Tijuana Book of the Dead Read online

  musta lost ten pounds on that diet

  got your new cowboy boots,

  qué bruto, man, qué bárbaro ’mano—

  hijole, today’s your big

  day, guey—

  and I march

  like some pinche mazehual

  up the steps of the templo mayor:

  • • •

  all the sacrificial class before me

  sees the blood come down

  and tells itself it’s paint:

  those priests in black feathers

  wait to cut out my heart, feed it

  to the sungod mainframe.

  But in eyedroop shuffle

  of another 6:30, I have lost

  my faith: birds

  are buscando bronca

  in every tree—I don’t believe

  anymore, I don’t believe,

  I’m not convinced

  that the temple ever earned my heart,

  that life isn’t better than this sacrifice,

  that I am a slave to be butchered,

  that I am born to die up there like my fathers

  who built the temple with stones

  on their backs:

  I cannot believe

  • • •

  not for a minute

  that I must submit

  and only ever hope

  to leave behind me

  this poem.

  Ditch Turtles

  For Darrell Bourque

  (Lafayette, Louisiana)

  ten mile drive around blackened cane fields

  empty now as country churches on Monday morning

  after a hurricane, sweet frankincense ashes

  sift down stubbled pews.

  grayness to roadside coulees

  where I’m watching for ditch turtles, splayed

  in fertilized holy water, black as prayerbooks

  scattered on the altar of the banks.

  red tractors rust, abandoned now for a season, red

  sugarcane trailers haul crops of dust, a share

  of preening egrets. along the ditch red oaks

  shade water gone blue

  and gold with crankcase oil, sugar sap.

  turtles mark the hours on this sundial prairie

  with plainsong. bow their heads into this brightness,

  fall open-armed as prophets before a burning bush.

  there’s only so much heat a body can carry, only

  so much light cold flesh can bear, their dark bowls

  overturned still ask for alms. who knows what sacristies

  within their heads contain

  the secrets that make them frown and blink.

  what memory of eggs is sacred? what psalm

  of crackling crawfish shell, what testament of coming

  close like clapping hands to mate, the clack

  of hardshelled life abundant?

  it’s 99 years of prayers for them: prayers to the culvert god,

  to the canebrake god, to the mealworm god, the cloacal

  sexual god, the field of fire god,

  the boy with a croaker sack god, the truck tire mercy god,

  the roving dog-pack god, raindrop god, sunrise god

  to grant just one more hour of heat, one short century more

  of warmth, one small well-fed holy life

  of nothing much: just boredom, just April, just mud—please

  more time.

  The Duck

  immense waves of flight

  out from forests, out

  from broken mirror beaver

  ponds in frozen mountains,

  they fled from ice storms coming—

  their shadows fell across freeways

  for days as I too migrated from frost

  dropping downslope and west—

  looking to rest under a forgotten sun.

  end of the continent—

  it wasn’t working. San Diego.

  after this bad spell I had, after

  one too many ghosts in my bed, you know

  how you wake up some mornings with the smell of the

  invisible on your fingers and the ruined broken plates

  of your plans in the fireplace—

  the first time I made these mistakes I was young

  and poor—I was not young anymore

  but still poor and still making the same bad

  moves.

  had enough for gas—drove

  1,000 miles to the house

  of a woman who knew me too well,

  who stripped me naked, sank me

  in a hot bath.

  I hoped to find shelter

  in the town where I’d died for a quarter century.

  the water did not wash

  away my sins.

  she said: get

  out. so I got out to see if my hometown

  had anything as interesting as aspens, anything

  as good as glacier water, as buffalo

  churning violet prairie shadows.

  down

  to Mission Bay.

  put the Club on the wheel

  in case a vato from my old street

  was out shopping for a snow-beat Jeep—

  old body felt older watching

  fabulous hunks of So Cali muscle

  jog around the Bay—just me

  and my rusted ankle twisted

  by too many turns on Rocky trails,

  my burning back, my stupid ideas

  aching in my head.

  marched away at my usual splendid pace,

  feeling hideous.

  you have to remind the body it exists

  outside of moist night clenches and carnitas

  in green salsa. it’s not all bad dreams,

  lust and crouching near-sighted as a mole

  over clacking plastic keys.

  I blasted past

  old men with walkers

  those bastards

  until my crunchy ankle

  frictioned up a fire in the kindling of my leg

  and dropped me trailing smoke

  to a waterside rock in pissyellow sand—

  landed, feet in seaweed,

  and the smug old bastards

  lapped me and hove away.

  cool air felt wonderful:

  a train rolling out of San Diego, going where

  I always wanted to be—somewhere else—

  sounded its long cry and faded north.

  I walked to the water, soaked my feet.

  OK,

  not bad

  I confessed—fish

  fine as needles tried

  to sew my toes together.

  near the effluent pipe

  that launched tampons,

  teardrops and coffee into the sea

  a duck.

  just one.

  a mallard.

  a male.

  half-bald.

  ragged.

  asleep.

  I sat down, said “Hey.”

  he jumped, looked at me.

  Wack, he muttered.

  Wack wack.

  “I guess I’m all right,”

  I said.

  he looked back at me, clacked

  his beak four times,

  tucked his head

  under his wing

  and went back to sleep.

  • • •

  a windsurfer boomed past like a jet.

  “What the hell!” I said.

  Wack! he complained.

  Wack wack.

  “Damned idiot.”

  Wack.

  “Right?”

  Wackwackwack.

  our heads swiveled in unison

  when the absurd slap of jogger shoes

  went past us.

  we watched them recede:

  we lost interest at precisely the same moment

  and turned back

  to our meditations.

  the wind ruffled his feathers.

  the wind lifted my
hair.

  me and the duck:

  compadres.

  suddenly,

  I understood the winos

  of my youth,

  the filthy

  old men

  in the dntn plaza

  where the fountains gurgled green

  and sailors still called town

  “Dago”

  and marines rushed up Broadway

  looking for hookers

  and tattoos—

  those old men shuffling

  their vague plaza circuits

  reeking of piss

  and port, no cents

  to catch a bus

  out of there—tossing

  stale rinds of last bread

  to the birds

  of the sidewalks,

  holy feathered vermin,

  all of them:

  dead

  those lonesome rummies

  now, with all their beautiful pigeons,

  swept up after sharing daylight

  before winter got them—

  old forgotten men

  and their pals.

  • • •

  I couldn’t stay.

  I didn’t know

  where I had to get, but

  I had to go

  and never

  come back.

  Wack,

  he said

  when I called

  “So long.”

  I had miles to flee

  before it snowed.

  I left him

  to rest

  until

  he too

  rose

  to his own

  impossible

  going.

  Elk

  elk

  didn’t care

  if that lover

  left

  or the bedroom

  froze

  and snow

  didn’t care

  just rang

  its aching bells

  through aspens

  nine miles

  below the glacier

  all that autumn

  all their bugling

  those antlers

  clacked wooden

  echoed

  like broken chairs

  in a kitchen

  abandoned

  La cara perdida

  Es invierno

  Y te escribo a través

  De este silencio eterno.

  Si pudieras ver lo que he dejado

  Bajo el cielito negro

  De este llano. Tres poemas

  Amargas. Mil figurinas

  De plomo. Mi nombre.

  Fotografias

  De un vestido

  Azul. Y

  Tu cara.

  Soy un hombre sincero

  De donde mueren las palmas

  Mi infancia fue

  Un jardín de fuego.

  Y ¿Tú? ¿Qué

  Supiste de mí?

  Antes de tocarte la cara

  La perdí.

  There Is a Town in Mexico

  For Kim Stafford

  There is a town in Mexico

  where no one ever dies, and those who have

  passed on pass back through

  the cottonwood square where alamos trees

  are whitewashed halfway up

  their trunks, and those few awkward dead

  the world coughs up stop

  by a bench where my grandfather sits

  at a black typewriter and a stack

  of oystershell colored sheets. “Name,”

  he says as he rolls the page

  with that ancient sound, that machine

  of poetry and dreams taking its morning taste

  of forever. And those inarticulate dead

  who made it through mango trees, agaves spiked

  a dusty jade, past snapping turtles

  in the huerta’s bog, scratch their heads,

  try to remember their names. Any name

  will do. My grandfather, for example,

  calls John the Baptist “Juanito.” Zapata

  never comes to town, or he’d get a name as well.

  The dead call themselves their own true names:

  Honeysuckle, Hummingbird, Wind,

  Coyote, Blue Deer. My grandfather types.

  Once they sign the page, these few

  scoop a drink from the cool stone

  fountain, shade their eyes, and stare

  at all those shiny

  forgotten coins.

  Song of Praise

  For Cinderella

  One spring I happened

  to read a high meadow

  laid out in stanzas

  of wild

  flowers,

  Their many names a poem

  written in gold-burned grass:

  lupine, foxglove, columbine,

  the tawny soft footprints

  of lions.

  This page of blossoms laughed in wind—

  one thousand bees

  about their business

  bumbled in tumbling light: sun

  that morning snuck

  from pine boughs, yellow as pollen,

  rose like chimney smoke

  from naked beams of ghost cabins, abandoned

  to morning glories, weathered gray

  from decades of snow. Crows

  walked the light struck

  train tracks

  vivid as twin rivers

  of dimes. But sunlight

  is what I’m trying to explain. How

  it whispered, how its glow

  was sweet as combs within the hive,

  how it fell

  across the bellies

  of streams

  back-stroking

  downhill to somnolent plains.

  Brightness

  that shook out the weave of the wind,

  light that tumbled in coinage of green,

  down trembling wild apple, that beat with

  the heart-shaped cottonwood leaves,

  split open like pillows to spill

  dayfeathers

  over bluejays, magpies,

  haunches of restless bull elks. It’s

  the sunlight

  so rich you could lift it

  in a tin cup—fill it with sky—take a swallow

  of glowing and sing.

  And the squirrels

  were shouting hosanna. And

  the eagles were shouting hosanna. And

  the lioness, blessing

  the field with her shadow

  paused there, sniffed,

  raised a paw as she silently

  sang her hosanna.

  Peaks clutched their capes of May snow.

  Lakes opened eyelash of pines.

  Moon faded pale as a snail shell.

  The pages of morning were turning, you see.

  And the point of all

  of this, the point

  of this poem, that light,

  light of the Rockies—heron blue, silver

  as ice, green

  as a hillside of sweetgrass

  mountain grape and holly—

  that arose with a sigh

  was only one half

  of the day

  I find

  in your aspen grove

  eyes.

  Love Song

  For Cinderella

  When I have gone to snow

  On the far side of the hill

  And this evil age takes breath

  To hunt sweet flesh of poetry

  Where will you go

  When I have gone to snow

  On the far side of the hill

  What Zapata will ride thunder

  Up the alleys of this city

  Shooting from the hip

  To defend you

  Woman, I will lay these lines around you

  I will paint your tongue with songs

  When I have gone to snow

  On the far side of the hill

&nbs
p; As every child will

  What new man will light his bones

  Into a bonfire for you

  What new man will come

  To keep you warm

  Definition

  Illegal Alien, adj. / n.

  A term by which

  An invading colonial force

  Vilifies

  Indigenous cultures

  By identifying them as

  An invading colonial force.

  Bravo 88

  For Pam and Bill

  July in the Sonoran Desert. The Jeep is dying.

  So is the first marriage. Both

  spew oil, poisoned fluids

  on the hardpan. Both wrecks

  ready for the scrapyard.

  And here comes a fat Chevy

  tow-rig, muscling up from wobbly

  water-mirages on the blacktop:

  driver has Red Man tatters threaded

  between his teeth and his gut

  hangs out a torn shirt, burned

  crimson and spotted

  with spit that flies

  straight as tasers when the wind

  don’t hit. “You call me

  Bravo,” he says, and

  peering in the open maw of the Jeep and

  the wife standing ten feet away,

  adds: “This here

  don’t look too god for you,

  buddy. No

  it do not.”

  Lying underneath, busted windshield glass and pebbles

  pocking his back he says: “You wanna come

  home with me tonight? Spend the night?

  I got seven rooms. I got

  a spare. Got a bed and a couch.

  Got my dad in there. It ain’t much I got

  but it’s a house.”

  We imagine chainsaws and

  human sacrifice. The wife

  backs deeper into the desert. Away.

  Bravo

  is not hurt.