Noon, I sat behind her where the rock
tipped its black slag into a turquoise sea;
each crevice licked as water whispered back
to itself, sparking off a galaxy
of brief stars over shallows clumped thick
with sea-urchins. The stone was carved with names
that shimmered with trapped water, letters slicked
with an outline of neon salt. Light flamed
an alphabet of molten Greek, drilled
candy-bright into seaside rock. I pulled
her into my cradling legs and swayed
her as the water lapped new names full.
We left nothing there. No names. The wet print
of her shiver steaming in the sun's glint.
Huautla de J�menez, Oaxaca, Mexico
You learned lore from soil, skins, stars,
stained yourself earth, interred yourself in sky.
Squatting out the rainy season,
high up, your mushrooms waited:
smoke snaking the belly of a cloud.
Your dog snarled through dank fugged leafage.
The wood was alive, whitened,
sperm-spat with tiny cocked triggers.
For the men, life was down there:
cantinas, work, women, horses.
Mexico meant burnt water, eloquent liquors:
Mezcal, a stubborn ember under pissed-on ash;
Pulque, a green lily stinking of sweating meat.
But for you, Spanish was a gattling stuttering
somewhere off in sea-green jungles,
away below an armada of cloud.
An anthropologist took you away from yourself,
put you before lights, cameras, banal magic.
Your body swarmed to moths,
fame drawing each cell flameward,
then singed them back wingless. Flesh.
Your hair's cables frayed, twisted to ash,
as your old coiled power sprung,
slithering off through damp grass lushes
before electric twine whinnied the air.
The dull chink of coins sent you back,
to your earth-box cabin,
to mend the mesh where jackals had smirked through,
got at your chickens; the wet pelt of mist
nuzzling you like a stray dog come home.
Sitting among the arthritic ruins of your domain,
you wear your century of years
like the knuckles of a bone necklace,
Below your hut, the Municipalidad challenges
your claim of sky with a white-walled clinic.
Your cracked voice is now reserved
for coughing out songs onto tape.
A corpse's great granddaughter is your daily tongue:
ancient silences interpreted through Rosita's giggling Spanish,
bargaining out your mysteries.
Every week they come, no matter the season,
with shiny spectacles, good boots,
big nosy cameras, folding money,
for dried curls of skin in creased brown paper,
salamanders blackening in old jars of crystalized honey.
Beyond the new coffee fields, thinking of plundered power,
your eye seeks out new secret silos.
You catch a scent that somehow reminds you
of the runt you trained to nose out where
power was just about to finger through.