Cibola 80
The Friar’s Camp: Song Contest (cont’d)
1. El Donado Marcos de la Sierra
Day after day
the lizards dance on the sand.
When the sun climbs high
the mountains won’t
sit still. Even the tortoise
toiling as little as he can
moves in time with the maguey’s
sharp-tongued shadow.
Sun. Tree. Stone. Sky.
The will to circle in the wind.
To walk like Lucifer up
& down in the earth
or lope like Coyote, always
one meal from the end.
Let the fullness without
break the drought within–
the way all teeming
prayers & curses seem
to seed the clouds,
go stepping out with feet of rain
on a Galilee of air.
This very day I too
will begin dancing.
Snake in a tree
Mystery does not begin and end with the Big Questions – Why are we here, How can evil exist in a benign universe, How can nirvana include samsara. Mystery is much more particular than that. The core of every being or event is inexpressable; all poets and artists know this. The world eludes our grasp in a manner that is both simple and profound.
How does a snake move without appendages? It seems as unlikely as speech without articulation. It can barely see, yet somehow it manages to find the right branch to take it where it wants to go. At key junctures, you watch it pause and lift its head, opening the mouth a little. The head and first six inches of its five-foot body nod and sway. Clearly it is weighing options, it is thinking – but how? What kind of thoughts? Its keenest senses are attuned to heat and motion. A snake would almost certainly not form mental pictures as we know them. Imagine yourself listening through every bone in your body. You think of Polynesian mariners, able to feel the presence of islands hundreds of miles distant by feeling the subtle shifts in ocean currents.
Like all predators, a snake is a creature that has evolved along with its prey – in the case of a black snake, small mammals such as mice and voles. They are fast-moving, fast-burning, fast breeder reactors. We like to say that mammals are warm-blooded and reptiles cold-blooded, as if the former is an advance over the latter. But nature is fundamentally non-hierarchical. Each strategy has unique advantages and trade-offs. The reptile’s core temperature is usually as high as a mammal’s; it is simply more closely tied to the temperature of its immediate environment. The drawback is that a reptile enjoys less liberty to go wherever and whenever it pleases. The advantage is that it can endure extremes of temperature that would kill a mammal. Also, without the energetic demands of an endotherm, reptiles tend to be on average much longer lived. And they know things no mammal can know, in a way it can never know them.
Members of many species of snakes and turtles live long enough to form intense bonds with their home ground. If transplanted and unable to find their way home, they starve to death. However knowledge is acquired, it must be organized mainly in the form of three-dimensional maps. So-called instinct can code for extraordinarily complex behaviors, but it still can’t tell the snake much about this tree, that branch. In its relatively brief and presumably intense period of juvenile development, it acquires intimate knowledge of territory: here there is shelter, here good hunting. The map consists of temperature patterns, networks of vibrations, felt with the same immediacy needed to maintain a constant body temperature. To borrow an image from Star Trek, the snake forms a mind-meld with its environment.
This suggests further that snakes do not dream. A current theory among evolutionary biologists holds that dreaming evolved as a way to organize and learn from experience. One can see its utility for short-lived creatures with a well-developed visual cortex. We know from the human sphere how well non-dreamers are able to prey on dreamers – usually by inhabiting the dream itself, or taking on something of its character. But such creativity, one suspects, is denied to the snake. What, then, does it have? It has time.
The snake is slow and capable of prolonged periods of apparent trance from which it can “awake” to sudden movement with no apparent transition whatsoever. We like to disparage the oldest parts of our brains as the reptile mind, as if it were some primitive thing. But in natural history, as in anthropology, it is the idea of the primitive that is primitive. The reptile mind responds to stimuli in a manner that is both simple and profound; one can no longer really speak of self and other, self and environment. I am this-climbing, this-eating, this-feeling.
The snake goes a couple feet along the wrong branch and stops. The darkness under the eaves isn’t getting closer this way. Stop and sway for five minutes, ten. Send tremors all through the limb. There, that other one… but the gap is a little too wide to bridge. The part of the brain/spinal cord that’s near the tail says here, and then begins to move so the head can take its place. The snake doubles back on itself like two trains running in opposite directions. By the time the tail gets to where the head had been, the head has reached the intersection and started down the other branch.
You expect the branch to bend down, but the snake knows better. Without the slightest hesitation it descends the increasingly slender branch to the very twig-end and straight out over the eighteen inches of empty space to the drainpipe. With the drainpipe as a support, the head enters the hole under the eaves even as the back half of the snake is still in the tree. It wastes no time, ever. From start to finish the whole climb takes only forty minutes, but to you it seems both brief and endless, a loop of tape you will replay more than once. Snake in a tree, you whisper. It has the unmistakable flavor of a dream.
__________
I hope it almost goes without saying that much of this essay consists of speculation with no basis in science.
Words on the street
Cibola 79
The Friar’s Camp: Song Contest
Sated with flatbread & venison,
men & women laughing
in a half dozen languages
fall silent when the chief elder stands up
beside the newly erected cross.
He speaks in a low voice,
just above a whisper–wind
in mesquite leaves, rustle of the first
fat raindrops in the dust. The sound
of power. The crowd stops
being a crowd; listening is a thing
each person does for herself.
Hands lie still in laps. At length
the elder returns to his seat, his last
few words breathed rather than spoken.
Then the town crier–a much
younger man–gets up, wielder
of plain words. His speech takes
half the time, even allowing
for rhythmic pauses. Each phrase
passes from language to language
around the square.
Your coming has honored us.
Here although we are poor
you have made us rich in blessings.
Your god the Always-Present is generous.
Already the medicine people see
great storms approaching with wind
& rain from the east,
the little arroyos running brown,
rivers heavy with silt leaping their banks,
weaving through the fields like a man
too full of pulque.
Already the Corn Mother
bulges in the belly,
Squash & Cotton & Tobacco
make a rumbling sound in the earth.
We wish to offer, besides those
who will share your road for four times
four days & nights, our friendship–
to pledge a covenant between
our medicine & yours.
This cross
is a thing our grandfathers knew,
but we’d almost forgotten it.
When your shaman, the black man, first
approached with all his retinue,
our hearts shrank.
But he gave us this cross & we rejoiced.
Then we knew he saw
beneath its mask of stone & soil
the true face of this Land:
place where the four winds come together,
where the worlds below & above
sprout & blossom from a single stalk.
Now we wish to inquire if, in token
of our friendship, as a mere precipitate
from your overflowing medicine power,
you might favor us with the gift of a Song.
For it is only through songs
that the hearts of all creatures
open fully, flowers for night-
flying moths . . .
With this, the polyglot susurration
swells to a hum: A singing contest.
The rest of the speech is lost
in gathering excitement.
The friar’s party gathers in a knot.
A nobleman from Texcoco
agrees to join the three oblates–one
a half-breed raised in Spain, the other two
donados: given to the Order as children
for what their terrified parents assumed
would be a sacrifice.
They have between them songs enough
to challenge the town’s best.
Meanwhile the women too
have been whispering: now
a grandmother stands up & says
that since none of their number
wishes to compete, they’ll be willing
all together to act as judges,
hold the stakes.
Relieved murmurs sweep the plaza.
This way each side will be able to save face
& munificence alone will shape
the outcome, it seems,
since women have never been able to agree
on a single thing since the world began–
a fortunate thing for men
& all their whims, their roguish heads
aswarm with desires, the lice of envy
itching, itching, grown plump
with the scalp’s own blood.
* * *
Marcos slips off to begin his evening prayers
while all eyes are on the singers
gathering at one end of the plaza.
Six translators sit in a semicircle at the foot
of the cross & pass a reed cigarette.
The smoke spirals to the west:
May your words
strengthen all hearts.
(To be continued.)
Confessions of a semi-professional misanthrope
1. I would’ve liked to be a charlatan, to cure the incurable despite myself & the spooky footlights that would’ve come & gone, turning my cheeks into sudden caverns. I could’ve learned how to capture & breed the small mice of fear. I’d have had a riverboat & floated upstream on the tide, under the sycamores. I’d have told each client to be patient while I made a careful, horizontal incision all around the skin of a pomegranate, then eased it open, revealing who knows what mucilaginous gossip to feed an infinitely malleable appetite for lies.
2. The woman at the cookout says things that no one believes, not even us strangers. She tells us she’s already eaten. She says she & her husband are leaving the United States for some place civilized, some place where more of the people think the way they do, keep their needs within bounds. The campfire makes her young husband’s eyebrows dance like an elf’s; even his smile is eldritch. Her own smile is extremely brief, like an involuntary twitch she has labored to suppress. We talk about music & the pleasures of silence. “I have to have something on all the time when I’m alone,” she says softly. “I guess I don’t like my own company very much.” The night grows cool & the firewood quickly runs out. Everyone gets up to leave, bowing to each other’s silhouette in the darkness & expressing mutual gratitude, warm regards.
3. Call it natural sound if you want, I said, or call it silence: more & more, this is the soundtrack of pleasure for me. I hear music whether I want to or not. Thoughts rise to the surface & burst, pretty little bubbles. I stand outside in the middle of the driveway until my freshly barbered head grows cold. Above, the usual glitter. I try to imagine all the busy little lives going on underground, in the forest litter or in hollow trees. I go back in my house & shut both doors as quietly as I can. If this is loneliness, my friends, it tastes delicious!
4. I do enjoy the company of my fellow misanthropes – preferably one at a time. And on rare occasions when I’m drunk I play loud music to cancel out the unaccustomed roar inside my head.
5. I am still haunted by stories of those child soldiers forced at gunpoint to execute their own parents, then fed a steady diet of drugs & made to rape other children until acts of violence came to seem as natural & urgent as eating, or voiding the bowels. Their leader was a portly, ebullient man who taught them how to cut off the hands of villagers without killing them. At first, the idea was to prevent them from voting or defending themselves, but the children took to it with a special relish – and who am I, said Papa Sankoh, to deny them their pay? From hands they branched out to feet, ears, lips – all of the body’s most delicate instruments. If one cannot go to war against love itself, surely this was the next best thing.
6. Horror movies bore me. They’re like elaborate practical jokes we play upon ourselves. The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out – flaccid penises that suck rather than spurt, vaginas with teeth. Big deal. I’d rather hear about the woman who married a bear, or why coyote’s eyes are yellow. Tell me about the time a snake almost swallowed the sun.
7. The brown tree snake in Guam. Kudzu in the American South. Nightcrawlers in the North Woods. These are only the most catastrophic of our slithering doppelgangers. Upon thy belly… Dust thou shalt eat… I will put enmity between thee and the woman. Who are we to deny the Lord His pay?
8. Beetles by the hundreds & the thousands, coming out of the walls. They crawl everywhere. I brush them from my beard, the back of my neck. Sometimes they bite. By the end of the winter, the house reeks of them. In my dreams, the floor heaves & cracks with their huddled masses. In their native Asia they winter in white cliffs; here, a white house or barn draws them like a beacon. Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home! But they are far more than just a nuisance. Some entomologists believe that dozens of ladybird beetle species native to the eastern United States have already gone extinct, unable to compete – their numbers too low, their habits insufficiently aggressive.
9. We have met the enemy, and he is us. We have. He is. This is authentic horror, the only kind that will matter in the end.
10. Call me Ishmael, then. I am a charlatan; how could it be otherwise? But better that, I say, than the unconscious & unconscionable sorcery of markets & bosses. Follow me, & we will both be lost – I promise. Salvation exists in the present or it doesn’t exist. We will thirst forever.
Sinking Valley
The accent falls on the first syllable: Sí¬nking Valley. A place of caves and sinkholes, streams that appear & disappear. Remarkable also for what it lacks: no state highway runs through it. Some farms date back over 200 years, to the first Scotch-Irish settlers. Spring plowing turns up arrowheads a thousand years older than that. Or so the Sinking Valley kids on the school bus used to tell me. You walk barefoot through the fields after a rain, they said, & feel for the points.
Our stop was the first of the afternoon, so I never learned which farms the other kids went home to. Our mountain forms the northwest – and lowest – end of the long, V-shaped ridge that surrounds the valley on three sides. We get all the same weather, but these wooded sandstone hills hold water like a sponge. In the valley, rain percolates quickly down through the soil & disappears. The porous bedrock can break the blade of a bulldozer.
A natural stone arch – the remains of a collapsed cave – gives its name to the nearby Arch Spring Presbyterian Church. This is the way all churches should be: surrounded by generations of their dead.
The afternoon sun isn’t right for photographing gravestones, most of which are the old-fashioned, upright kind, resolutely facing the east. Some of the graves from the 19th Century have both headstones and footstones, the latter a third the height of the former, & carrying only the initials of the deceased. I’m reminded of the words of an old Scotch-Irish ballad:
Oh dig my grave both wide & deep,
Place marble stones at my head & feet,
O’er my grave, a turtle dove –
Let the world know that I died for love.
A sobering number of stones memorialize the deaths of infants & children. Some lie flat like quilts under little carved lambs. The sign hanging from the cast-iron gate expresses a sentiment not often heard these days, even in sermons: That Which Is So Universal As Death Must Be A Blessing. The operating assumption seems to be that the universe is essentially benign. It’s not hard to picture the skeletons stretched out under the sod as if for a final operation, the slow drip from God’s own rain dissolving what once had been bones, lime into lime.
we climbed down
to the birthplace of water
bloodroot
wild ginger
sang
roots stretched into crevasses
limestoned voices
inaudible over
the gasp & suck
a scum of flotsam in the gullet
we crouched in the sun
blood-colored flowers
whitewater curling back
& back we prayed
for a rain of calcium
another sky opened
impossibly high & thin
Words on the street
Cibola 78
Reader (12)
We lift our songs, our flowers,
these songs of the Only Spirit.
Then friends embrace,
the companions in each other’s arms.
So it has been said by Tochihuitzin,
so it has been said by Coyolchiuhqui:
We come here only to sleep,
we come here only to dream;
it is not true, it is not true
that we come to live on earth.
ANON. AZTEC, 16th century
(adapted by David Damrosch from the translation of John Bierhorst, Cantares
Mexicanos 18:39)
The honored men are singers. The man who has fought for his people gets no honor from that fact, but only from the attendant fact that he was able to “receive”–or compose, shall we say–a song. . . . What of a society where the misfit, wandering hopelessly misunderstood on the outskirts of life, is not the artist, but the unimaginative young businessman? This society not only exists but has existed for hundreds of years.
RUTH MURRAY UNDERHILL
Singing for Power: The Song Magic of the Papago Indians of Southern Arizona
All Piman songs, regardless of “way” or type, are formed in the same song language. We may draw the implication from this, that for Pimans “song language” is the lingua franca of the intelligent universe. This is a Piman manifestation of a theme common among North American Indians: In ancient times the animals and men talked the same language. Among Pimans they still do and that language is song. A further implication is that this lingua franca is now spoken in dreams, for that is how singers get their songs. Presumably the linguistic transcript of a dream, if such were possible, would be largely in song language.
DONALD BAHR et. al.
“Piman Songs on Hunting”
Confessions of a serendipper
In yesterday’s post, I advocated for serendipity as a great way to find new poets. I have been unusually fortunate in this regard, I think, because the library where my father spent most of his professional career, Penn State’s Pattee Library on the University Park campus, is one of the largest libraries in the country – if not the world – to have completely open stacks. Anyone – even a ten-year-old kid with a yen for literature – can wander off in search of a call number and emerge hours later with an armload of books from the surrounding shelves. My father has often said he finds the easy browsability of Pattee Library to be one of its most patron-friendly features.
Until a recent expansion of the library led to a rearrangement, the literature was all shelved in one, big room with long, easy-to-browse aisles. All but the oldest stuff was catalogued according to the Library of Congress system, which doesn’t distinguish between poetry, fiction and plays, but I grew to love the way it grouped literature according to language – I was a fan of poetry in translation from an early age. When Vicente Aleixandre won the Nobel Prize in 1977, my parents bought me a copy of Roots and Wings: Poetry From Spain, 1900-1975, a bilingual edition edited by Hardie St. Martin – still one of my all-time favorite anthologies. Fortunately, the library had an extensive Spanish literature collection, and I spent many hours wandering the stacks and grabbing anything that looked interesting. While most kids my age were getting their first exposure to more challenging ideas through the lyrics of the more thoughtful rock bands, I was burrowing deep into Lorca, Aleixandre, Vicente Huidobro, Rafael Albertí, and soon enough Neruda and Vallejo.
Around the same time, I stumbled across some anthologies of Japanese and Chinese literature up in the attic – texts from a class my mother had taken in college – and got hooked on Arthur Waley. That led to Donald Keene, Burton Watson and, eventually, a B.A. in comparative literature with a focus on Japanese and Chinese. So largely through serendipity I immersed myself in two of the main streams of influence upon North American poets in the second half of the 20th century.
My exposure to contemporary poets in English was less extensive and more haphazard, perhaps because it came originally under the tutelage of an elder poet with strong opinions of his own. I dutifully read the books he recommended, but other than William Carlos Williams, I didn’t really share his enthusiasm for most of the poets he idolized – wordsmiths like Hart Crane and Melvin B. Tolson. It’s only really been in the last 10-15 years, when I stopped trying to read poets that I thought I should read, and simply started acquiring whatever looked interesting in used bookstores and book sales, that I began to grasp the incredible richness of contemporary poetry in English.
These days I do prefer to buy poetry books rather than simply borrow them, again because of my fondness for the indirect, haphazard approach to reading. More often than not, if I’m in a mood to read poetry, I’ll quickly scan my shelves and grab two or three titles almost at random. Usually I will quickly lose myself in one of them, and end up dipping back into it several more times over the course of the following couple of weeks before finally returning it to the shelf.
How does one read a book of poetry? There’s no best way. Usually it’s a good idea to read it from beginning to end in one sitting at least once, but that isn’t always an ideal way to approach it for the first time. Often I’ll start in the middle and skip around for a while, reading perhaps half the poems in the book in this manner before settling down and starting from the beginning. Poems read for the second time almost always reveal more meanings and resonances than on the first go-round, but how much time should elapse between first and second readings? If you read a poem several times in quick succession, you may fool yourself into believing you’ve gotten everything out of it that’s there to get, and not read it again for another couple of years. But when you do, chances are you’ll see it in a completely different light.
My mentor always used to say that he liked to read poems first thing in the morning, and I’ve found he’s right – that is the best time. But it’s also the best time for me to do my own writing, so there’s a bit of a conflict. Many mornings, after I come in from the porch, I sit down to read a few poems from whatever book or magazine is handy and quickly find myself reaching for my pocket notebook. That’s how a lot of the material in this blog comes about. Even though I rarely discuss poetics or review books of poems, without this almost daily influence of poetry, Via Negativa would be nothing like it is.
*
I was going to review the most recent book of poems acquired in the manner I advocated yesterday, but this post is getting a little long, so I’ll be brief. Actually, I already did share a quote from it in a post last week. The book is Mermaids Explained by Christopher Reid (Harcourt, 2001). I picked it up last month, along with a couple others, at my favorite used bookstore, which is also where I buy my coffee. While I was standing at the counter waiting to get a pound of beans ground, I noticed a sign – “Half Price Off, All Used Books. Ends Sunday.” I wasn’t particularly in a book-buying mood, but this was too good to pass up.
Mermaids Explained was hardcover, in good shape, and whoever this Reid fellow was (the former poetry editor for Faber & Faber, it turned out) the collection was edited and selected by Charles Simic, so I figured it ought to be interesting. I opened the book and read this:
Lines from a Tragedy
Pale twin,
aren’t you ashamed
of what we have come to?
Abject crawlers,
porters of heavy flesh,
the unpretty caryatids
of a decaying house . . .Surely you remember
the great days of our infancy?
Bewhiskered sister,
we did not always wear
such slabs on our toes,
such smoked-looking calluses;
our veins did not always
bulge like this.Years ago,
before the fall into walking,
we knew how to play
and to touch the world
with our nakedness.
We were as tentative, then,
and as sensitive
as hands.
“The fall into walking” – how wonderful! This, it turned out, was from a collection called Katerina, poems in the voice of a fictional female poet from an unnamed country of the former Communist Bloc. Reid manages not only to create a believable voice, but to imitate the sound and feel of English translations from the Slavic – a real tour-de-force. In fact, each of the books that this selection includes samples from has a unique style; Reid is, as Simic puts it in the Foreword, “not an easy poet to characterize. He likes disguises, playing different roles, trying out different voices. While some poets seek the absolute, Reid delights in metamorphosis. He can also be unflinchingly direct.” This last is perhaps one of the hardest skills for any poet to master, schooled as we are in the art of finding meaning through multiple layers of allusion, nuance and ambiguity.
*
In a comment to yesterday’s post, Maria – herself an accomplished poet, originally from one of those Communist Bloc countries of Eastern Europe but now, like Charles Simic, an American writing in English – tells a brief story:
I gave a poetry workshop today in a library as part of a California Council for the Humanities project.
Five people showed up: one was a friend who brought along another friend; two were there because next week they are giving a workshop-discussion on another part of the anthology that had the poems I was discussing; and there was one other guy there who kept challenging me to make him love poetry, seeing how he doesn’t have the “poetry gene.”
I tried, but short of a lap dance, I don’t see how else I could have made him excited enough about poetry to go read some more. He was so determined not to like any of it….
Reading this right after another dip into Mermaids Explained got my mental juices flowing.
Bugged
the man who does not possess the gene for poetryRap is sheer thuggery, poetry’s buggery –
I mean, it bugs me. Half the time it ain’t
even grammatical. I still like Al Pope –
so mathematical! When the cat goes
outside of the box, you better believe
she gets her nose rubbed in it. Listen
up now, this is a metaphor! I’m serious.
What the heck is a pet for, if not
to pet? That cat puts on airs. I say
Hey, old fish-breath, furr-ball, how’s
about jumping in my lap? Then purr all
day if you want. I’m getting crotchety,
I know, but Lord – why can’t things
be a little more straightforward?
Bikes could come with locks.
They could print more recipes
on the side of the box. Dictionaries
could tell you how to tell stones
from rocks. Words should say
what they mean, & don’t you forget it.
It’s all such hugger-muggery.
I just don’t get it.