking to us in early morning.

Promise of heat. Red road, jungle soil. Philodendron, palmetto, liana. We follow an artificial waterway, strange rectangular slots to hold water like miniature watering troughs for animals. Why did the Maya make them? Or were they more recent earthworks?

We stumbled upon an old ruin, not restored like the others, with murals still intact. John treated it like a mountain to be climbed except he can’t get down again. The murals have something to do with sex. The temple is covered with mossy epiphytes. I direct him back down the wall, stone by stone, verbally describing the toeholds. If he fell, surely he would break something and we were far enough from civilization to be concerned. He did make it back down to terra firma again, but was a bit surprised by his own temerity. 

Howler monkeys in the distance, the unseen guerilla as well as the young soldiers in the jungle with their Uzis always at the ready—among the few tourists looking for a more ancient rhythm, trying to condone the 20th century.

Journal entry, 11/6 John Oliver Simon, Teresa and Sean, Guatemala

My neighbor is moving, tossing out lots of books. Always desperate for an interesting read, I scrounge through her growing bookpile in the dumpster. After all, this is how I found out about Douglas Adams and hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. Mostly college catalogs and a book about asexual relationships. The play, She stoops to conquer. 

A blue notebook like the kind John uses. It says RJ Moon on the outside. Reverend Moon? Small tightass handwriting, science notes to page 59. Genetic engineering. Not my neighbor’s. Did she borrow it? How unfortunate the name, RJ Moon. Probably Robert John, not Reverend James. College catalogs for Oregon, Southern California, good old Whittier and redneck republicanism. Social low-calorie IQ and a catalog for Swarthmore. 

Will I jump anytime there’s a reference to John however indirect? Do I care that he graduated with the highest honors? Was it there he hardened into the habit of falling in and out of love every few years? I talk with Teresa and Sean, friends from the gringo trail, they reminded me that we tried to break up last fall as well. That said, it seems to be a pattern that hits a lot of people after heavy travel. 

Last year, we had to stick it out because of the abortion. This year, there is no excuse, no reason, only ourselves. They said they’ve been going through that too. Sean says medical school is worse than travel for putting strain on relationships. They didn’t seem too concerned, like this was another phase.Teresa did recommend to book on the changing couple, especially since John has a higher rate of switching partners. 

Hugh’s parents were married eight times, and his wife won’t let him walk away from it. John‘s card came yesterday, he writes about the emptiness inside his girlfriend niche, and the emptiness where I am space that specific Ness of who I am, the companion, the friend. He says he admires my mind, my creativity, who I am but can’t live with me because he can’t live with himself. He asks should I have been more direct about breaking up? Yes. But more than that, you didn’t have to break up to work through this. Asshole.

Lynn Watson tells me it’s hideous out there. All the men are schmucks. I worry about aids and trying to find a reasonably intelligent man who is compatible, who will push me further. John doesn’t have to prove he’s smart. He has a degree that is well documented. Rhodes scholar that he is. I, on the other hand, I’m always plagued with doubt and insecurity because of my dyslexia. I’m not trained academically. I did go to school and got my degrees but it was wasn’t exactly challenging. 

I need to be in the presence of minds burning bright as my own. In the presence of James Burke,I felt I was in the presence of a burning mind and it fired off so many sparks I could barely keep up, and I loved it. I loved the challenge. I worry about finding such a mind again. Teresa and Sean said they will be up in February and would like to have dinner with us, could we behave ourselves? They said they’ll just duck when the knives get flung. They said they were used to that sort of thing. February seems like such a long way off.

Are the French Really Rude? On the Gringo Trail

ARE THE FRENCH REALLY RUDE?

Just back from spending the summer in South America, for me, one of the first indulgences of coming home (besides marveling at flush toilets, potable tap water and raw fruits and vegetables), is to read the Sunday paper.

One title in This World section caught my eye. “Are the French Really Rude?” Foreign LA Times correspondent Stanley Meisler writes, “after five years in France, and American still has a puzzling time figuring out the French. Are they really rude?

I read that article with particular interest because I was going through the same dilemma after spending two months on the Gringo Trail with them. In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, all those places we budget travelers have been beating a path to, made popular in the “60’s, is the Gringo Trail. Tropical beaches and ancient ruins are de riguer. Club Med is out.

One meets people from all over the world vagabonding on the Gringo Trail but these days the bulk of travelers are comprised of young Europeans. The trouble with the Gringo Trail is that the travelers tend to bring to bring a portmanteau of their country’s obnoxious habits with them. Friction develops.

Fellow tourists from other countries tend to get annoyed with each other. Being forced to ride 14 hours in the Pullman car or a first class bus with a group tour of rude Frenchmen is worse than water torture for some travelers. I suppose a tour of North Americans or Germans would be equally obnoxious— but one sees fewer North Americans on the road.

These reports are not isolated instances of psychopathic travelers who have it in for the French. For example, the journalist from Boston’s very first sentence to us was to commiserate how rude the French were.

It seems one Frenchman didn’t like the way she moved his suitcase in the overhead luggage rack above her seat to make room for hers. He jumped up frothing and shoved her suitcase back screaming if he wanted his suitcase moved, he would have done it himself.

Days later she’s still pissed off. The problem with the Gringo Trail, is that you keep running into each other in various ruins and cafes all over South America. Vendettas and quickie marriages are common.

There are times when I prefer a second class carriage with its chickens, pigs and robbers to traveling with the French. When the train stopped to wait for an oncoming train to pass, pity the poor traveler, unable to face a second class pissior, who jumped off the parked train to take a quick pee and lost his eyeglasses to a light-fingered Peruvian admirer in the process. He was pissed off. P.O’d. is a more polite abbreviated term.

Any tree in a public park is well guttered with piss. A seal rookery smells better than the local plaza. One rarely sees a Frenchman traveling second class. I didn’t always have this racist attitude toward an entire segment of fellow travelers. Being on the road with them too long did it.

When I first came face to face with blatantly rude French travelers was in Guatemala. It’s true they won’t give you the time of day. In Latin America, every one graciously and politely greets each other. A greeting is met with coldness by the French. Being in a restaurant with them can be embarrassing for fellow Gringos. If they wanted to eat at Maxim’s why on earth did they come here?

I though my normally liberal traveling companion’s bristling tirade against the very sight of the French was a bit of an overreaction— he’s logged many more miles than I have, with ten more years on the Gringo Trail than I— I figured that they just pushed his buttons and the incident was merely one of travelers crossing each other’s paths wrong.

That was until one Frenchman decided my bus window needed closing with my hand still in it. I wasn’t upset that he knowingly slammed it on my hand. He didn’t have the courtesy to ask to close it. As it turned out, I was carsick— about to lose my cookies as they say— because he smoked a cigar and I needed air. A minor brawl erupted. What thoughts go through their heads that they prefer to do violence to fellow travelers than to speak anything abut French?

Or the time one Frenchman took to shouting and laughing into the wee hours in the open air bathroom adjacent to our room in a minus three star hotel in the Galapagos. Minus star hotels generally don’t have glass in the windows or curtains for starters. I asked him to be quiet in the lengua de pais, Spanish, which he ignored. I tried both the formal usted and the familiar tu forms. I even tried French. No luck.

It’s amazing how much English they do understand when it’s delivered at top lung and peppered with stout anglo-saxon phrases. “Fuck” a guaranteed attention grabber will usually trick them into speaking English with you. Then they really hate you.

Next morning, he claimed innocence saying he didn’t understand Spanish because he was French— as if that in itself was an excuse— and proceeded to deliver insults like a schoolyard bully.

Lack of sleep does wonders for my Irish temper. He erred in his judgment as to how much abuse I would take. Spineless, I’m not. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. When he flicked his hand like a glove at my face like a man about to challenge another to a duel, he got one.

I avoid physical conflict, being on the short side of small. There was a time when I despaired that I would never reach five feet. That was like breaking the sound barrier. When I was in 8th grade, the school bully, a well developed “girl” named Tayde who outweighed me by100 pounds, and was a foot taller, had me cornered and tormented me one time too many.

I went in swinging expecting to be killed on the spot but I didn’t care any more. About the only place I could make contact was with her boobs. We always speculated they were fake balloons. Well, they weren’t and they didn’t pop. To my surprise, she laughed, and later became my friend.

I went for the Frenchman’s throat. I didn’t care that I was creating an international scandal. I was out for blood. My companion separated us and everyone thought he had pushed the Frenchman and jumped on him! Male chauvinism. He didn’t become my friend.

I am reminded of the curious fact that the French installed in their public buildings the placard, “no spitting and no Bretons allowed here.” They have little love for the Celt yet they call themselves Gallic— which is a Celt of course! The French, or the Franks of Charlemagne as they were called, took what is now called France from the Celts in the first place.

It took the Bretons, last of the European Celts to rescind the law concerning spitting and Celts. Llamas and Latin American men spit like crazy. A disgusting habit. At least llama spit is mostly hay.

The natives get jaded fast from all this hobnobbing with world travelers and demand money for everything from posing for photos to tourists loitering in public squares and churches. Gone are the National Geographic salad days of photographing the natives going about their business in quaint settings with llamas gamboling about.

Kids are the worst. Dame plata, dame sucre. Gimme money, gimme candy. And if you don’t give willingly to the cause, there are other methods. They’ll come up and hug you, their tiny starfish hands thoroughly frisking each pocket and wrist before you can say como te llamas.

They grow up to be razor artists who slash your daypacks and pants pockets so everything falls out. There’s a funny story of a razor artist so skilled that one unfortunate traveler’s pants fell off as he was walking down the street. Some are that skilled. It gives new meaning to the word embarrassed.

In South America, one has to register name, age, nationality and passport number at every tourist site and public transport. Each ticket taker demands this information and woe to the traveler who resists. I assume this precaution is in case there’s a coup so they’ll be able to identify the bodies after. This does not make me feel any more secure.

Half the time, we weren’t about to list our passport numbers namely because our passports were safely stashed inside a secret pocket in my traveling companion’s pants which meant exposing himself in public just to get the number and so we made up new ones on the spot.

Getting arrested for publicly unzipping and rummaging in one’s pants in a foreign country didn’t appeal to us when there were so many other more interesting things we could get arrested for— like false passport numbers. Ticket takers are almost as irrational as the French when crossed.

My traveling companion, at 46, took a perverse delight in noting he was usually the oldest person on the road. About the only time he was upstaged was at Lake Titicaca by a 60-year-old New Zealand grandmother who decided it was time to travel the world. So she left husband and kids to fend for themselves for a year. At 12,600 feet, she did better than we did in the thin air.

He said, admiringly, “I hope I’m in that good of shape at 60.” My traveling companion and I were an anomaly. North Americans, Californians— over twenty-three traveling with backpacks. Not many from our neck of the woods travel in strife-torn Central and South America these days. The declining dollar, the unofficial coin of the realm is keeping us home, but not the Europeans who are able to travel at bargain prices. The median age of all the world’s people is twenty-three.

The cliché that the French are rude as you’ve heard seems to be true in Latin America. It’s become one of the topics of conversation in coffee houses along the Gringo Trail. Latin Americans are complaining. Even other Europeans. I’m not about to write off the entire French population. I love French cooking. My aunt spent two years in Paris getting her Grand Diplome at the Cordon Bleu School of Cooking. I can’t imagine the world without the visions of Renoir, Cezanne or Debussy.

I also remember reading how the impressionist artists were barred from the Salon of Painting because they did something different than what was accepted as culture. According to my aunt the French come from a stiff, unbending world, blamed in part on their rigorous school system which focuses on rote learning rather than creativity.

“Shhhh! You Americans and French always at each other's throats! France is a middling power, arrogant and with an inferiority complex,” said a Limeño friend. It’s a pity so many take the national prejudices with them.

I’m sure I will meet many lovely French people traveling. I prefer the individual travelers to groups who may as well never have left their native soil to begin with. Nationalism belongs at home.

I read that the French president Mitterand is one of the few foreign leaders who stands up to the US and refuses to bow to its power and influence. They have banned “American” words like hamburger and computer from the French language, fearing the corruption of their language. Our language is enriched by the addition of French. I can’t see North Americans boycotting words like envelope, romance and intellectual because they’re French words.

I can imagine all the hate mail I’ll receive in French envelopes on this one. (Oops, French envelopes means something else again. Rubbers, galoshes).

One Peruvian said France is too unyielding. It’s unable to bend. That is why it is no longer a superpower. As Americans— let me digress. Calling ourselves Americans is considered an imperialist attitude. And rightly so. It was pointed out to me that North America also contained two other countries, Canada and Mexico. We are all North Americans. English, Spanish and French.

Central and South Americans don’t call themselves Latin Americans. They call themselves Americans! And they are also Americans. I’m sure Kennedy addressing the people, “my fellow Americans…” had no idea he was addressing two continents. Simón Bolívar’s dream was to unite South America and call it the United States of South America. How different things might have been if he’d succeeded.

As US citizens, we are often called on the carpet for our embarrassing policies on Central America. We travel as ambassadors of the American people who don’t necessarily support or agree with the political policies of our nation.

Reagan is a very dirty word. Reagan may shoot down passenger planes mistaking them for military planes in the Iranian Gulf but at least he doesn’t go around blowing up Greenpeace ships protesting nuclear testing in the South Pacific like the French did in Tahiti. That’s a very small consolation prize.

I take it back. The man’s senile and crazy. Referring to the destruction of Polynesia, Jacques Cousteau said, “small material things mask the vital problems in the destruction of a culture. He was referring to his own countrymen. Nationalist attitudes should stay at home with all the extra baggage you don’t need (like the outboard motor) while traveling in a foreign country.

Stanley Meiser cites a stifling school system and foolish posturing on the world stage as an excuse for their behavior. He writes, “all studies show that outsiders look on the French as the coldest and least welcoming people of Europe. They have no tolerance or time for spontaneity or weakness.”

One begins to wonder why a group of people who steadfastly refuse to learn the barest minimum of a foreign language would even want to travel. Simple words like excuse me, con permisso, or thank you, gracias would make all the difference in the world—well, not world but in the Americas at least. ”When in Rome, do as the Romans do” obviously hasn’t yet been translated into French.

The sad part is, aside from pissing everyone off, they miss so much of the culture. Americans both the Latin and Northern of the species— are gregarious and open. A Bolivian writer said, “Nowhere else in the world do people treat you like the French if you do not speak their language.”

Note Bene: I transcribed these journal entries in 1988 - 1990, hence the variable dates. (I'm moving them all to 1988, journal entry date, not transcription/revision date). We were in South America during the summer of 1988. I was trying to publish these stories, or at least find a home for them. I've a vague recollection of the Machu Picchu piece being published in The Paper. 

I was readying several of these Peru pieces pieces for an anthology, House on Via Gombito: Writing by North American Women Abroad. I also wrote Bill Truesdale, the editor for New RIvers Press, St. Paul, MN, a rather zany letter about my travels across the USSR. He took the letter, and not the stories. 

After an incredible journey through South America, John Oliver Simon broke up with me, left me for a young blonde former student of his, and it took me nearly a decade to recover from the horror of it all. Going to the USSR in 1989 was my salvation—and still John was trying to reel me back in. Or maybe he was doing the AA thing, in his case, the SA 12-step thing, atoning for his wrongdoings. By that point, I wouldn't even give him the time of day. Ironically, we managed to heal the gap nearly 35 years later. So it's fitting that these pieces finally get to see daylight, after languishing in darkness for so long.   —Maureen Hurley 2/26/2014

I've very few photos transcribed over to the electronic medium, another project. Here are three small albums.

Machu Picchu
Peru
Galapagos

Journal returning from Mexico and Guatemala

I'm back from Mexico and Guatemala, and I'm plagued by bad dreams. The red light of the digital clock becomes a fire burning at the top of the temple of the Jaguar at Tikal.

I have a hard time convincing myself that I'm home again. Reverse culture shock. I wake up, not knowing where I am, or who I am. The feeling of utter desolateness doesn't leave me. The soldiers with their Uzis continue to patrol my the perimiter of my dreams.

Meanwhile, thousands of forest fires burn in Northern California. The sun is a red ball in a gray sky, an angry eye in the temple.

9/9/1987

Guatemala Journal: 26 Aug., Tikal, Guatemala City

26 August

Guatemala airport, we're waiting to get out of here on standby. John bribes the airline ticket clerks. I sit atop a pile of luggage. The latest US invasion of Honduras has thrown the airport into chaos.

I can't believe how much we got screwed by Avioteca's travel agent, Señor Gamboa. He overcharged us for the hotels and the taxi we paid for, never came to pick us up.

John raised hell this morning. We got 80 quetzales back, that about covers the fraudulent taxes we paid. Their attitude is that we're all rich and we deserve to be ripped off. Not exactly great for the travel industry.

I forgot to mention the amazing toucans flying from tree to tree with their ridiculous rainbow striped banana shaped bills, or last nights dinner of venison, puerco, and some piglike animal, tepasquintle, it sounds like the Honduran capital that we didn't get to visit. I'm sure it was either a tapir or a large rodent (like agouti).

We're all a little weak need from the trots and various ailments. I slipped on the Flores dock with my sandals on slick wood, and my heavy backpack threw me off balance. At one point I barely managed to keep from falling over the rail into the lake at Petén.

I was cinched into my backpack with bellyband and breastband, wondering if I could unhook it in time, or drown trying. I'm about to fall overboard, and no one sees me, they'll wonder where I went off to. They'll never think to look in the dirty lake. I compromised and did the splits, landing on my operated knee. It's swelling, but I think it's okay. Better than the alternative.

The woman doctor drinking coffee in the airport, bandaged my knees. We talked of the troubles in the Petén. She said it's very dangerous there because of the soldiers. I couldn't quite get it correct, the language barrier. Anyway, it's a bit scary here and we're rocking the boat with this travel problem. What are we supposed to do? Smile when they rip us off because we're gringos? And we don't want to be disappeared?

The Indians or the Indios, have a stoic attitude "live for today "that's all they have to look forward to, is today. The now.

Guatemala City Aug 26 postcard

26 August. Guatemala City airport. Hi gang! Well, no one can say this hasn't been an eventful trip. The Guatemalan highlands are beautiful and the Indians are amazing. They are the most Mayan of all the tribes we've seen so far. The 20th century has landed softer here than in Mexico proper. But there is lots of racial tension between the Indios and the Ladinos. There are soldiers all over. Tikal is occupied by the Guatemalan Army. Roadblocks everywhere – soldiers with machine guns horsing around – some as young as 15 years old – themselves, Indians guarding the other Indians who have a stoic practiced calm attitude about them. The motto of "live for today" is all that they have. After of couple of exciting jungle adventures with the local travel, make that robbery industry, and the US invading Tegucigalpa, it's too hot. We decided we've had enough of Guatemala, and are trying to get out today on standby. My advice to future travelers is to avoid the cities: Antigua and Guatemala City have too much going on. The civil war is very present. The villages are wonderful, but the guerilla activity and the roadblocks are too unnerving. Too many people disappearing.

Guatemala Journal: Tikal (photos)

August 25 — Another Mayan mishap. Maya International Travel didn't pick us up from Tikal. If it weren't for Eric, a Frenchman with a Suzuki jeep, offering us a lift out of the jungle, we'd still be in Tikal waiting for a taxi that will never come.

We passed three or four roadblocks. The soldiers are more scary than the guerillas. And the Tikal guards were the worst. One flagged us down looking for subversives. Five gringos and way too much luggage piled up the roof of the jeep, there's no place to hide a guerilla.

We kept thinking about the Guatemalan archaeologist who was killed last week for running a red light. The police fired one warning shot and when she didn't stop, they open fire and killing her, and a lawyer friend. A stink was raised only because she was a prominent person.

The story of the two French girls comes back to me. The war here is very real. Eric is looking for his sister, a nurse who has disappeared. He fears the worst.

Two soldiers gather water from the alligator pond this morning in a huge 20 gallon aluminum pot. Ugh. Strain the water. A bush camp in the Tikal jungle, is a military training camp—halfway between Flores and Tikal.

The peasants and soldiers alike are constructing new palapas, new houses, or Mayan na. This raw jungle is new homestead land, they are relocating the peasants from the guerilla war zone.

All studied calm expression, the soldiers horseplay with their guns waving wildly at all of us. They are Uzis, that's how you can tell the difference between one group and another.

Another soldier casually points his gun at a the peasant lying on the ground. They too are Indios and everyone is so young. Children with guns.  The boy who flagged us down at the jungle roadblock, was no older than 16.

We hope we don't witness anything unusual for that would invite certain death.

Guatemala notes

We learn firsthand of the multinationals. Think Kraft, Wonder, Kentucky Fried. Monsanto invented 2–4 D, the pesticide that's killing the campesinos. The United Fruit Company has vast holdings in Guatemala. The stock market adds new meaning to the idea of a Banana Republic.

Then there's CIA intervention. With the help of the CIA (Operation PBSUCCESS), Guatemala fell back into the throes of dictatorship. And past direct military aid from the US, the UFC has kept them in power. The Bank of the Army is the largest bank in Guatemala.

The cutback began during the Carter era. Which changed the country's wealth.

An independent peace policy is not part of the US ballgame, like in Honduras. US support in the Petén jungle is anti-guerrilla. It has fallen to the role of the Armed Forces to resist the communist guerillas who have ties with Nicaragua and Cuba.

Prensa Libre, the anti-Nicaraguan columns, a conservative rag, and the FMLN in El Salvador, are enemies of the state. The elite class vs the farmers and the campesinos.

Missionaries in Oaxaca are converting the campesinos, in Antigua it's insidious. The evangelist take is all about hellfire and brimstone, domination, and Armageddon. Right wing religion is alive and well in Guatemala. Jehovah's Witnesses in Antigua, it's an imperialist takeover. The Catholic conservative liberal theology of upholding basic human rights has been completely subsumed. Washed in the blood of the lamb.

Evangelical protestants are extremely right wing. There is God, and there is politics. The premise of the evangelical movement: the Apocalypse is upon us. Ironically it really is upon us, thanks to the doings of Monsanto, the United Fruit Company and the Guatemalan Army fighting the campesinos.

Who gets saved, it comes down to individual initiative and free enterprise— it's a wide-open field to save all those souls and make some money on the side. It's all about money in the end. The primeval Mayan Lacondones are now the prime target of the Seventh Day Adventists. Just leave them alone. They don't need your religion.

Guatemala is the overseas empire for religious zealots. What's in it for them besides saving 7 million souls? Why are all these conservative Christian millionaires dying to save so many souls? Does it all come down to United Fruit stock? What is the position of United Fruit in the community? There is that evangelical savage attitude toward Indian communities. There are goon squads waiting to kill those who step out of line, or protest.

At Santa María de Jesús the missionaries were looking so superior, so smug, wearing those false pious faces. The evangelicals and the soldiers have teamed up against the Indios. They plan to break the resistance with religion and guns and bad rock and roll.

Tikal is a strategic hamlet, an outpost of soldiers, while the guerilla are back of the volcanoes in the highlands. Otto-Raúl González, the former communist Minister of Agricultural Reform was fighting for peasants' rights. Human rights. His law degree thesis was on the socioeconomic reality of indigenous peoples, and agrarian reform—placing the ownership of land back into the hands of those who work it, not UFC.

Peaceful peasant groups organized, and were killed. Robertija Nunchu's younger brother was lit on fire. The Guatemalan military has absolute government power to eradicate what it perceives as enemies of the state from every walk of life. And we put it there. Opponents of the state are disappeared.

At the ruins near the zócalo at Huehuetenango, the birthplace of the ancient ancestors, the campesinos gather. The children are not in school, they are selling their pulseras on the streets. There is not enough to eat. Visions of the future. The status symbol of who grows up to be soldiers, versus guerillas.

Soldiers of the Criollo-run Guatemalan Army, the Ladinos, carry the Uzis. The guerillas, the Indios, and the left-wing students, carry AKAs which is a Czech version based on Soviet AK-47s. I now know the difference between UZIs and AK-47s. This isn't going to end well.

We have entered the politically correct country, a dictatorship of US-owned bananas and coffee.

Guatemalan Highlands, postcards

Indigenas mercado de Chichicastenango

Mercado de Palin

Lake Atitlan postcards

Guatemala Journal: Aug. 24, Antigua, Guatemala City, Tikal

Monday the 24th (catch-up journaling, storyline's a bit convoluted)

No use explaining about the way time evaporates here. Sean says to Terese, Time is like a river. When you die you hold your breath forever. In that instant between life and death is the end of the universe.

Climbing the pyramids of Tikal, we watch howler monkeys and wild ocellated turkeys and bands of parrots. The roaring jungle. It is not quiet here, insects are like rasping saws, or the metallic roar of lawnmowers in synchopated rhythm, some like distant phones, others like roaring furnaces.

There are diminutive paths through the jungle made by leaf cutter ants. Outrageous butterflies, toucans and stunning birds with bright feathers traverse the humid air.

At the Temple of the Jaguar, the steep ascent was scary and the descent was even worse. When I looked down, I thought I was going to faint at the top of the Temple of the Jaguar, and fall all the way down to the ground.

I look out over milpias, cornfields and learn that la canícula (dog days) is their name for Indian summer after Sirius, the dogstar (they, being Indios, it would be silly to call it Indian summer), and cayucos are dugout canoes. So Cayucos in California is the place of canoes. You can hear the work kayak embedded in the Spanish cayuko as well, from caique, related to coracle, and curragh? Convergent evolution or coincidence?

---

I never even mentioned Antigua with its one-story buildings and the numerous ruins of churches. The last big earthquake in 1976 leveled most of the town. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, the first governor de la ciudad de Santiago de los Caballeros de Goathemalan, (Antigua), once a Mayan capital, Quauhtemallan (forested land), was buried here. But the church fell down on him. James of the horsemen of the forested land.

When the crater rim of Volcán de Agua collapsed, the city (Ciudad Vieja) was was destroyed by a lahar. The new city, Antigua Guatemala (got that?) founded at Pachoy, was the capital of Guatemala. But a huge earthquake in 1773 destroyed it, causing Volcán de Fuego to erupt. The capital was moved to the ruins of another Mayan city, Kaminaljuyu, and renamed Nueva Guatemala de la Asunción. Guatemala City too is plagued by earthquakes, but not like Antigua.

We wandered into the ruins of El Castillo (Iglesia y Convento de la Compañía de Jesús?), the thick walls were two stories high. There are no tall buildings here. It is the land of earthquakes. Fragments of glazed tile glisten like jewels among the rubble. A Humpty Dumpty kind of town.

I think this is La Iglesia y convento de las Capuchinas
Convento e Iglesia de Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Zaragoza

---

Santa María de Jesús, on the saddle slope of Volcán de Agua, ten miles from Antigua, is called the cantina where the men cry. Not sure why, but ice is gathered from the volcano, perhaps to chill the chicha?

Santa María de Jesús has been overrun by Mormons and evangelists proselytizing with dueling electric guitars in the plaza. Bizarre. Hard to say which European religion has done the most damage in Latin America.

We climb the steep slopes. I watch the volcano for signs of smoke. Volcán de Fuego has been grumbling lately. Last major eruption was in 1974. Smoke rising from the summit. Small earthquakes rock the region. The earth is shaking like a wet dog, the churches are the first casualties.

---

We don't like Antigua, after Panajachel, we make wild plans to escape. All our wild plans to Tikal fall through, and re-materialize. The men go for the package deal, which includes transport and hotels. They have made a decision. Forget about the fine print.

When we arrive at the jungle hotel we discover we been ripped off for over $100 US. John loses his suitcase, there is no hot water for three hours, and we only have three hours of light by generator, and dinner is a dive. We pass a bad night, banks of mist collecting in the treetops, where fireflies continue the patterns of the Milky Way into the darkness of the trees and mist.

The tail of Scorpio is nearly overhead. We have been stung over and over. There is no light pollution here for miles and the stars are numerous and bright like in the Sierras and we are only 300 feet above sea level.

The jungle is cooler than we expected but even still, it takes something out of us, and it saps most of our energy just to explore the rooms. There is so much to see, and there is still so much unexplored.

The lights dim even as I write, the generator threatens to fail and leave us in total darkness. It is really dark here. Heart of darkness. You can't even see your hand in front of your face and there are animals out there who love human bodies. Aside from the mosquitoes who are illiterate, and bite us, no matter how much bug juice we apply. Dengue fever from the day mosquitoes, and God knows what from the kissing bugs who nest in the thatched roofs.

The archaeologist have removed much of the undergrowth, leaving an incredible landscape of pathways. Strange to see all these houseplants are growing wild. Philodendron, liana, ceiba trees, zapote trees for lintels, and chicle, (a wood harder than iron 70 pounds per cubic foot).

Strange foot-long orange millipedes and hummingbirds bathing in puddles.

---

Yesterday, a hummingbird caught behind the glass door at Lillian and Raúl's place in Guatemala City was nearly inhaled by one of the dogs. I grabbed it to let it go thinking of its poor heart, as Raúl turned gray and sat down. His heart is acting up and he uses enough nitroglycerin to knock out a horse. It absorbs through the skin he feels a bit better.

I immediately fall in love with my friend Donna's cousin Raúl, but John sees him as part of the ruling class. Perhaps. But Raúl and I get on like a house afire.

Sr. Raúl Moreno shows us his extensive Mayan collection which is larger than most museum collections. I hold a clay pot that is 4000 years old. I play on tiny ocarinas. Raúl and I play a tinny duet on instruments that are thousands of years old. He said that many objects were smashed during the big 1976 quake, and yet nothing on the shelves is protected by glass.

Much of his collection has been extensively photographed and appears in books on Mayan art, and has been loaned to museums. He excavated most of the work himself. They call him Professor Moreno. Sr. Raúl Moreno is an amateur archaeologist who is in love with learning.

Raul shows me a smoking mirror made of magnesite, metal from a meteor, not obsidian. It is so highly polished, I can see myself. He sticks a magnet on the back, it's made of  interstellar iron, of course. I can't quite grasp that I'm holding a piece of the fallen stars in my hands.

I am reminded that in San Juan Chamula, Chiapas, all the saints wore as many as three mirrors, so that when you worship them, you saw yourself in their realm. The mirror is at hand.

Later they drive us back to Antigua and we nearly faint from fear with Raúl behind the wheel, his eyesight can't be too good with the diabetes either. I don't know which is more frightening, the guerillas, the Guatemalan Army, or Raúl behind the wheel.

---

I take very few photos of Indians. I don't like intruding with the camera. Much of what I've seen in Guatemala I'll take back as a memory, rather than a photo. I've done very little writing except to catch up on the events in spurts, and certainly no poetry has stumbled forth waiting to be born. There's so much to absorb.

Huxley was right, this is the most beautiful country in the world, with its remote volcanic lakes, its highlands, and Indians and ruins.

It seems we've moved from one guerilla territory into another. Many more soldiers in the Petén jungle than in Atitlán. They are army. They scare me with their casual pointing of guns. The natives don't seem too alarmed. Or maybe it's a studied calmness. I can barely look at them, and give them a wide berth.

The French girls recount how the army stopped the bus from Atitlán, they made everyone get off the bus and everything was searched. The girls didn't have their passports on them, and were harassed. Moral: don't go anywhere without a passport. It could've been worse. People have been shot for less.

The roadblocks are real, though we've only passed through them, and have never been searched. There are several gates, and roadblocks manned with soldiers who look like they'd be happy for an excuse to test their guns. It makes spontaneous travel a bit pressured. We're careful to stick to the touristed areas.

Guatemala Journal: Aug. 22 Panajachel, Santiago Atitlán (photos)

22 August

Our first night at Panajachel, we couldn't find a place to stay, and spent the night at what everybody called the Nazi's compound, sharing a great two-bedroom bungalow. The taciturn owner was seriously creepy, dressed in tan jodhpurs, black riding boots (nary a horse in sight,) with his doberman pincers patrolling the grounds. Compared to the other places we saw, it was very expensive at 92 quetzales each, which is something like $2.55. Port in a storm, John said.

The next day we moved around the corner to Casa de Huéspedes Santander, which was very cheap, but it was quite nice. No weird vibes. A good thing too, as John finally came down with the 24-hour fever, replete with aching and trots. The rest of us are recovering slowly. We've already been there and back again.

Casa de Huéspedes Santander

We took the mailboat boat to the tiny village of Santiago Atitlán and wandered through the marketplace and got a sense of what a Mayan village is really like. We towered over the diminutive Mayans. And I'm not tall.

The mailboat boat to Santiago Atitlán

For sale: baskets of tiny dried fish in three sizes. Crabs trussed with palm fronds really got John's attention. How to you keep your live crabs from walking off. Such strange fruits. Considering how far away we are from the ocean. I thought maybe they were land crabs. But the fisherman assures me that indeed they come from the lake. Was it once part of the sea? It's a caldera.

Everywhere we look, it's a riot of color. It doesn't seem appropriate to shoot photos here. Sean shows me how to shoot from the hip, but the shutter is so noisy that I'm spending all my time looking not recording via camera, or by journal. I want to buy a purple woven top and skirt, but John buys it for me.I am touched by the gesture.

The xocomil, the afternoon winds that carry away sin, rise up and churn the surface of the lake. I think Lake Atitlán was once a very large crater. Two huge volcanoes Volcán San Pedro and Volcán Tolimán, in the middle of the caldera, rise up to 10,000 feet. The tallest, Volcán Atitlán (11,598 ft) near the southern rim, is almost a perfect cone, all part of the Ring of Fire.

Volcán San Pedro

The lake itself is over a thousand feet deep. One of the most beautiful lakes I've ever seen. Aldous Huxley thought so too. Atitlán means "at the water" in Nahuatl. The water never escapes the crater to find the sea. Introduced bass have eaten most of the native fish species, and crabs, which has in turn, endangered the giant Atitlan grebe.

In 1976, a 7.5M earthquake fractured the lake bed, causing the water level to drop seven feet within a month. More than 26,000 people were killed. The drop in the water level, revealed several ancient Mayan villages, Sambaj, and Chiutinamit, like the mythical underwater city of Kêr-Is, or Ys, dates back to 250 AD.

Panajachel, surrounded by steep crater walls, sits on a rich alluvial plain made by Río Panajachel that fans out into the lago. Panajachel means the "place of the matasanos," the white sapote fruit tree in Kaqchikel, a Mayan dialect. Nahuatl tzapotl means a soft, sweet fruit. Native orchards of sapote, pitahaya (dragon fruit), and avocados amid the coffee fincas.

Some pitahaya (dragon fruit) at the market.

We spend our last evening buying native weavings on Calle Santander. I buy red placemats, napkins and table runners. There is one television hooked up outside the cafe at the crossroads, everyone brings chairs, or petates, native Guatemalan mats, and sits right in the street to watch the TV, their only link with the outside world. The Black Christ, or is it Maximón? watches on.

Panajachel nestled in the Sierra Madre range, in the southern highlands, more than met up with my expectations of Guatemala. I am sorry to leave this place. Like Chichicastenengo, Panajachel is a Hippietenengo haven on the Gringo Trail. Somewhat glad that the civil war has kept the mostly German hippie influx at a minimum. I don't think I could bear it otherwise. Onto Guatemala City.

(expanded & revised 10/17)

Mexico Journal: Aug. 22, crossing the border

Many days later, so much as happened after Chamula, we discovered the nightmarish apparitions I was plagued with were for John. Sure, I could blame the 24-hour bug for my delirious delusions.

But it turned out that his friend Kayla really had died that night. She appeared three times in my dreams, she wouldn't go away. When I described what she was wearing and showed John her stance, he said that's Kayla. it was a message for John. They had parted on bad terms over poetry. I guess it was payback time.

San Cristóbal de las Casas is so full of tension and hatred especially toward women. I was glad to leave the place. At the Guatemalan border, an official tried to exhort a thousand pesos from the couple in front of us. We squawked loudly. A comedy of errors, we team up again with Sean and Terese. It's four against one. We all get in free. No additional mordita. Things are looking up.

We board a Bluebird yellow schoolbus and head for Panajachel. I marvel at the dark green Naugahyde seats, and turquoise ceiling. The bus brings back childhood memories. So that's where all our old school buses went, to Guatemala, on a banana republic student exchange visa.

AT THE CENTER OF A BIRD'S BACK EINSTEIN SLEEPS

My aunt says the millennium is at hand.

She strokes my cheek, wants me to believe, be saved,

reunited "upstairs" when the time comes,

while on T.V., a modern-day Elmer Gantry preaches a concoction

   of science and myth—anthropomorphic bible-thumping.

It's the tenth anniversary of Jonestown, Greneda.

I have not received communion since the Vietnam war.

For this, I will spend an unspecified amount of time in purgatory,

my aunt says. But there are graver sins I have committed

which I tell no one. I watch re-runs of Kennedy shot over and over.

After 25 years, grief unfurls anew and I am ten years old again.

The sacred volcanos of Peru and Guatemala are littered with corpses.

In the Peten Itza jungle, near the sacred city of Tikal, saraguato monkeys howl,

making no distinction between exiled guerillas, and the invading army—

Uzis bought with U.S. dollars. AK-47's. In the jungle the Cold War continues.

In the ceiba trees scarlet macaws scream warning to thrumming insects.

Oblivious leaf-cutter ants carve low tunnels through the underbrush.

I never get used to the guns. In the highlands I never saw boys or men—

only women and babies waiting under the volcanic shadows of Atitlán.

On a shining path deep in the Andes, friends carrying medical supplies

are stopped by leftist Sendero Luminoso terrorists on horseback

who let them go when they answer each question right.

Having passed the test, they feel reborn. Their path leads forward still.

Like with Kennedy, I cannot erase or help the blood

of lawyer Manuel Febres-Flores migrating to the sea.

My Peruvian friend said don't look, but it was too late

as we sped off through the Chorillos tunnel to safety.

The TV news fills in the details. He went to buy a newspaper.

His crime was that he was a good lawyer on the "wrong" side.

I have committed this to memory, and I have no words

for bearing witness to the casual departure of life.

There are no front lines in the jungle, the cordilleras, or here.

The Japanese woman warns me never to sleep

at the foot of the bed, or I will have terrible dreams.

During this harvest of apocryphal nights, I learn I have "thin boundaries"

because I dream of snipers in the jungle, and wake up on the floor

crawling toward the safety of closets. I worry about borderline

madness but there are those in power who don't dream. Ever.

Instead, they bring us nightmares. Names of horses.

Before the attack on Hiroshima, an ex-pilot boasted

how he dropped warning leaflets written in English.

He said they were like falling snow, or "window,"

the metal filaments they used to avoid electronic surveillance

while flying in enemy space. He said they named the bombs

and planes after children: Fat Man, Little  Boy, Enola Gay.

I wasn't born yet when this happened

but I keep making origami cranes to heal something in myself.

There are thin boundaries between water, air, and space.

Point in time. Crushed beneath the burden of air, fish drown.

On the swing set, I heard angels striking matches in dry summer grass.

The Hibakusha, the first to witness bright plasma clouds and shadow

are nearly all gone now. At the center of a bird's back Einstein sleeps.

Antichrist arrives in the form of invasion.

When the last condor dies, who will strip it clean of flesh

and make a quena flute from the feathers of its wings?

1986
rev. 1987 & 1989