A Mayan Poet

Every day in Mexico, 

I eat my chocolate bread. 

Every sun that climbs and goes, 

Hears Maya in my head. 

Every word in Mexican,
Says I Mexi-can't, 

But through every rhyme my chocolate bread,

Feeds my Mayan rant.

I'm a Mayan poet,

A master of apostrophe,

Every day a metaphor,

Comes from Him to me.

He knows I'm a Mayan poet, 

Of this 20th Century,

He also knows I'll follow his road,

to my final Destiny.

A Guatemalan Poet

I'm a Guatemalan poet,

Master of apostrophe

I work in Milan who on roadways, 

Of this 21st Century.

A Guatemalan Mayan,
My name ends in 'B and 'E.

Even though I'm a Tikal poet, 

I drives the straight Sac'be.

I married a Mayan lady,

From the port of X'caret.

Took her back to Tikal city,

To write, and be a poet.

As a Guatemalan Mayan,

We loves our Adam and Eve,

Everyone in Milan does knows it,

Who lives in Italy.

My grandfather was a Nak'be poet,

He worked in1400 BC.

A Mayan, he wrote on white limestone,

On wide causeways, just like me.


Notes:
Tikal - A pre-Columbian Mayan civilization, located in Northern Guatemala, famous for its pyramid and other religious structures.
Sac'be - a causeway or straight roadway engineered by the Maya, connecting cities and religious sites. The Maya built the 'white ways' or 'white roads' during the peak period of pre-Columbian civilization. Superbly engineered they today are used as foundations for modern roads and railway lines.
Nak'be - one of the earliest of pre-Columbian Mayan sites. It is located in the Mirador basin of Guatemala.
X'caret - A seaside village in Mexico located along the Riviera Maya, a port in Mayan times, recently transformed into an eco-theme park.

Ciudad Juarez

Time to see murals and offer some prayers,
Painted by the good people, of Ciudad Juarez.
I was walking down this avenue, where this mural just got painted,
Surfing, thinking rural, 'tis true . . . I saw it, . . . and nearly fainted.

                                                                                     photo: google-earth

Yucatan

paper signs are strung from the telephone lines
signs for Mallory Duracell hang
from the limbs of trees
fingers of trade
amputations of nature.

bulls and goats amble
thatch hamlets
a pharmacy, a school, a hardware store, a town square
where a lot of churchmen got hacked by machetes

onions radishes melons mangos
tuna shark grouper rays
a language that is dynamic restlessly overturns the dead earth
     a bulldozer
cuts a new road

trees cut for a golf course
scrub mosquito infested
flat impenetrable tangle brush
spring up eight foot limit to growth
     so it seems
big trees live only
in seeds.

machete hands
returned from clearing brush,
on the bus sits next to me
weeping sores from all the chechen
he has arms and hair doused with
     white lime and chaka.

there is a power to make new names
place names, people names, thing names.
“Corn Flakes”,  “Xerox”
a name invasion.

bicycles, sewing machines from Korea
Kashmiri rugs
pine furniture, a pharmacy for veterinarians,
sellers of live chickens.

Mexico City Fragments

Mexico City, Thursday February 25, 1993

It is no wonder that the myth of the Northerner should be so structured around technology, and that of the Southern inhabitant around agriculture. Metals, atoms, molecules, subatomic particles, fuel and energy, these are the Gods of the North. The human being of the South worships corn, the sun, the moon, tides, the soil, and rain. The Northerner with his weapons, and computers, becomes warlike, and uses technology to dominate, but in domination, ends up dissipating his warlike force. The masculine energy of technological cultures is expended, and absorbed by the earth. The former is weakened, and retreats, absorbed into the womb of more fertile zones. It feels as if the earth itself divides energy, like a charge between two poles, a magnetic field to distribute behavior amongst its children.

-:-

[a circular on a bulletin board at the School of Agriculture, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México]

Amaranth - Spanish amarato used in soups, cereals, crepes, tostadas, tortillas. Pueblos in the U.S. used amaranth as a dye. Red pigments used in ritual ceremonies by the Zuni, and the Hopi, Rio Bravo indigenas. Relative biological value of the protein of different foodstuffs:

Maize/Corn 44
Trigo 60
Soya/Soybean 68
Cows Milk 72
Amaranth 75

Amaranth contains between 14.5 and 16.0 percent protein.

-:-


Mexico City, Saturday February 27, 1993

An artist lives in Hell, but must have known Heaven, and is thus attempting to work his way back again. He seeks to re-achieve what he has lost, through artistry and inspiration. Heaven slams him down, again and again, each time he is furnished with a taste of love-lost, and so renewed goes back to work to regain it.

I met three young girls dressed in red uniforms yesterday in the zócalo. They were busy handing out leaflets promoting the sale of some leather goods, that was going on at one of the nearby hotels. One of the girls spoke English fairly well, so I offered to buy them all a coffee after work.

When four o'clock rolled around, and I had finished with all my touring and exploring of the ancient pyramids just off the corner of the cathedral, I met them as we had arranged. We walked to a lunchtime spot that had turned its tables to an end of the day trade, tea (for foreigners), coffee, and donuts.

Marisol, the one who spoke English, brought a friend, a vivacious girl with red hair, and a third woman, who was herself the beauty of the threesome, pale thin and quiet, and confused by all this foreign language. Her name was Erica.

Jennifer, the one that spoke the best English, needed to go to the market to exchange some shoes that she had bought the previous day. We stood around in a street crowded with stalls, and people buying everything, dish wares, tacos, and clothes, while Jennifer fitted and tugged at different styles for her pudgy little feet.

Erika, turned suddenly, and blurted out that she’d gotten a phone-call from her grandmother. Her father had died. I didn’t know how to properly say I was sorry in Spanish, for something big like this. I looked on, as the girls exchanged hugs. Marisol looked sad and perplexed.

They all agreed to accompany me to Coyoacán, a ways south of the city center.

There we sat at a cafe table. Each of the girls politely ordered two tacos and a soda and we exchanged all sorts of banal Spanish and English with simplistic bits of "how do you say . . . " mixed in with a lot of giggles. Erika went to the ladies room and was gone a very long time. She returned pale and shaking, and began to cry. The others told me she lived alone with her grandmother.

When we reached the Metro, Jennifer and Marisol said good-night, and we made the usual silly exchange of telephone numbers. I stayed with Erika to walk around Coyoacán a little bit.

The friend that was supposed to take her home never showed up. We talked for about three hours, sitting on an embankment, overlooking the busy avenues. She helped me translate some of the tougher bits of an old Aztec poem that I had gathered at the museum, and she told me a bit of her life story:

Her name is Erika Lancaster, her mother is American, and her father Mexican. She has taken her mother's English name, but both parents deserted her when she was young, first her mother, then her father, but not after he had molested her a great deal. She showed me scars, knife wounds, where he had cut her arms in different places. I was horrified, but was also caught in a suspicious state of disbelief, as if she were lying about something. Perhaps she had done this to herself.

I noticed she was thin, and extremely fragile in build. I sensed anger, fear, dependence and a very complicated love-hatred feeling about men. Her cute actress’s face froze into a grimace as she told me all this. It made her cold and she started to shake. She had lightweight sweater which she pulled out of her purse and put on.

She told me her abuela, her grandmother, had become her mother, and how this woman was everything to her. She would not leave Mexico, even though she had a U.S. passport, as long as her grandmother lived. By the end of the evening, because she had shared so much about her life, she was much attached, and hung off my arm like we were like father and daughter, or husband and wife, or lovers, but really we were just strangers.

We walked past Frida Kahlo’s house. The streets were dark, the purple-blue walls where Frida made so many great works of art, were a black mass of vines. In another life, at another time, Erika might have even been a friend of Frida's. All I have now are vague recollections of things she said, her Spanish was very hard for me to understand. All else was perfectly clear, as clear as one of Frida's paintings.

The heat from her arm, I understood. We were warm-blooded creatures, walking through a dark city at night.

We really didn’t look at each other much. At  another time I might have tried to give her a kiss.

I wondered what her father's death was doing to her. Did it make her feel guilty? She’s now alone, dealing with what he did, responsible for it in some way. Maybe she cut herself, not him, because of things at home, though he may have driven her to it, and maybe now she lies about her scars to hide that. I felt guilty myself for thinking this way. Everywhere there was pain, over everything like the sky. Yet strength was there. I felt a load of it, hanging like a warm precious parcel from my arm.

We scrambled over the hill and down the bank, leaving the cool of Coyoacán for the glare of highways and subway overpasses, that reverberated a dull city roar from vehicles we couldn't see.

She made me promise to call her. Grasping my hand, she led me like a child to the proper train. I wondered what she would do after this. She seemed desperate to place me on the right line, headed for the center of the city.

There was this closing moment. Something electric happened. We embraced but it could have been done at a distance of a mile. All that was needed was some signal, some synchronous pulse to time it. A surge of electricity passed. It was not erotic, but something else, much deeper, much more powerful. I felt like it picked me up and set me down. Right after, she was twenty feet away and moving through the platform crowd and I was sitting in the train and the doors were closing.

I did call, and got her once. In faltering Spanish we arranged to meet at a museum. She never showed. I thought I perhaps had got the day wrong.

Some weeks later while I was off exploring the mountains around Oaxaca, she deposited a note at my hotel in Mexico city, entreating me to get in touch, and apologized for not meeting me at the museum.

I called, spoke briefly with her grandmother, but with one day left in Mexico, was unable to phone again.

. . .

I’m listening to a man who runs a small vegetarian restaurant at the edge of the zócalo where I've just eaten lunch.

Vegetables are plentiful here, but vegetarian food, cooked away from the presence of meat, isn't common in Mexico. One would imagine a greater demand, yet the place is quite empty. The owner is good-natured enough. He has a big mustache, just like the waiters in the places that serve big steaks.

I'm drinking a cup of coffee, and writing down what he says. It sounds like a poem:

I worked for a family down by San Angel,
Cared for their gardens I watered their trees.
Every so often I chipped down some of the iron,
Put on red lead and then a coat of black paint
I made good work.
Pointed up some of the stones.
Kept the bougainvillea under control,
Tightened the wires on the TV aerial.
And fixed whatever it was that broke.

Tenochlitan

A few broken brass notes,
     drift down the street,
At every corner there are young girls
     lined up for the telephone.

Venus runs before the moon by two hands.
The Moon waxes, falls later into cupped palms,
Then she wanes, falls onto the back of my fingers,
. . . splits in two.

Her words ricochet . . .

. . . Grandfather I am sorry, each time we talk, I feel my weight crushing your bones.
. . . Grandmother beneath our voices, you are falling.
. . . Father you hear every thought of mine and die
. . . Mother who carries me in her womb - my heartbeats stop you each day.
. . . My son whose voice brings stones to life, I feel your weight on top of me.
. . . Daughter, I breathe with your laughter, soon all my breaths will be yours.

The Town

 

I was telling you a story . . .
I walked through many cities, thirty thousand days
. . . and I dreamed of a town . . .

It had a plan, a name . . .
a vestige a settlement
I caught a scent
of a perfume that I knew.

A village ended and circled, abutted rivers
without bridges
cataracts impossible to cross in a boat
mountains scratched the sky
through an avalanche of rock and snow

I had bitter tea served in a china cup
in the capital.

I took the government plane.

flimsy jerrycans of kerosene leaked
fog and mist
cloaked sharp as daggers
we passed a long valley

the pilots shouted, coffee sheared groaning spinning
high branches, snapping bones
coconuts littered broke lose
near a garden, scattered.

in a remote wing, a tin-lined box
held a family of spiders

a desk of dark teak
an old lamp
in coagulated light
and a bar of uneaten chocolate partly wrapped in foil
chalk white it became powder,
a letter opener encrusted with colored gems
left it where it was.

each man's footprint is a signet ring

what story is told
or calmed by falling?
cool waters ageless sputtering volcanoes
soaring eagles and two foot clamshells at the bottom of the sea
a kingdom to come
some pestilent impatient living thing hurts to think
of a thick rolled ball
some dark force galactic solar fate set
like a rooster waiting
for dawn

storytellers are not to be trusted.
maybe I already said this . . . no matter . . .

A sky of leaves,
a network of twigs.
Each twig became a star.

The brightest star becomes a child.

Celestum

What do I hear,
when I hear voices?
Are they mine or yours or someone else’s?

Or are they shells, ghosts, cast off homes,
mistakes of language,
things that were said, but never done.

What a pleasure to watch the wind,
 . . . lift then catch the curtain,
and send a curl running across its breadth . . .

So a crab dashes across a rock before a wave.

A seething mind boils, cools
Ideas explode, send a thousand sparks showering . . .
Crust cracked, bleeding molten rock.
Late day sky and coral, turn green, of limes.

.

Merida

From a flat jungle, a city of limestone rose, clustered about a pyramid. A mountain, it towered above the Mayan world, their people, their highways, temples, their scorpions, jaguars, and precious water in deep springs. Into sacred cenotes the Maya threw votive statues of gold, and bones of souls sacrificed to Quetzalcoatl, their god.

Sacrifices became so prevalent that throwing bones into the sources of drinking water was deemed unwise. Skulls were later stacked in another place, at the Temple decorated with a thousand carvings, . . . of skulls.

-:-

The quetzal, a jungle bird with long tail feathers still lives in these parts.

Quetzalcoatl half bird half-serpent, in divine manifestations had a manly aspect, and and during the late Maya, was as demanding of blood as the God of Hummingbirds, to whom the Aztecs built temples in Central Mexico.

“When He rises in the morning He is pale, and demands blood, and at night He goes to sleep gorged on the sang of his victims.”

-:-

Adjacent to the pyramid the ball court, two parallel stone walls fifty yards apart, reflect every whisper. A yoke of stone surmounts the center of each wall. Adorned in feathers and wearing protective armament, the players of the violent sport, something of a combination between lacrosse and soccer, competed to pitch a small rubber ball through one of the stone rings without using their hands. The teams vied with each other for victory in front of the Gods, and the winning team was sacrificed. They changed it . . . as power shifted from Gods to men . . the losing team was sacrificed.

-:-

The sun down here can be blinding. The pyramid is extremely steep, and is the only edifice of any height for hundreds of miles. You climb to the sun, creator and executioner of all life. A flint or stone axe flashes from the sky, a head severed sends a red shower of blood, radiant in the blinding light, creating a rainbow spray of colors, a refractive warm salty mist. The rainbow apparition that hovered in the air was believed to be Quetzalcoatl.

-:-

At the top of the pyramid many of the stone steps are lose, they wobble, and are very uneven, and I'm sure that many, Westerners have taken an awful roll down the entire staircase. I listened to the yells of English and German tourist women, pleading for someone to help them get up or down. Typically people start climbing the thing, and then once they are aware of how steep it is they begin climbing on all fours, and somewhere further up they freeze and flatten out like worms onto the face of the serrated pitch.

-:-

Merida is the retail mecca of the Yucatan. A downtown Macy's, hundreds of shoe stores, Mayan girls in high heels, narrow sidewalks, crowded shop lined streets. Sears is here doing a big business in washer dryers. The market is quite close. Red strong looking onions, radishes, melons, mangoes of endless variety, papayas, other sweet fruits too numerous to mention. Bananas, tomatoes, fish of every hue taken from the nearby sea. Blue-fin, tuna, shark, grouper, ray, eels. The indigena women sit on blankets with piles of chilies in front of them.

-:-

 - At the guest house, courtyard, slotted with shutters, veiled by mosquito netting, yellow pearl marble stairs curving right and left up to the second floor balcony past two hairy marble lions with curly manes, a slim Mexican proprietor pads about in plastic thongs, this sound echoes throughout the house. On the second landing I met a Danish bespectacled tall kid carrying a knapsack. Said he got laid in Zipolite on the Pacific coast, actually used the words, 'I recommend it highly.'

-:-

A couple of American girls have gotten so broke they've stayed on at this place week after week, because moving around cost money. They got lazy and slovenly in their dress, and sometimes padded about with hardly anything on. Had frequent conversations with them as they sat spread legged airing their crotchy parts not in the least caring that I saw all their secrets. Got used to this after a while.

One day they locked themselves out of their room, down a dark dingy passage along the first floor, where horses were kept in the old days. I played with the lock using a coat hanger, and one of their hairpins, with a screwdriver borrowed from the proprietor. They hung from my shoulders entreating me not to give up. My probing into the lock became an exploration of many other things, when finally the catch spring yielded and the wooden crate of a door swung open to a haven of musty sheets and clothes they bounced in and shut the door after me quite worried that the proprietor would catch them, that he was very particular about ‘what went on’.

I could do nothing else except run the tools back to their proper places.