MADRE TIERRA
Sorry, kid, you weren’t supposed to be alive.
Blinded by blows, your mother lost count.
Your father fell feet overhead in a burning lake
of alcohol. You learned no human language.
Outside of Madre Tierra you stumble to my knees
with a primeval groan for all the eternity
of your six years. I will not share even one
crumb of my chocolate croissant with you.
San Cristóbal de Las Casas,
Chiapas
10/14–15/1995
Comentario: Madre Tierra is a popular Gringo Trail bakery breakfast spot in San Cristóbal. She’s pictured on a silkscreen postcard from Taller Leñateros, glued on the cover of my 112th blue notebook, as a lovely young Indian woman with a child wrapped in her rebozo, and bearing a platter on her head and another in her left hand piled high with the goodies of the earth: cinnamon rolls, scones, and pain au chocolat. It’s disheartening to move through this world rejecting the hungry children at every step.
HOMBRECITO
Holding my little man in my hand
I piss inexhaustible rivers.
They plash on a knot, on a nest,
on a fist of mountains, every way
from here: Cauca, Magdalena, San Juan.
I stand on a hill like a man of stone.
The old hotel is sleeping.
I play my flute of waters.
Pasto, Colombia Tahuintsuyu
1/20-21/1996
Comentario: The “knot of Colombia” is a mountainous triple divide whence a raindrop has an equal chance of flowing via big rivers such as the Cauca, Magdalena, and San Juan to the Pacific, the Amazon or the Caribbean. The stone men, including a bear-figure holding a flute, are at San Agustín. This poem in Spanish:
Con mi hombrecito en mano
orino ríos infatigables.
Chapotean en un nudo, en un nido,
en un puñado de montañas, a todos lados,
Cauca, Magdalena, San Juan. Me paro
en la colina como hombre de piedra.
El viejo hotel duerme.
Toco mi flauta de aguas.
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CUCAO
This is where they run out of road.
Where the bridge sways with the weight of your breath.
Where the tracks of all your friends are blurred by blowing sand.
To the edge of earth, where water howls and prays,
where seagulls peck at a woven robe of flesh,
where the sun is squeezed to a glowing syllable
and gone, and then, as if to balance things,
the moon’s pale cup is lifted from a final line of hills.
Cucao, Chiloé
Chile
4/2-3/1996
Comentario: Sunset on the long white deserted windy beach of Cucao, on the Pacific coast of the great island of Chiloé, 42° South, my closest approach to the South Pole. A whale–vertebra a meter in diameter is stuck in the sand, and birds are still eating the blubber. Fluffy clouds pass over from the south, above the massive forested hills, home to the endangered sequoia–like alerce. When the rain comes again, the clouds will turn and come from the north, symmetrical to how it happens in California. This rhyme pleases me.
GARZA
Folding and unfolding origami wings a white heron rises from the border river. I hand over my coin, my stamped paper and perch myself in the stern of the little lancha with the guapos talking about fu’vol. The captain drains his maté and we putt–putt through the mist. The fisherman in the green rowboat doesn’t care whether he’s in Uruguay or Argentina. Salto, Uruguay/Concordia, Argentina 5/20-21/1996
Comentario: I stumble down toward the Río Uruguay at dawn, carrying a mesh bag that once held pine–cones for poet Silvia Guerra’s fireplace, now bulging with books of Uruguayan poetry. Guapo means cute in Mexico but tough in Argentina, and fu’vol is what we North Americans would call soccer. The heron flexes great wings and flies into bare Argentine branches catching first light. Garza, says the ferryman, chewing his dead cornhusk cigarette.
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