Tijuana Book of the Dead Read online

por ríos de piedra

  que me llevan

  detrás de la fábrica

  cerrada—y los montones

  de carros asesinados

  torturados, con estrellas

  en los ojos

  y tú

  tú tambien

  bailas ahora

  a mi espalda

  o

  a mi lado

  y a veces

  yo te sigo

  oyendo música

  en el viento

  de mi vacío

  ardor

  Lines for Neruda

  Ay, mi Viejo . . .

  We were the men who worked the machines

  each anointed with oil on his knees—

  when our families dreamed, machines came awake

  to search us out. I didn’t know, I didn’t know where

  poetry entered. The thousand smashed windows

  that watched empty alleys, did the virus of verse

  blow in them with the tubercular wind?

  Or the poisonous voices of wet oleanders

  on Interstate 5, were they calling my name?

  The electrical smell, the machinery smell,

  the cannery smell, the armpit smell,

  the shoe polish smell, the bakery smell,

  the gas station smell, the gunpowder smell,

  the Thunderbird smell, the V-8 smell,

  the dirt street smell after rain,

  • • •

  the bare belly smell, the open sex smell,

  the hair tonic smell, the wood varnish smell,

  the tortilla smell, the ashtray smell,

  the Catholic smell, the Tijuana smell,

  the refinery smell never hinted at poems.

  The first poem I read

  was the ragged V scrawled

  in a brown sky by gulls

  escaping the garbage dump at sunset

  cutting under clouds

  over the apartment blocks

  going to a sea I knew

  was there across the city

  but never saw.

  And then dear darkness.

  Our lullabies were the inexhaustible keen

  of overhot gears beseeching grease. Our fathers’ nightlights,

  40 watt bulbs strung up on orange power cords: lynched stars

  that swung over their heads, their shadows flapped

  like wings of the machines. Old angels squinting

  at nude magazines they couldn’t read—

  coffee break black and white braille—the smudge of hard fingers

  on thighs,

  Pall Mall ash speckling sad night nipples—a touch of paper skin

  deader than snow.

  How did the Word ever hunt down our hearing?

  The engines of hunger drove us deeper to silence.

  What was it that urged us to sing? What handle

  disengaged the gears, by what chain were we dragged

  from the brink? We lost singers every day:

  one lost to pistols, one lost to flames, one lost to

  coughing night sweats, one erased by the highway. Each one

  wore black shoes,

  workingman soles as rippled as waves with no shore.

  The ironwrack pounded unceasing around us,

  the glass crash, the tire burn, the shotgun,

  the shouting. Blue exhalations sighed from our cars—

  were the vowels of my song gasping into the air?

  Was the ratchet of pistons this consonance drumming?

  Why did poetry come forth from cables, from coils,

  punctuated by nails in veils of rust

  to the beat of Border Patrol helicopters

  from words as simple as hermano, hijo, compañero,

  esperanza, amante, dolor—

  how did you come to me to lay mothwings of song to burn on

  my tongue?

  Pinche Ernesto

  In Tijuana, of an evening

  Don Ernesto James

  Drained his tequila, loaded

  His revolutionary .44

  Revolver and cursed

  The Goddamn moon

  Took aim above his outhouse

  And fired off six rounds

  Into its eye

  As he reloaded

  We scrambled under tables

  La Flaca yelling

  “Pinche Ernesto!

  Kill that moon if you have to,

  But don’t kill my chickens!”

  As his bullets flew

  Across the sky

  Like burning little moths.

  Tijuana Codex

  Tijuana to here—

  What a long rough walking road—

  A red road, my road.

  The Tijuana Book of the Dead

  Bury me standing.

  Bury me facing

  West.

  I could have been born

  An eagle, or

  A serpent caught

  In its Mexican beak

  But

  I was born the son

  Of coyotes

  And crows.

  I was born destined

  For the temple of toil: born

  To feel my heart

  Fed to the blind

  Fleeing sun.

  • • •

  Mazehalcuicatl Chichimecayotl.

  Bury me

  In Tijuana.

  Bury me

  Standing.

  Bury me

  Facing

  Where the sun

  Has run,

  For the east

  Is abandoned.

  The gods

  Are choked

  With washing machines

  In their mouths.

  Bury me

  Among tired men

  • • •

  Who smell too bad

  To enter banks.

  Bury me

  Beside women

  Old at 23

  Who stoop

  To garbage gardens

  To pull bones

  From the ruins

  For soup.

  Bury me

  Among children

  You have spit on

  In fields

  Of shattered glass.

  Pick there for my name

  Like the ibis

  After mustard seeds.

  Give me back

  To the poor.

  • • •

  I was born

  In the city of coughing.

  Rough nights ran wet

  In every arroyo.

  I was born into hills

  Where tubercular girls

  Brought up their lungs

  In mortal hymns

  Coughed their spume

  Into steel cups

  And dumped their singing

  In the mud.

  Six inches

  From my bedroom window

  Holy

  Holy

  Holy their blood.

  Holy the spores

  That rose from their foam:

  • • •

  Holy the pollen

  Of dying

  That found me

  And fed the roses

  Of fever

  In my chest.

  I

  Want to go home

  To Tijuana

  I want to be every

  Fatcheeked kneeling boy

  Firing marbles in the grit,

  Suffering through morning mass,

  I want to fly

  Newspaper kites, I want

  To be every Mixtec woman

  My aunt ever kicked

  For asking for pesos

  Outside the pollo frito

  Stand

  Nursing a coughing little mouth

  At her black nipple.

  • • •

  I want to be that mouth.

  I want to be that nipple.

  I want to be that milk.

  Bring me back

  Ten thousand times


  Bring me back: let me be

  The whore in La Coahuila,

  The sicario,

  Let me be the Jesuit

  At tacos El Paisano,

  Who still believes

  In Guadalupe and the lotería,

  In Quetzalcóatl—

  Let me die

  There again, let my dust

  Mix among those that remain

  Of my father.

  Let me paint

  A velvet Elvis.

  Let me laugh

  Until the coughing stops.

  • • •

  Bury me later.

  Let me live

  79 years

  In la Independencia,

  Raise chickens, bananas,

  Cilantro. Let me sire

  20 bright Mexicans.

  Burn incense.

  Kneel in prayer.

  Every night

  Let me sleep

  Beside my old woman

  Snoring.

  Never

  Learn English.

  Dance to accordions

  Play boleros

  On a dusty out of tune piano

  And die

  At dawn

  On the Day

  Of the Dead.

  • • •

  So I might learn

  To sing these songs

  And make the world

  Listen.

  Bury me

  In Tijuana.

  Holy the coughing.

  Bury me

  Standing.

  Holy the coughing.

  Bury me

  Facing west.

  Allá.

  NAHUI

  Insomnia Machine

  What is that engine coiled in cables and red hoses

  That lurches at the darkest hour

  As it pumps, pumps, churns

  Desire and nightmares out the mainline—sends

  Hot want into the alley down the hall

  In the window as it rusts itself

  Keeps us awake all night, all night, all night

  Like a motel neon sign in the rain: pounds

  To death: that working machine

  That makes us weep that imagines God that

  Drives the pistons that slog in hollow graveyard

  Shifts, that dynamo that suddenly snaps and

  Wrenches itself apart as we shout: human beings

  Once called it a heart.

  16 Lane

  For Andy Prieboy

  All my people are larger bodies than mine, quiet, with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds.

  B. H. Fairchild

  1.

  Gone now, bulldozed for parking lots, gone as sure as the old

  men in the corner seats

  with their yellow White Owl fingers and green

  suspenders. Gone

  as childhood and the 4th of July, as lost as the kisses frosted on

  your lip behind the public

  pool that summer you were crazy with the earplug of

  that Japanese radio

  w/ yr antenna telescoped to the moon where some

  33rd Degree Masons were planting flags & you were

  looking into yr first bikini top. Gone.

  Fever Tree, Spirit, The Chambers Brothers, Iron Butterfly.

  Gone too the lonesome uptown wraiths who spent their last

  hours of this used life

  in the floor polish and cigarette smell of Hillcrest Bowl: those

  wretches: those hard

  wood 16 lanes: those jukebox records: those ghosts: that

  mothball peppermint urinal trough smell: gone

  those lavender/ blue/ red/ black & yellow two-tone bowling shoes

  tucked into cubbyholes like letters in a demolished country

  mailroom,

  sizes inscribed on each heel in lathed leather cut-outs: 7,

  8 ½, 10, 12 ½. Ladies’ 4, 5, 7 ½. Gone the cans

  of fungus killer sweet talc powder, flat as the coat pocket tin

  flasks the rummies

  tipped in the shadows to hail every strike for the

  Traveling League All-City

  Tour from the Bowlero to Poinsettia Lanes to

  the Hillcrest.

  Gone the stains of sweat etching delicate housewife footprints in

  those shoes.

  Gone their rental balls, their pink-swirl, their red, their see-thru

  orange, their pocked

  black deathstar balls. Three holes each ball infused

  with fingerprints. Fingers prodding the dark holes since 1948:

  thumbs of cops,

  of hookers, of Mexicans, sailors, soft boys with their

  mamas’ curves & grease

  in their flat-tops & fingerless bowling gloves as if this

  here was a sport.

  My old man’s fingerprints.

  Cream, The Electric Prunes, Steppenwolf, Donovan.

  You couldn’t call my old man my old man.

  What if his girlie heard that bit of gringo disrespect.

  She of the Wayne Newton records and the red cowboy boots,

  the five dollar Chanel

  Tijuana copy perfume & the stretch pants that cupped

  her unbearable bottom,

  that tucked into the sweet tight line of shadow

  behind her

  that awoke even the old cigarmen and made them kick.

  Tenderest midnight

  of her body that smelled night and day of rain

  in spring aspens. Oh.

  While her husband far dntn was tucked under rotten Buicks

  in the rusted-out light of his failing Shell station: he

  trotted out

  when my old man clanged over the bell-hose thinking they were

  pals, thinking

  my old man was teaching his li’l cowgirl how to bowl.

  Filled ’er up

  to the radio spurt and called my old man Al.

  Johnny Cash, Jimmy Dean, Kitty Wells, Peggy Lee.

  If you called him my old man, you’d get one of the looks,

  those looks

  he played like the termite-chewed Thomas organ in his

  bedroom, working

  on tangos & boleros for the night he graduated from

  shoe rental

  & pin-machine Brunswick tending

  to the Rip Van Winkle room

  upstairs,

  dark in its red purple velvet and bubble lights, white women

  and whiskey, cigarette smoke & maraschino cherries on little

  plastic swords. Gone, gone, every naughty

  cocktail napkin

  w/ its big breast cartoons gone, every Benson & Hedges 100 butt

  w/ coral lipstick

  prints, every lame come-on, every sigh, gone: pried

  from the earth by a diesel Cat, tracks clotted w/ mud from the

  last time

  they decommissioned a useless memory & scraped a graveyard

  downhill into a canyon. Gone now, man, and even his shirt

  w/ his name stitched over his heart is pulled into threads in

  pigeon nests.

  I went yesterday to see what remained and just a taco

  stand stood

  behind a mall. It had the same name as my old man: how do you

  like that happy crappy

  as the old sports used to say.

  And that name is Alberto.

  2.

  If it is true that everything good fades to zero, it is true that rust

  awaits also everything bad. The cancer cell starves to death

  when the patient passes. Even dreams run out of blood

  when you die, even memories. Tumors punch a time-clock.

  Not one of them noticed the Hillcrest then,

  and now I am the only one left to tell.

  What is there to tell? Nothing. Another song of a clanging place,

  noisy with echoes: nothing men and no
thing women w/ nothing

  days dropped

  dimes in the juke selectors w/ their white & silver

  flap pages

  in their windows like vertical pies—and the pies all

  drooling and

  old beside the juke on the long burger grill counter—

  one fly always caught

  in the rack, drunk on cherry juice on its back kicking

  black whiskerlegs

  & going zzzzzzzzzzzzz with its wings making a circuit

  going nowhere: nothing songs about nothing loves for

  those who

  had nothing going on in their beds back home or longed

  for nothing to take them before they had to get back—a car

  wreck, a heart attack

  or the lottery, a lover or a miracle, or maybe

  Armageddon would finally come and the crazy Negroes and the