|
Written by Xiuhcoatl
|
|
May 27, 2006 at 02:36 AM |
"When history sleeps it speaks in dreams;
on the forehead of the sleeping people the
poem is a constellation of blood.
When history wakes image becomes act,
the poem happens; poetry moves into action."
Octavio Paz
CANTO DEL RIO BRAVO
by Juan Santos
1 The Refuge
Cars pass.
Two men leap from their bunks.
They press their faces to the dark glass.
Outside the window they are coming,
they crawl through ditches,
past sensors buried in the dirt,
rip their skin beneath barbed wire,
move beneath the world
crouched in drainpipes ,
in the trunks of cars,
on the roofs of trains,
make their passage
through a curtain of snakes.
In the morning
the men open the door,
hunt the street with their eyes,
press their backs to the wall,
peer around the corner.
They cannot see the green vans
slithering in the streets.
There is nothing.
She has not come.
2 The Will of the Priests
The priests of Coyloxaoqui
gathered all her bones
and the soft film of light
from the skulls of those
whose tongues spoke dreams,
who hunted the pale invader in sleep.
They formed a shield in the darkness
from the coppery fire of their will for us.
One still waits.
Her name cannot be said.
It was formed in silence
to enter those who find her.
No asking opens this.
There was no name
for the temple of their gathering.
She remembers the forgotten things.
Obsidian orbs that blazed and fell to ash.
The slinking of the feathered one
whose serpent mouth
set fire to the long grass,
whose fangs emptied
the village of children.
She is made of them
and of the ancient sorceress,
the jaguar that dwells in our hands
that dissolve and pour themselves
like dust into the earth.
She makes quiet atonement
for the fallen moon,
the severed corpse.
She lays a wreath of green feathers
to curse the smoking mirror,
the god of heart-eaters whose open gate
brought the long horror to this shore.
3 The Black Bridge
After they've shopped
the women return to Juarez,
crossing the bridge
with their small packages.
The Customs stop an old car
waiting to cross the line
into the North.
Dogs strain at their leashes,
their claws clicking against the fenders.
They sniff the trunk.
The women freeze.
They cross themselves
in the ancient gesture
of the conquered.
A hundred yards away,
in open daylight,
a young boy runs at top speed
scales a fence twenty feet high
drops to the other side
he doesn't stop
he springs across
the black railroad bridge
oblivious to us.
4 The Dog
They have split in two
the river flowing from our mouths.
They have removed his fathers' tongue.
His mother
has died of fright.
He leaps the black cross
of their silence
and runs to the black mouth
of the North
into its teeth of giant boulders
its bestial throat
the great black dog of night
who is waiting on the other side.
5 La Peseta
There is no grass
on the mountains.
Near the river
in the treeless shantytowns
of Juarez there is no running water.
On Avenida Lerdo
a man sells cheap cigarettes.
A woman with five children
and a shopping cart
begs a quarter.
Four year olds sell
tiny square packets of gum
to the absurd gods of the north;
they are light skinned,
so rich, so tall?
their heads float above their shoulders?
the Earth itself is different here
but they cannot feel it beneath
their feet.
From this side
downtown El Paso
is a skyline of banks,
a giant gleaming fist
in the dust.
6 El Sueño
There is no grass on the mountains.
No heart beats in the unceasing wind.
At darkfall a jade ghost rises
with the desert stars
and with Venus,
who is unknown to him.
He is the thought of War
that moves like fog
along the banks of the Rio Bravo.
He is a dream of stone
resting in the brown palm
of a sleeping girl.
He drifts downward
over the dry brown slopes,
hovers above the sand
then floats through the streets
bumping the tourists.
Their heads float in slow circles.
They look backwards.
over their shoulders,
sighing.
They see nothing
not the jade ghost
nor the jaws of the eagle;
not the feathers
as they fall each night
to rest in the black hair
of a sleeping child.
They fall silently on the cobbled streets,
near the door of a small shop.
There, in a basket of trinkets
the key of heaven turns.
The girl turns in her blanket.
A jade eye opens
and turns its gaze
through the waters of the river.
On the other side
the tallest buildings turn to sand,
to crumbling, the walls
slide down pouring
heavy sackfuls of dust
into the lungs of the men
and their shining black shoes.
In Juarez
a woman rises from her bed.
In a secret room
she grinds corn
and waits
for the sun to come.
7 The Captain
Yolanda said her brother is grown now,
not as she remembers him, with his
horses and long eyes.
He's a captain now
in the Border Patrol.
He makes a lot of money now?
never turns in all the drugs.
No one does.
He lives in a quarter million
dollar house in Laredo.
One night, Yolanda said,
he disappeared. They
couldn't find him,
couldn't raise him
on the radio.
Nothing.
There was a woman in the river.
She'd refused to halt. She
was pregnant, dripping as she
rose from the water toward the bank.
His bullet hit her just
below the diaphragm.
This was before "la amnistia."
Every night hundreds would flood
across together in the dark of the moon
returning like buffalo to the coyote
on the other bank.
A certain percentage
would always make it.
When they found him he was in Boys' Town
Drinking it off, whoring in a cantina.
This is a true story.
Yolanda said so,
then very suddenly
she went inside.
8 La Cama
She floats in silence
her blood in little swirls
over the glistening stones
of the bed.
He vomits an orange cloud
into the clear flowing water.
Fish, snakes
swarm to the wound above her belly
near the child's head
cradled in her womb.
9 The Projects
In the housing projects
in El Paso certain women
leave out dry clothing
for the people who've
crossed the river
and a little something to eat.
When La Migra comes
the kids on their bicycles say
"The mojados went thataway!"
As the Migra
turns the corner
the children laugh.
10 The Conquistador
In the darkness
the water of the river
are a rippling mirror of flame.
The conquistador, Alvarado,
has built a bonfire
and filled it
with the severed heads
of children
11 Burning
East of El Paso
There's a Migra checkpoint
on the highway.
If you have brown skin
they shine a flashlight
in your eyes
and ask where you're from.
The light burns.
Your have to answer
"America."
12 The Green Feather
This is the line between worlds.
A copper moon takes the horizon from the sun.
This is the fissure of the Earth's crust.
The dark cut whipped into the world's soft shoulder.
Here, the dreams of the ghost dancer,
the poetry of Vallejo,
our mother of corn,
a brown woman's yes,
are reduced to a blip on a screen,
a fly to be crushed
as it enter America's house.
This is the dark epiphany of the West.
A planet of headlights aimed at the poor.
Helicopter gun ships hunting Indians;
a raw telescopic frontier,
a laser incision,
an infrared nightmare.
I have dreamed it.
Geronimo is resurrected
in the desert highlands.
He is calling down
the Mogollon Rim.
He fills the copper mines
with reservoirs of blood.
The Maya have come to your border.
The Quechua come to your gate.
The Navaho and Huichol are dancing.
13 Juan
The police know the one
who comes from the mountains,
how he enters the streets
and waits for them.
They call him "Juan."
Thus they name their deaths.
He comes quietly,
beneath the flicker of electric lights
to the lot of a small store,
the smell of gasoline,
grease stains
and the whirring of the pumps.
He comes with a soft mound
of the blue pollen in his palm.
The police stare silently
at a Guatemalan woman,
the swaying of her long braids
as she walks to the Laundromat
with her basket balanced on her head.
They watch the cholos pass
in their low-slung cars
and the Salvadoran guerillero
who sips beer standing beside his truck.
At night the raids begin.
Women disappear
walking to the store.
Concrete barriers block the streets.
The green vans come. A call
is placed to La Guardia Nacional.
In the morning the garbage dumps
of San Salvador swarm with carrion birds.
14 Jorge
There is an empty lot,
a cracked foundation
covered in a spread
of splintered glass.
There wait there,
their silence broken by curses
and coming of the work trucks.
They crowd, then, like children
around an ice cream vendor;
they melt like chocolate
on the pavement.
The sun absorbs them.
A slow rain falls
in the villages
and the blue glass towers
of the city, where Jorge,
with his one good eye
cares for his family
picking up heavy plates,
half-eaten burgers
and ash trays
for the art crowd
and the nouveau riche.
His other eye is a glassy cloud
filled with corpses on the airport road.
He reads the constellations
of the blackened sky.
A single white hand
imprinted in smoke.
Skulls dissolving like sugar
on children's tongues.
In the total darkness of the grave,
in the silence of the untapped vein,
blood has no color.
But our dead are not under the earth.
Santiago, Managua and San Salvador weep.
The patron hovers, laughing
above the bodies of the disappeared.
The Maya file through the mountains
toward San Cristobal with
their rifles and red bandanas.
Lima is surrounded.
Rising from the darkened streets
men with burning wings
fill the clouds with whispers
and the sounds of torches.
Beneath the midnight sky
Jorge pours coffee,
raises his eyes
and smiles. |
|
Literature 
