Tuesday, February 24, 2009
I'm Not Ready
This season is throwing me. I'm not ready for this warmth. I'm not ready to lose my winter muse, she, with La Luna, playing in the frozen strawberry daiquiri sky and dancing across the creamy snow out my windows. Those two, they called me to my home floating like a houseboat near the edge of the Rio Grande Gorge. I'm not ready for the social explosion of spring when my butt does not want to stay in a chair. I'm not ready for the gears to roll the soil and pop the buds on the tips of the branches. No. I'm still romancing the hulking, sharp-branched cottonwoods, gnarled fingers jiggling an accusation, the boughs yawning against the wind with sideways snow glued into their creases. I'm not ready to push the clocks ahead. For now, I come home after a back country ramble and the light drops; blueberries and pixilated cranberries and, sometimes, electric salmon snakes waver over the dark covered nipples and humps, pursed lips and haughty buffalo flanks of the caldera. I'm not ready to give up the mourning for the people I know who have not slept all winter. The vigil, in my bedroom, on the satin blue zafu, looking southeast, the light already poured into the building navy of night. Looking at the foothills and the snow-streaked rounds above treeline leading to the pinnacle of a circus tent that is Truchas Peak. Sometimes the stars shine like a Bunsen burner blue gleaming razor blade and allow me to see shadows against the snow, silver clouds from the west lit from behind by the moon. And you can feel somewhere in the bowels and down through the legs the echoes of an exodus that happened a long time ago, and gets played out through shadows on snow over and over throughout the winter; the dying of something large, the leaving behind of the story, the bending of time. I'm not ready for that story to end. I'm not ready for the caress of solitude to be driven from me by my tensing muscles, the thrust coming up from my feet and feeding my thighs. But it's coming, the end of this and the beginning of that. It is too early. I see as I hike Devisidero in the mid afternoon, the warm wind blow-drying the mud and decimating the snow. The Taos lowlands are back to burlap, that patchwork I wrote about in November, those last days I followed my green velvet fiddler up the trail. I heard her again in late January when the roads first turned to mud after a wet pacific storm ate away the bottom of the snowpack. Back then, we were all in our houses playing fiddles, guitars, mandolins, banjos, listening to the snow drip through our roofs into pots and tin cups. It was then that the rabbit man told me she was dancing in the mud, playing, barefoot, heading for the canyon. I knew this and felt her pull me, she was wearing green silk this time, and I was pressed to my window feeling the cold against my nose and lips. I heard all their prayers kneeling in front of fires, playing for her, playing for their own ears so they could know how mired they were. And the fiddler, my fiddler, skirted the kissy lips mountain they call Two Peaks and went off with the purple tendrils of cloud lurking over the desert, looking for something to cling to, anything. I'm not ready to give up the mire, the depth, the slog. It is too early to be sprightly, to be bright. That time is coming, and I will be with it, I will dance to that song. But still I want to mourn and I want to lay down in deep snow, die properly, peacefully, the wind kicking through the trees teasing me. I came home this winter, to die with my eyes open. I came to be buried in that snow and I am not ready to be revealed.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
The End of the Ceremony
Rumors among the tribe, being seeded by Tayo's old friend, turned enemy, Emo, that Tayo is living in a cave in the hills (which he is, in harmony with his medicine woman, Ts'eh, and looking after the resilient cattle he and his uncle had purchased the year before and he had tracked down as part of his journey/ceremony), and thinks he is a Japanese soldier, has the army people, the tribe (even some of the elders), and the BIA government people, searching for him to put him back in the hospital (or kill him if they have to). Emo, along with some of his other old friends, Harley and Leroy, are getting close. Tayo is holed up at the mouth of a closed uranium mine.
"He had been so close to it, caught up in it for so long that it's simplicity struck him deep inside his chest: Trinity Site, where they exploded the first atomic bomb, was only three hundred miles to the southeast, at White Sands. And the top-secret laboratories where the bomb had been created were deep in the Jemez Mountains, on land the Government took from Cochiti Pueblo: Los Alamos, only a hundred miles northeast of him now, still surrounded by high electric fences and the ponderosa pine and tawny sandrock of the Jemez mountain canyon where the shrine to the twin mountain lions had always been. There was no end to it; it knew no boundaries; and he had arrived at the point of convergence where the fate of all living things, and even the earth, had been laid. From the jungles of his dreaming he recognized why the Japanese voices had merged with Laguna voices, with Josiah's voice and Rocky's voice; the lines of cultures and worlds were drawn in flat dark lines on fine light sand, converging in the middle of witchery's final ceremonial sand painting. From that time on, human beings were one clan again, united by the fate the destroyers planned for all of them, for all living things; united by a circle of death that devoured people in cities twelve thousand miles away, victims who had never known these mesas, who had never seen the delicate colors of the rocks which boiled up their slaughter.
He walked to the mine shaft slowly, and the feeling became overwhelming; the pattern of the ceremony was completed there. He knelt and found an ore rock. The gray stone was streaked with powdery yellow uranium, bright and alive as pollen; veins of sooty black formed lines wit the yellow making mountain ranges and rivers across the stone. But they had taken these beautiful rocks from deep within earth and they had laid them in a monstrous design, realizing destruction on a scale only they could have dreamed.
He cried the relief he felt at finally seeing the pattern, the way all the stories fit together - the old stories, the war stories, their stories - to become a story that was still being told. He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time.
He turned. The moon was rising above the last mesa crossed from the east. A transition was about to be completed: the sun was crossing the zenith to a winter place in the sky, a place where prayers of long winter nights would call out the long summer days of new growth. Tonight the old priests would be praying for the force to continue the relentless motion of the stars. But there were others who would be working this night, casting loose countermotions to suck in a great spiral, swallowing the universe endlessly into the black mouth, their diagrams in black ash on cave walls outlining the end in motionless dead stars. But he saw the constellation in the north sky, and the fourth star was directly above him; the pattern of the ceremony was in the stars, and the constellation formed a map of the mountains in the directions he had gone for the ceremony. For each star there was a night and a place; this was the last night and the last place, when the darkness of night and the light of day were balanced. His protection was there in the sky, in the position of the sun, in the pattern of the stars. He had only to complete this night, to keep the story out of the reach of the destroyers for a few more hours, and their witchery would turn, upon itself, upon them.
Arrowboy got up after she left.
He followed her into the hills
up where the caves were.
The others were waiting.
They held the hoop
and danced around the fire
four times.
The witchman stepped through the hoop
he called out that he would be a wolf.
His head and upper body became hairy like a wolf
But his lower body was still human.
"Something is wrong," he said.
"Ck'o'yo magic won't work
if someone is watching us."
"He had been so close to it, caught up in it for so long that it's simplicity struck him deep inside his chest: Trinity Site, where they exploded the first atomic bomb, was only three hundred miles to the southeast, at White Sands. And the top-secret laboratories where the bomb had been created were deep in the Jemez Mountains, on land the Government took from Cochiti Pueblo: Los Alamos, only a hundred miles northeast of him now, still surrounded by high electric fences and the ponderosa pine and tawny sandrock of the Jemez mountain canyon where the shrine to the twin mountain lions had always been. There was no end to it; it knew no boundaries; and he had arrived at the point of convergence where the fate of all living things, and even the earth, had been laid. From the jungles of his dreaming he recognized why the Japanese voices had merged with Laguna voices, with Josiah's voice and Rocky's voice; the lines of cultures and worlds were drawn in flat dark lines on fine light sand, converging in the middle of witchery's final ceremonial sand painting. From that time on, human beings were one clan again, united by the fate the destroyers planned for all of them, for all living things; united by a circle of death that devoured people in cities twelve thousand miles away, victims who had never known these mesas, who had never seen the delicate colors of the rocks which boiled up their slaughter.
He walked to the mine shaft slowly, and the feeling became overwhelming; the pattern of the ceremony was completed there. He knelt and found an ore rock. The gray stone was streaked with powdery yellow uranium, bright and alive as pollen; veins of sooty black formed lines wit the yellow making mountain ranges and rivers across the stone. But they had taken these beautiful rocks from deep within earth and they had laid them in a monstrous design, realizing destruction on a scale only they could have dreamed.
He cried the relief he felt at finally seeing the pattern, the way all the stories fit together - the old stories, the war stories, their stories - to become a story that was still being told. He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time.
He turned. The moon was rising above the last mesa crossed from the east. A transition was about to be completed: the sun was crossing the zenith to a winter place in the sky, a place where prayers of long winter nights would call out the long summer days of new growth. Tonight the old priests would be praying for the force to continue the relentless motion of the stars. But there were others who would be working this night, casting loose countermotions to suck in a great spiral, swallowing the universe endlessly into the black mouth, their diagrams in black ash on cave walls outlining the end in motionless dead stars. But he saw the constellation in the north sky, and the fourth star was directly above him; the pattern of the ceremony was in the stars, and the constellation formed a map of the mountains in the directions he had gone for the ceremony. For each star there was a night and a place; this was the last night and the last place, when the darkness of night and the light of day were balanced. His protection was there in the sky, in the position of the sun, in the pattern of the stars. He had only to complete this night, to keep the story out of the reach of the destroyers for a few more hours, and their witchery would turn, upon itself, upon them.
Arrowboy got up after she left.
He followed her into the hills
up where the caves were.
The others were waiting.
They held the hoop
and danced around the fire
four times.
The witchman stepped through the hoop
he called out that he would be a wolf.
His head and upper body became hairy like a wolf
But his lower body was still human.
"Something is wrong," he said.
"Ck'o'yo magic won't work
if someone is watching us."
Richard Hugo on Work and Luck
From "The Triggering Town" on writing by Richard Hugo (p. 17):
"Once a spectator said, after Jack Nicklaus had chipped a shot in from a sand trap, "That's pretty lucky." Nicklaus is supposed to have replied, "Right. But I notice the more I practice, the luckier I get." If you write often, perhaps every day, you will stay in shape and will be better able to receive those good poems, which are finally a matter of luck, and get them down. Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don't work. You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work."
Darn it! Genius or no, it takes work.
"Once a spectator said, after Jack Nicklaus had chipped a shot in from a sand trap, "That's pretty lucky." Nicklaus is supposed to have replied, "Right. But I notice the more I practice, the luckier I get." If you write often, perhaps every day, you will stay in shape and will be better able to receive those good poems, which are finally a matter of luck, and get them down. Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don't work. You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work."
Darn it! Genius or no, it takes work.
Monday, February 16, 2009
The Lie - An Excerpt from Ceremony
An excerpt from "Ceremony" by Leslie Marmon Silko. This is deep into the book about Tayo, a half Laguna half Mexican, as he is tracking a herd of lost cattle owned by his dear deceased uncle in the central mountains of New Mexico. It is soon after he has visited a half Navajo half Mexican medicine man in the sandstone hills above Gallup, NM to cure his post-war "sickness." During this healing "ceremony", Betonie, the old medicine man, explains to Tayo that the destroyers who practice witchery are out to destroy the people, the world as it has been known, maybe the world itself. But it does not have to happen. The new world requires an evolved healing ceremony, different from what the people have known. The stakes are higher, the weapons more destructive, the agents of witchery more deceptive. But if you step through the five hoops, representing the 5 worlds, you will see again and the worlds will come back to you, and you will be able to continue. In this case, the white man is the agent of witchery unleashed by one of the destroyer gods, and is living, in most cases, the Lie that perpetuates the destruction of the other peoples, animals, the earth mother herself. But, Betonie, makes sure that Tayo understands that you cannot judge the entire race for the deception of the Lie, as they are deceived too and under the influence of the witchery. It is in the waking up and being present with the Mother, whether it be Indian or white or any other race or creed or mixture thereof, that unmasks the witchery and prevents the destruction (of everything). Although at once harsh and beautiful, and certainly an indictment of the history of the white race on this continent, it is also hopeful, in the sense that there is the possibility of waking up.
"The lie. He cut into the wire as if cutting away at the lie inside himself. The liars had fooled everyone, white people and Indians alike; as long as people believed in lies, they would never be able to see what had been done to them or what they were doing to each other. He wiped the sweat off his face onto the sleeve of his jacket. He stood back and looked at the gaping cut in the wire. If the white people never looked beyond the lie to see that theirs was a nation built on stolen land, then they would never be able to understand how they had been used by the witchery; they would never know that they were still being manipulated by those who knew how to stir the ingredients together: white thievery and injustice boiling up the anger and hatred that would finally destroy the world: the starving against the fat, the colored against the white. The destroyers had only to set it in motion, and sit back to count the casualties. But it was more than a body count; the lies devoured the white hearts, and for more than two hundred years white people had worked to fill their emptiness; they tried to glut the hollowness with patriotic wars and with great technology and the wealth it brought. And always they had been fooling themselves, and they knew it."
"The lie. He cut into the wire as if cutting away at the lie inside himself. The liars had fooled everyone, white people and Indians alike; as long as people believed in lies, they would never be able to see what had been done to them or what they were doing to each other. He wiped the sweat off his face onto the sleeve of his jacket. He stood back and looked at the gaping cut in the wire. If the white people never looked beyond the lie to see that theirs was a nation built on stolen land, then they would never be able to understand how they had been used by the witchery; they would never know that they were still being manipulated by those who knew how to stir the ingredients together: white thievery and injustice boiling up the anger and hatred that would finally destroy the world: the starving against the fat, the colored against the white. The destroyers had only to set it in motion, and sit back to count the casualties. But it was more than a body count; the lies devoured the white hearts, and for more than two hundred years white people had worked to fill their emptiness; they tried to glut the hollowness with patriotic wars and with great technology and the wealth it brought. And always they had been fooling themselves, and they knew it."
Music Memory
"Things are different now, things are different now” – strains of Robert Mirabal run through my head, and I pick up the bongos. When I listen to Indian music my internal landscape changes and I see a coyote leaping a low fence and crossing a dusty road under a full moon in the sage and boulder wash spilling out from the blue-bearded mountains. And when I open my eyes that actual landscape is there, but it’s not the same as when I daze out my car window on a weary trip back from Santa Fe, parallel worlds apart, white and sweater clad, shoes too tight, coffee too strong, talk radio keeping me company until droning static tells me I’m all alone along the Rio Grande. Then I turn on the Mirabal CD, at first resistant of the change I know will occur. But then the flutes that rise along the canyon walls and float like smoke through the branches of the bosque trees and out into the faltering blue above the red escarpments, take me back to a place where I must have been because it hurts too much not to be true, and it is this land that is that place. And what I know when I write this is that I have been buried here, in the soft sand along the river, at the foot of a mountain next to a boulder, many times buried and birthed. Then the guitars kick in and Mirabal chants in a witch doctor’s wail, a medicine man’s entry into the wound, and I am with him. The pain, I realize, is in stretching myself across these parallel walls in an unconscious state incapable of sewing up the space, collapsing the worlds, remembering they are one. And then I remember, and it doesn’t take much; 20 seconds of a song, and I soar with the bald eagles through the album, chanting along, banging on my steering wheel, looking out to the west as I crest the horseshoe to see the cut in the earth on the caldera, my ass feeling a horse beneath me, my eyes setting with the sun through a lone, leaning tree on the edge of the mesa sea. And I understand how hard it is to reach back through the killing times, the unfathomable loss of recognition and understanding, to the times when the sun just circled the sky. But, I know as I’m listening and looking that I have to reach back to be here, and not just once, but every day. And then the CD ends and I see the sign for the golf course. I’m 7 miles from home. I forget again.
Burn
Blackened earth on the side of the highway in northern New Mexico. I get out of the car and breathe deep - sage and pinion and the sun on wood chips. Blanca Peak rises like rock candy to the north dominating the San Luis Valley. It is here when I knew I was home. It is here where I dropped to my knees and put my nose to the dry, prickly ground and brought the dust of the high desert into my body. It is here, looking to the dry, broken west - all the way out to the San Juans 100 miles away - where I came into my body for the briefest moment; where I inhabited myself for the first time since birth. It was 1995 - June. The wind blew from the west and clouds massed over the endless crest of the Sangre de Cristos. It was here when I knew I was alive. Life smelled like burning ground and distant cottonwood trees in an ancient streambed. And it tasted like antelope and buffalo long gone into that ground. The sky to the west was unrelenting in its blue - the crystallized New Mexico blue. How does the sky know what state it's in? Go With God - "Vaya Con Dios", the sign read. It was here when I knew I was a writer. And I knew also that I wasn't a writer. It was here where my eyes burned from tears and I almost turned around and went back to sleep in Boulder. It was hard to stand in that forever valley. It contained everything. I had vertigo. There was nothing to hold on to - no hooks in the sky, no trees to climb - only sage: sturdy, sweet sage fanning to the horizon beyond the burned hump of mountain in Sunshine Valley.
A Bargain at any Price
A barker at a carnival talking out of the side of his big mouth over a set of Ginsu knives that the knife thrower will throw into the hollows under the arms of the long-legged, red-headed, roped-to -the- wall siren.
"A bahgin at any price! Lad, step up to the table. See these knives? See the blood stain on the stainless steel of the dagger? Ahhhhh, yesssssss. You're right. This knife was used in the Perfect Tommy's Massacre on 84th and Amsterdam in good Ole NYC back in 1989. Hmmmm, REAL Amercican killing steel...that's right. 4 dead with the same 4 inch dagger. But it was the last victim, John Amici, 24 years old. Lived around the corner. It was Amici who was stabbed in the heart - right in the center of the aorta. Aortic blood, the deepest, darkest of its kind. Stains stainless steel....see it right here? For you....$100....that's it. Right now. Tomorrow, I'll sell that thing in Chicago for a grand. That's right kid, one of its kind"
The kid walks away; not really a kid is he, about 24 himself. Deep hollows of yellowed purple under his eyes. A Kool in his hand dangling. A Kool? Who the fuck smokes Kools anymore? He's bored. He's walking, dragging his PF Flyers in the clotted dirt, clotted from cola and candy and maybe some of that aortic blood. He looks up at the top of the ferris wheel. It rocks back and forth stuck for the moment. 2 people at the apex banging on their
cage. He's thinking that they should just relax and look out over the water. The water looks endless from up there, stretching out into the night, calm, dependable, calling, but not too loud like his girlfriend. Well, was his girlfriend until last night. He heads over to the gambling tent where he won $50 playing blackjack with the firemen and Knights of Columbus. He spits and rubs the wad into the dirt with the rest of the effluvia. His head is down. He's sick of the jouncy carnival music cast out over the speakers hung on the tops of telephone poles. He smells the water...low tide.
"A bahgin at any price! Lad, step up to the table. See these knives? See the blood stain on the stainless steel of the dagger? Ahhhhh, yesssssss. You're right. This knife was used in the Perfect Tommy's Massacre on 84th and Amsterdam in good Ole NYC back in 1989. Hmmmm, REAL Amercican killing steel...that's right. 4 dead with the same 4 inch dagger. But it was the last victim, John Amici, 24 years old. Lived around the corner. It was Amici who was stabbed in the heart - right in the center of the aorta. Aortic blood, the deepest, darkest of its kind. Stains stainless steel....see it right here? For you....$100....that's it. Right now. Tomorrow, I'll sell that thing in Chicago for a grand. That's right kid, one of its kind"
The kid walks away; not really a kid is he, about 24 himself. Deep hollows of yellowed purple under his eyes. A Kool in his hand dangling. A Kool? Who the fuck smokes Kools anymore? He's bored. He's walking, dragging his PF Flyers in the clotted dirt, clotted from cola and candy and maybe some of that aortic blood. He looks up at the top of the ferris wheel. It rocks back and forth stuck for the moment. 2 people at the apex banging on their
cage. He's thinking that they should just relax and look out over the water. The water looks endless from up there, stretching out into the night, calm, dependable, calling, but not too loud like his girlfriend. Well, was his girlfriend until last night. He heads over to the gambling tent where he won $50 playing blackjack with the firemen and Knights of Columbus. He spits and rubs the wad into the dirt with the rest of the effluvia. His head is down. He's sick of the jouncy carnival music cast out over the speakers hung on the tops of telephone poles. He smells the water...low tide.
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