Mixtecs

Carved in Stone 65 & 66

Carved in Stone
65

Flames flow sparkling waters,
a cataract of fire,
down church walls
as the Castillo burns.

Fireworks claw upwards
to knock on heaven’s door
and waken the sleeping gods
reminding them
not to forget their people.

A knife edge slices sun
from shadow, heat from cool,
solombra, Paz calls his neologism
with its combination
of sun and shade / sol y sombra.

66

I will never forget the taste and smell
of my own sweat as I walk beneath
the heaviness of a midday sun,
its heat falling vertical
and rebounding in waves
from concrete and cobbles.

I recall the roughness
of hand-hewn stone
heated by that burning sun,
the smoothness of silk
contrasting with the harshness
of tares in hand-woven wool,
marketed in the central square.

Commentary:

Fireworks claw upwards to knock on heaven’s door. The celebrants would buy their rockets in groups of 3, 6, or 12. When the first rocket went up – whoooosh – BANG! – we would wait for the fourth. When the sixth rocket went up, same thing – do they have a full dozen? And when the seventh rocket goes up, indeed, we know they do. Sometimes, we would be woken up in the early morning, as the joyful people returned home after a night of reveling. When that seventh rocket flew skywards – we knew it was useless to try and go back to sleep!

I remember leaving the zócalo one night, turning into a side street, and being met by a wall of people. A whole village, with its accompanying band stood there, waiting. Up went the first rocket, the band started to play, and the dancing broke out. No sleep for the gods that night. Their people needed them and had come knocking on the door. I was always amazed by the way the old gods stood shoulder to shoulder with the new gods of Christianity. The number of people who worshiped both also surprised me.

I last visited Oaxaca in 2001. I wonder how much has changed. I hope the dancing trees never change. Inside them, young children, their eyes peering through the bark, followed the band music. Occasionally, one of them would stop, open his or her tree, and invite you in. Alas, I never had the courage or the skill to accept the invitation. Even by 2001, the traditional carnival figures – monos – were gradually being replaced by Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. Tragic, in so many ways. I hope they keep the traditions of the rockets and the music and the trees.

People of the Mist
A Poet’s Day in Oaxaca

If you want to read more about Oaxaca
Click here to purchase this book.

Carved in Stone 64

Carved in Stone
64

I cannot bring you
the sounds and smells
of my own backyard,
let alone those of Oaxaca.

The pungent odour
of the first drops of rain,
falling from a blue sky
into dry dust.

The tang of bees’ wax candles,
burning in the cathedral’s darkness
where la Virgen de la Soledad
clad in black velvet sequined with stars
stands on guard in her small side chapel

Nor can I bring you the high notes
sung at the golden altar
in Santo Domingo
by the old woman, dressed in black,
who sings here every day.

The central market
is a bustle of bursting scents,
rooftop goats snicker above me,
my neighbor’s German Shepherd
patrols the roof-garden
and growls in my ear.

Commentary:

Sun and Moon is the first book in the Oaxacan Trilogy – Sun and Moon, At the Edge of Obsidian, Obsidian 22. I travelled to Oaxaca for 6-8 weeks each year between 1995 and 2001. I taught there and also researched the language, the culture, and the Mixtec Codices. Quite simply, my Oaxacan experiences changed my artistic, linguistic, educational, and cultural life. How? I earned to distinguish between what I could, and couldn’t do. A simple lesson, but one that needs to be understood at the deepest level of understanding.

The lessons took in all of my five senses – touch – dry dust, carved wood and stone, the tares in woven blankets -, taste – mole, flor de calabaza -, sight – the castillo burning -, sound – animals, goats and sheep, herded to the market-, smell – the central market is a bustle of bursting scents – hearing – rooftop goats snicker above me. A select few that blended with music of guelaguetza and the dancing that accompanied the village bands. But the experience(s) went beyond that. I began to realize, deep down, who I was, what I was, and, perhaps more importantly, what I wasn’t, what I could never be a part of, what separated myself from the other, the other whom I loved, who loved me, but who could never be a part of me.


Inquisitor

Inquisitor
Sun and Moon

He told me to read,
and plucked my left eye from its orbit.
He slashed the glowing globe of the other.
Knowledge leaked out, loose threads dangled.
He told me to speak and I squeezed dry dust
to spout a diet of Catechism and Confession.

He emptied my mind of poetry and history.
He destroyed the myths of my people.
He filled me with fantasies from a far-off land.
I live in a desert where people die of thirst,
yet he talked to me of a man who walked on water.

On all sides, as stubborn as stucco,
the prison walls listened and learned.
I counted the years with feeble scratches:
one, five, two, three.

For an hour each day the sun shone on my face,
for an hour at night the moon kept me company.
Broken worlds lay shattered inside me.
Dust gathered in my people’s ancient dictionary.

My heart was like a spring sowing
withering in my chest
It longed for the witch doctor’s magic,
for the healing slash of wind and rain.

The Inquisitor told me to write down our history:
I wrote … how his church … had come … to save us.

Commentary:

No wonder the little girl in Moo’s painting looks so sad. She must have read this poem and understood how the exercise of power and authority, be it religious or secular, can effect those upon whom it is exercised. Times change, but so many things remain the same. The pendulum swings, and it moves from chaos to order and back again. The meaning of meaning – how we define chaos and how we define order define who we are.

Birds of a feather flock together. Manners maketh the man. Wonderful sayings. But fine words do not necessarily make for fine men or women at that. Serpents and senators, both can speak with forked tongues. It is up to us to apply discourse analysis and distinguish between what they say and what they actually mean. As my friend Jean-Paul Sartre once said – “L’homme n’est rien d’autre que ce qu’il fait.” A man is nothing more than what he does. His deeds reveal his true inner self – and remember – the plumage doesn’t necessarily make the bird.

Sun and Moon

Sun and Moon
Poems from Oaxaca, Mexico
is available at the following link:
Click here to purchase Sun and Moon

Introduction to Sun and Moon

Oaxaca

A city of legends where the dead walk among the living and the stones beneath your feet come alive and talk to you. A city where the animals have voices and the songs of tree and leaf can be clearly heard. A city of hallucinations and spirits, of mystery and myths, a city, young in itself, built on land so old that memories clutch at you with treacherous fingers and lay siege to your heart claiming you for their own. This is the land of Sun and Moon. Come, enter its world. Join me there, if you dare.

Meeting my father in the main square

I saw my father yesterday evening, in Oaxaca. I walked through the zócalo, opened the main cathedral doors and walked in. The doors closed behind me. I looked towards the main altar and there my father stood, motionless. The evening light shone through the engraved glass panels and illuminated him as if he were some long passed saint come back to visit me. We stared at each other, but I couldn’t open my mouth to speak. The hairs on my neck stood on end and my hands shook. When I forced my mouth open, words stuck in my throat. He wore his best grey suit over a light blue shirt and a dark blue, hand woven tie: the outfit in which I had buried him.
            Three old women, dressed in black, broke the spell. One stood in front of me and wouldn’t let me approach my father. She held a large bag of knitting in her hands and the wool spilled everywhere as she pushed me away. The second threatened me with a pair of scissors that she held in her left hand and thrust towards my face. The third smacked a tailor’s measuring rod against my father’s head.  He nodded, smiled sadly, and they all turned their backs on me and hurried away out of the cathedral and into the square.
            Just for a moment, I stood there in silence. Then I pulled the doors open and ran in pursuit of my father. The setting sun filled the square with shadows that whispered and moved this way and that, as if a whole village had come down from the hills to walk beneath the trees and dance in the rays of the dying sun. I stood on the cathedral steps and called out my father’s name, but I could see no sign of him among the cut and thrust of the shadowy crowd.
            I ran out into that crowd and pushed at insubstantial people who stood firm one moment and then melted away the next like clouds or thick mist. I came to a side street and saw real people, flesh and blood beings, a group of villagers gathered behind their band. I stopped and as I did the village elder put a live match to the taper of the rocket that he clutched between his thumb and forefinger. The taper caught on fire and the rocket soared upwards with a searing whoosh. The village band marched forward and started to play a traditional dance as the rocket clawed its way into the sky to explode with a loud knock on the door of the gods.
            Tired of grasping at shadows and afraid of this living phalanx of men that marched towards me I went back to the cathedral and knelt at the altar of La Virgen de la Soledad, the patron saint of Oaxaca. Real wax candles stood before her altar, not tiny electric lights, and I inserted five pesos in the slot, took a taper, and lit a fresh candle from an ageing one that had started to sputter. I knelt and, for the first time in years, I prayed. I prayed for the soul I had saved from extinction by lighting my candle from another’s flame. I prayed for my father and my mother and, above all, I prayed for myself.
            On the way home to my second-floor apartment where I live alone, I bought two litres of mescal, one to send me to sleep, and the other so I would survive the next morning.


           
     
           
          

El Brujo

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El Brujo (Solace 5 & 6)

5

I light the gas stove and run water from the tap into the coffee pot. Some things, especially the stupid ones,  are so automatic.  I am in a dream state, still half asleep, not thinking, half-dreaming, still influenced by the mescal. I turn off the tap and open the fridge. I take out a plastic bottle of cold water and pour into an open saucepan that I place on the gas.

Thoughts tumble through my head, night thoughts, crazy thoughts, hallucinations fuelled by last night’s mescal.

… the man in the moon now wears my father’s face … he perches like a scarecrow on the dead stick of a returning rocket … and the Mexicans  launched a rabbit to the moon before the Americans ever went there, well, a rabbit to the sun anyway, and he put it out and caused the moon to be formed, moon-raker, moon-maker, jack rabbit, rabbit pie in the sky … and the second sun sizzling, then put out, staring now, like a blinded eye … death’s face simmering in the stew-pot moon and everyone doomed as the white rabbit scuttles down his narrow escape tube and back into his burrow … high flames flicker on zopilote’s wings and bring an end to darkness … Zopilote, the Trickster, the bringer and bearer of the sun’s early morning fire … Lucifer, the morning star, the bearer of light, a new star rising among star-crossed generations … red scars of tulips, casting shadows on white-washed wall, twisting shadows, shadows dancing as they struggle to take shape … three women, dancing in the limelight, and the old man, standing there, wringing his hands, then vanishing, a soap bubble, borne away on the wind that catches children’s balloons and floats them away, up into the air … to where the returning warriors play their hummingbird games around the sun, returned from their death like all the dead, here in Oaxaca, are said to return … and the people placing food and drink on altars in their homes for their dearest beloveds to return once a year … down the moonlight’s marigold path, to feast and be fêted by their families … all the dead … returned …

“All the dead …?”

But this is nonsense: I can’t believe I saw my father last night. I couldn’t have seen him. I buried him a long time ago, a long way away. What did I see then, a living man, a man who looked like him? But he was wearing the suit in which I buried him. It had to be my dad.

I just don’t understand. There must be someone I can ask, a priest, an elder, someone who knows all about the local customs and what happens here. I can’t believe it was him. Do things like that happen? I’ve got to find out, I’ve got to know. There’s so much I want to know.

6

A solitary bell that hangs in the tower of the church of St. James.  Every day, an altar boy climbs the tower steps, with a hammer in his hand, kneels beside the bell, and beats it. The bell lurches into life and lets out the cry of a struck anvil in a hot forge where the farrier tends the horse’s hoofs. Six times the hammer strikes to warn the parishioners to hurry along, because morning mass is imminent.

A sudden urge to go to mass sweeps through me. I dress quickly, hurry down to the courtyard, and meet Mario, the handyman.

“Buenos días, señor.”

“Buenos días, Mario.”

“It’s peeg day, señor.”

“So it is. I won’t forget,” I slip out of the front gate and hurry down the street.

Outside the church door, two young people squat on the ground in front of El Brujo, the local witchdoctor. The young man, eyes closed, threads a cactus thorn through his lips. Dark blood oozes and El Brujo catches it in a little earthenware bowl. Beside him the young girl carries a flower-filled basket on her head. The aroma of the incense El Brujo burns on his fire tickles my nostrils.

            … light are the flowers … heavy cruel stones lie beneath them and weigh the basket down … twelve girls in floral dresses stand outside the church of the Soledad… they pick up their baskets … place them on their heads … hand on hip, one arm swinging free they wait for the high priest to bless them … then they start their pilgrimage … twelve girls … twelve churches … each will leave a floral tribute in a church … the twelfth … the petitioner … will continue to the cathedral .. alone … the petitioner frames a question as she waits for the blessing … will her mother live? … and her lips whisper an answer … please let my mother live …perhaps …  if   her brother sheds enough blood … if her daughter carries a heavy enough weight for long enough …

            El Brujo looks at me and snaps his fingers. I shake my head and my dream flees. El Brujo closes his eyes and hums a rhythmic chant. I walk past the group and enter the church.

Codex

Ay Ay Ayeres

Codex (Solace 3 & 4)

3
Down below, in the courtyard, the handy man wakes me as he tumble dries a TV ad in the washing machine of his song sparrow throat. He gargles with gravel and churns stony lyrics skywards until they grate at my bedroom window and drag me from my dreams.

My ears fill up with a crackle and roar. Wave after wave of sunlight breaks over the azotea. Blind with music, deaf with light, I am awash in the sea-surge rhythm of this surfacing sun. My dreams break up like biscuits and between my fingers I feel a sandstorm of crumbs.

Morning blows fresh colours into each corner of my waking mind. An early breeze shakes cobwebs and dust from my brain. New visions crawl out from the vellum codex I left open last night on my table. Red and green gods wearing black and white masks crawl through spaces still alive in my mind. Sometimes they move when the eye doesn’t watch them, but when I concentrate, they freeze in intimate poses. I link them with lines and arrows and vow that my life will never again be scarred by their secretive smiles.

The red glare of the day’s first rocket climbs its ladder of sky to smash at the gods’ front door. A second rocket draws me back to daylight. Awake, I lie there, counting. A third explosion is much closer. The fourth rocket surges skywards and the fifth and sixth rockets are two fiery giants exploding above my apartment. I pull back the bed clothes and swing my legs over the side of the bed. My day has begun.

4

The codex lies open on the dining room table I use as a desk. I scan the interpretation I made late last night, transferring the visual to verbal.

“Two breasts: one green, one yellow, symbolic of the hill where the church stands; the church itself bi-coloured, strong stone walls, a spire. A large red heart symbolic of the love we bear for you, our masters. Two feet walking the path of enlightenment you opened before us are accompanied by two hands pointing the way. The feet below the heart; the hands above the heart, like wings; and the heart becomes the body of the new place you have built for us. And in the heart is our sacred symbol: the Earthquake, a sign of leadership and power used only by those of Royal Stature and the Noblest Blood. Attached to the heart is the Numeral One which means Lord of the Earthquake; for you are Number One in our Hearts. Attached to the heart is a speech scroll showing felicitous words of praise; below it is the sacred earthworm, and beneath that the serpent head of wisdom and the flint knife promising strength through sacrifice.

But be wary: for our symbols are double-edged! The colors of the hill are divided, as the hill is divided, showing strife and division. The church is on top of the hill, for the symbol has conquered the people, and the people are starving, subject, and destroyed. The feet are pointing in opposite directions, for the people are stalled. They have no forward movement, nor will of their own, for they are conquered by the sword and not by love. And the hands are pointing in opposite directions; for the right hand knows not what the left hand is doing. And the hands are reversed showing anguish and distress. The sign of the heart is the sign of the disembodied heart, torn from the heaving chest of the vanquished and thrown to the dogs. The sign of the earthquake is also the sign of movement. And that movement is a bowel movement. And one movement in the middle of the sacrificed heart is the victor excreting on the vanquished and treating them with scorn and contempt. The scroll protrudes from the nether part and says that the victors are speaking words of excrement, that verbal diarrhoea issues from their lips. And the serpent has no feathers; it cannot fly. It is as a snake treacherous and bitter, crawling on the ground. The head of the serpent is two tongued and tells of treachery and of deceit. The flint is attached to a heart; it speaks of the heart that is as hard as flint, knowing no mercy. And at the end that heart will receive no mercy in its turn.”

Figures on the codex page take on a fresh life. They walk and strut, nod their heads, move their limbs. The sun climbs in the sky. Shadows shorten. Footsteps march steadily across the page from right to left. I blow a kiss to the piggy-back bride and she waves back.

Too much, too early. I reach for the remains of last night’s bottle of mescal and gulp them down. Order is restored. The cartoon figures go back to sleep. Normality, whatever that may be, returns.

Waste Knot

 

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Waste Knot
(6th Century BC)

finger-nails crack
red sealing wax
liberating gathering
knotted parcel string

broken finger nails
hard scarlet chips
blood flash-frozen
beaded on blade

underground
clawing for clues
damp walled
this cave-walk
distant the exit
thread leading out

reef knots slip knots
sheep-shanks bowlines
bowlines-on-the-bight
tight he tied them
used them
to measure distance
to distance him from doom

behind him
the bull head
boisterous
bellowing him on

Eight Deer

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Eight Deer
(1113 AD)

eight deer visit
my garden each night
they raid my feeders
capture my birdseed
lusting for gold
anything to keep out
this winter cold

raccoons
leave claw-marks
grubbing for grubs
dug up like donuts
circled on my lawn

who captures whom
when the full moon
descends from the sky
walks among men
making them mad

death by snow plow
snow-melt and crows
Eight Deer emerges
his sacrificed body
preserved on this page
and in salt snow

Yesterday

Ay Ay Ayeres

Digging around in the photo files that I transferred from my old computer to my Google drive, I discovered this golden oldie composed of my words and Clare’s images. What a revelation: I had completely forgotten that this group of work existed. I’ll dig them out ne by one and post them from time to time. Ayer is the Spanish for yesterday, hier in French. The title “Ay! Ay! Ayeres!” with its multiple plays All our yesterdays and its reference to the old song “Ay, ay, ay, canta no llores” draws together a series of memories, some in the past and some in the future. ‘How can we have a memory in the future?’ you ask. By recognizing a present moment, or one that lies just ahead in a future that ill become soon enough a present, as one that has already occurred in the past, thus confirming the circularity of our lives and the idea that all time is time present, one of T. S. Eliot’s recurring themes.

Ocho Venado: Eight Deer is a central figure (war leader) in the Zouche-Nuttal, a pre-Columbian Mixtec Codex. He is the war leader in the Conquests recorded in the codex (circa 1050-1100).
Quesadillas: Oaxacan tortillas filled with cheese and flores de Calabaza, gourd flowers.
Reyes Magos: the three wise men or kings who visited the Christ Child on January 6, the traditional Spanish Christmas.
Murcielago: the bat and a symbol of death in Oaxacan mythology.
Nueve Viento: Nine Wind descends from heaven to separate the sky from earth and its waters. Nine Wind at Tule meeting with Cortes is mythical not historical, though the meeting of Cortes with the Mixtec chiefs (caciques) did happen.
Apoala: The Mixtec nation was born form a cave (sometimes a tree) in Apoala, Oaxaca.
Spinning the wheels in the snow: a reference to Jean Chretien and one of his famous images.

The piece is written in a surrealist style that mixes historical fact with creative writing. The distant past is recalled (1050-1100), then the middle past (1525-1530), and finally the present appears. This mixing of time and place (Mexico and Canada) is also related to the surrealist movement. Surrealism creates a dream world in which images float and change shape within a time-space conundrum where dream is more real than reality and creates its own new meanings that are individual to each reader.

Any comments on this rediscovered piece will be warmly welcomed.

Sun & Moon

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Sun and Moon was published on Amazon and Kindle today. This is the second (revised) edition of Sun and Moon, the first edition having been published in 2000. Although this is the second edition, I have returned to and revised the original manuscript. It is clearer, stronger, and better than the first edition. Here is the description of the book as it appears on Amazon and Kindle.

“They tore down our walls,” Mono whispered, “stone by stone. A new church they built on the land they stole from us.” These opening lines begin the verbal adventure of Sun and Moon. Written in Oaxaca, Mexico, between 1995 and 1999, the poems tell some of the tales  of the voiceless, of the conquered, of the displaced, of the survivors, of the people who eat and sleep in the streets of Oaxaca, spinning their myths and legends and recalling their oral histories and memories. Sun and Moon traces the relationships between two civilizations, the indigenous and the conquerors, from the first contacts between Europeans and the people of the Oaxaca Valley up to the modern day interactions between locals and tourists. In these pages, some of the ancient ceremonies and beliefs, as described by indigenous people, are brought back to life in vivid images and colorful metaphors, so sharp, they can be grasped between the fingers and examined by the light of the sun by day and the moon by night. The multiple voices in the poems are those of human beings who, like the author, himself an émigré, find themselves in exile, lost, abandoned, and displaced. As the final character cries out in the final poem: “You do not worship at our sacred places … you don’t know even know the meaning of my name.”