On Seeing a Detailed Map
of Old Town, Albuquerque
I notice the empty space
where there is no map,
only theater of man and myth,
where there is no path
to the wild mesas,
the shimmering fields of the unicorn,
a great land of dream and memory,
where less lovely beasts pursue
and try to corral him.
El unicornio
malherido por la cadena que rompió
y el coral puntiagudo
que saltó, corre por los campos
rumbo a . . .
los sueños y el recuerdo.
Ya vienen los perros.
El unicornio sangra, sangra.
Se vuelve pura espuma del sufrir,
un leve humo blanco.
Se vuelve pura esperanza.
The unicorn,
badly wounded
by the chain he broke
and the sharp-tipped picket fence he jumped,
runs through the fields
toward . . .
dreams and memories.
The unicorn bleeds, bleeds.
He becomes the lather of suffering,
a thin white smoke.
He becomes a pure hope.
To the east are the Sandia Mountains
where Apaches hidden by time
look down on the great city
stretching far to the west
and all along the Rio Grande valley.
They are beyond the old pain now,
the shrinking land and the suffocating sky.
Once in a while they recall
the good times and as a jest
they send a bear
scampering down into Albuquerque
to test the state of the laughter
there on the asphalt streets,
the surface of the smoothed-over rift.
Enormous caterpillars called "Eucs"
have cut a swath
across the Sandias
gouging deeper than any book
has ever made a furrow
through my mind.
Tourists speed by
perhaps not sensing the scar tissue,
the plowed-up land,
not likely to see the aspen,
cedar, deer and wild goat
above the limestone ledge.
It is not where logic and tools
conspire to simplify the land
that a poem
snares the fish of light
in a shadowed stand of pine.
I choose the forest
and the peaks behind my eyes
above the road cut,
where a hobbled unicorn cries
and a white whale breeches
through El Greco's tumbling skies.
From those heights
the city down below forms a bowl
whose center is Old Town;
not the make-believe Old Town,
the Hollywood Old Town,
but rather as it was then called,
Alburquerque,
where it all began
in the unhurried nights and days
a long time ago,
where the small ranches
spread out along the river
and slowly the plaza formed
a diminutive stage,
the center of my universe.
Boxes on the map
are meant to be houses made of words.
Discrete squares,
loops and rectangles
form this world of ink.
It would become cluttered, messy,
to try to show the details
inside the make-believe worlds
these lines on paper represent.
Straight lines suddenly veer
or curve to follow some unknown contour
of the mind or of the land.
They are roads made of words
obscure as the kingdom
from which they come.
En el reinado de la palabra
todo puede ser.
El rey absurdo ni apenas
se vista de tinta.
Los vasallos andan por allá
entre las sílabas.
Y los demás,
es decir el pueblo,
como es ahora
y siempre ha sido,
forma el fondo escuro
del reinado de la palabra.
In the kingdom of the word
everything is possible.
The absurd king is not even barely
dressed in ink.
His vassals scurry around
through the syllables.
And the rest,
that is to say, the people,
as it is now and always has been,
form the obscure backdrop
for the kingdom of the word.
Roads are words
leading to
silence
where the map falters,
becomes the screechy note on the violin,
the musician blinded by the desert sun,
where the map stumbles
into a whiteness
as total as death.
He cruzado caminos
en los sueños.
Caminos que dan a la muerte.
El letrero de un camino dice "Roma,"
pero a Roma llegan
muy pocos caminos de aquí.
Son caminos
que se parecen mucho
a los caminos despiertos.
Son caminos
donde hay poca gente.
Caminos que dan a un parque
o a una vega placentera
en medianoche
con un jardín que pronto se hace
camposanto
con cruces
bajo luz blanca,
y todo esto
envuelto en la niebla que lleva
el barco del sueño.
Todo mar y camino
llegan al margen
de la nada
donde no hay ni huella que seguir.
Aquí el poeta con su pluma
dibuja imágenes
de su porvenir.
In dreams
I have come upon roads
leading to death.
A road sign says "Roma,"
but few roads here
lead to Rome.
These dream roads
are very much like wide awake
roads.
These are roads
with few people,
roads leading to a park,
the pleasant meadow
at midnight
and there is a garden
that changes into a cemetery
with crosses
bathed in white light.
And all this happens
wrapped in the fog carrying
the ghost ship of dreams along.
All roads and seas
lead to the edge of nothingness
where not even a clue
is left to follow.
Here the poet with his pen
sketches out images
for his future.
Inside the boxes
there is an incessant whirl.
People and their possessions
seek form,
the ultimate solidity of words.
Long before there were words,
the curious tracks they leave
across an empty space,
the only map
was in the eye of the eagle
gliding along the canyon walls,
or in the fine particles of sand
forming an undulating S,
the wake of the serpent
sidewinding its way south
beneath the sun.
Once people formed by the light
became Aztecs wandering this land.
Their lips uttered words
and the words became gods.
Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl,
Lord and Lady of Our Sustenance.
Quetzalcoatl,
God of Life,
Creator of the People,
Lord of the House of Dawn.
Tezcatlipoca,
omnipotent God of Darkness,
God of Sorcerers and Highwaymen,
Lord of the House of Night.
We are not the Aztecs
who left ghost trails here.
We remember them.
We are the victims
of all the Aztecs--
Mexican Aztecs
Spanish Aztecs
Anglo Aztecs
Pick Your Own Favorite Aztecs.
We are the sacrificed
in this land
where the Lord of the House of Night
grows fat
at the Feast of the Flying of Men.
Reluctantly, we leave home and wander.
Sometimes our barrios
recall the family names of founders--
los Barelas, Martineztown,
los Candelarias--or the saints--
San José, San Felipe--
and we remember them
on our travels
for we constantly move about
and we are far from Aztlán.
Words become seeds of maize
the healing herbs of the medicine man.
Words become mud villages
named with the flint edge
of cliff, wind, and star.
Tiguex, Alcanform, Isleta, Sandia.
Spaniards brought their words
for the shapes of horses, sheep,
metal plows, swords and crosses,
wheat, apples, peaches.
Franciscans offered up
their sales pitch--
sin, forgiveness, salvation,
the trade-in offer for the old
native gods.
Words become seeds of maize
the healing herbs of the medicine man.
Words become mud villages
named with the flint edge
of cliff, wind, and star.
Tiguex, Alcanform, Isleta, Sandia.
Spaniards brought their words
for the shapes of horses, sheep,
metal plows, swords and crosses,
wheat, apples, peaches.
Franciscans offered up
their sales pitch--
sin, forgiveness, salvation,
the trade-in offer for the old
native gods.
Clouds of ivory
tinge the Spanish sky,
burst and fall in Mozarabic light,
a fountain spray
beneath al Andaluz sun
caught in some Alhambran
garden of my mind.
Evening toward Africa
and a dark muezzin
calls down the Moorish night
to the narrow streets of Granada.
Golden Age ballads
and a song
in praise of wine
by Samuel Ha-Nagid
drift through the olive trees
toward the sea.
Here an occasional Morrano
paused on the journey north,
seeing the Sandias,
seeing Granada in his mind,
and continued on up in the valley.
Spanish tongues
fleshed out the bare bones
of love and hate.
Indio
Mestizo
Española
Mexicano
Americano
whispered
the ritual words,
then parted the blessed thighs
In the name of the Father
and of the Son
who will be born of this union . . .
and of the Holy Ghost,
him, the spooky one,
the inscrutable tongue of fire
who threatened to burn me as a child.
Him, the ghost who may have been
the howling birth of strong men and women
who built
la Plaza de Alburquerque,
the Church of San Felipe Neri,
ad majorem gloriam dei.
Words of ancestors
spoke of fabulous islands and beasts,
fountains of youth,
cities of gold and heavenly utopias
where the saints would wait
for the second coming of Christ.
Words of ancestors
spoke of Hummingbird-on-the-Left,
an eagle devouring the hearts of men,
the sun who did battle with darkness
and arose every morning
from the pool of night,
human blood and tears.
Words of ancestors
spoke of Jesucristo and his mother,
la Virgen María, who intercedes
with God the Father
to have mercy on sinners.
Sephardic laments
of a lost tribe
carried the words of ancestors
who longed for Zion.
Words of ancestors
sprouted from the lips of the dying,
gathered and hovered
over the rites of extreme unction
and the return of the camposanto.
From where it no longer is,
a star takes aim like a sharpshooter
right at my eyes.
Light scatters in all directions,
a pack of wolves on fire
running to the past and the future.
Bones walk through my shadow
and my body explodes
into a longing for wings.
Coyotes gather in the dark place
circling my path with cold fire.
I cannot answer their hungry jaws.
A bird, a hawk, is a shadow
circling my future,
is carved into stone I cannot see.
Camposanto of words
uncoupling from flesh,
camposanto of words
seeking the lips of a lover,
camposanto of words
unmoved by time
scattering the tombstones,
camposanto of words
crystalline for the moon
fleeting and hard
as an obsidian butterfly,
camposanto of words
you yearn for a song.
The land is stark in New Mexico.
The sky comes right down to the ground
and stamps hard on the earth
insistent as a Jemez dancer
or the staff of a matachín.
It is a land of hunters
where men and animals
stand naked in a forest of light,
always taking aim,
always the target.
Between San Ysidro and Cuba
I come across a hunter,
a coyote killed by a truck in the night,
a spot of gore on the road.
His great head stands alone,
sculpture mounted on the desolate asphalt,
the jaws thrown open like the land,
the fangs bare to the immense sky.
This is his last and fitting comment
on the world of coyote,
the vast wilderness of death
he did not know
would fix forever in my heart
this final, silent, and classic howl.
Capulín rises, a perfect volcanic cone,
near Folsom, at the edge of the plains to the east.
We drive round the base in a pickup truck
hunting for deer, our tracks crisscrossing
the ghosts of cowboys on the Goodnight Trail,
Kiowas on their fast ponies, and earlier men
who hunted the mammoth and the great bison.
Capulín rises, a white marker
in a green and cloudy sea
while we, like cavemen, repeat the pattern below
before we, too, complete the circle
into memory, into silence, and into stone.
Looking down from Johnson mesa,
Ratón is a scattering of cold seeds of light,
mirror to the stars in the black sky.
I remember I am a fawn on this sheer ledge,
an early man wandered over from Folsom,
or from the cool caves at Altamira.
There is a cold wind sweeping around the rocks
as at Stonehenge, and through my bones.
Before my feet, a sharp drop falls
to the deer below nesting down for the night.
I remember that I am a tired hunter
and that time has caught me on this cliff.
There is nothing can be done for it
except let hunter and hunted sleep for a while.
Tomorrow we take up the chase again with the sun
here where the world breaks off,
snapped like a twig or a rifle shot
into the silence of the valley below.
Here the earth, too, is a hunter
restless on its trail through the void.
Driving on Highway 90
east from Silver City
crow crosses my path above San Lorenzo.
Gray squirrel does the same thing
in Gila Wilderness.
Halfway through Hillsboro
a whirl of cottonwood leaves
dances across the highway
following Percha Kreek
down to Caballo Lake.
The Caballo Mountains to the east
rear up from the desert floor
shimmering in the afternoon heat,
horses trapped in stone;
much like unicorns,
they stretch their necks upward,
the great blue heads
neighing into the sky.
Rhythms of the hunt
demanding as the staff of the matachines
return to la plaza vieja de Alburquerque,
the boxes made of ink on paper.
Ya vienen los indios
de Guarecimé,
son los matachines
de Guarecimé
Son los matachines
de Guarecimé.
Son los matachines
de Guarecimé.
Words of ancestors
remembered a castle in County Cork,
a leprechaun hiding in the glen,
the clean taste of whiskey,
a beloved violin in the evening breeze.
A Victrola of the heart
plays in each box on the map
letting fly voices and words
which sing of another time.
A box on a map
is a whirling dust devil,
a ghost dance in ink.
Each box forms
a history of the flame word,
a cry from the past.
Ghosts walk arm in arm
around the Old Town plaza.
A pale tourist yawns.
Mr. Devine plays
a waltz on his violin.
Carried by the wind,
the music rising
from the bandstand in the square.
He dreams his children.
The old photograph
shows dark Irish eyes and hair.
He sees his grandson.
When she was young,
Rebecca Gutierrez sang
and danced in these streets.
Grandmother looks subdued.
Not at all like when she prayed
the endless rosary.
Another photograph,
family portrait, dated 1898.
Cristobal Mares,
patriarch of the family,
prosperous ranchero,
his eyes are the shade of history.
He remembers his grandfather's stories
about the long cattle drive
north from Guadalajara,
the throat-searing crossing
of la jornada del muerto
(the dead man's journey)
to arrive in the rio arriba country,
green mountains north of Santa Fe
then Taos and home.
Trinidad Pacheco de Mares
endures the eternal Taos winter,
the struggle etched in the set jaw,
the pursed lips.
She is the matriarch who bears
for her husband Cristobal six children:
Laureano, Porfiria, Isabel,
Fernando, Lupita, Eduardo--
my grandfather who is about fifteen
in this photograph, stubborn enough
to survive the loss of land,
the Great Depression,
slaving in the sweatshops
for the Santa Fe Railroad.
He will live long enough
to wrestle me as a child,
that strength of his still there
for me to draw from until now.
These Mares and Martinez stare
from the cold eye of winter
into the eye of the camera,
into the eye of death,
that bony-faced woman,
la huesuda, who smiles
and points her arrows at them
from my century,
from my eyes starting into theirs.
I turn away toward the future,
also found deep in the eyes
of David, as Goliath discovered
in a painting by Jaro Dedina.
David, confident as a man
delivered from the jaw of the lion
and from the paw of the bear,
ruddy and handsome,
his face the color of the earth,
takes up the foreground.
A visage as of a mighty power
to the right and above David's head
looks down from the sky
over the valley of Elah.
There seems to be no place
large enough on this canvas
for a Goliath to stand
against the steady gaze
of David's eyes.
Goliath,
seen only in the eyes of David,
sees a graceful motion not his own,
a dance he fears he cannot do.
For forty days
the Philistine came forward
large and clumsy as a doomed empire.
Morning and evening
he shouted defiance of the spirit.
Trapped now by these eyes,
his great bulk
reduced to pitiable smallness,
Goliath can do no thing
but murmur the ritual slogans
and lurch forward to the battle.
David's eyes will not let go.
Goliath, held fast to is footnote in history
by the eyes in this painting,
does not see the onrushing future,
the small stone
cast from the whirling sling of David.
A third photograph shows my grandparents and their red brick house
on First Street in New Town.
It was the harsh thirties
and the photo tells
the old story of the Crash,
the land blowing away to Texas.
Grandpa is dressed in a cheap suit,
Grandma in what finery she could salvage.
Grandpa was bound
as my father was then bound,
hand and foot
by iron and steel and debt,
by the railroad "shops"
where men were sliced in half
by the indifferent tools.
The "shops," layered with grime
so dark and gloomy
a worker could lean over a stairwell,
piss on the foreman below
and never get caught.
A train whistle
cuts from east to west
through a child's memory
that first flew and circled
high above some Andalusian plain,
or took flight on a fluted note
in the court of Texcoco.
Far away across the lake
and the floating gardens,
the ram's horn
called to yet another sacrifice.
The child cannot remember
what he remembers now
here in Old Town,
here with this map,
right here in the Rio Grande valley
where extinct volcanos
guard the west approach
and the Sandia Mountains to the east
sculpt the memories of stone age men.
Another camera has caught
the ghost in the KiMo Theatre.
Early 1930s, clean
New Mexico sky,
small town downtown Albuquerque
KiMo Theatre marquee:
Glen Tryon in Hot Heels,
Five Acts of Vaudeville.
Years later, Uncle Elfego
took me to see Roy Rogers,
Gene Autry, the Cisco Kid,
and all their epigones
who fought the good fight
against the ubiquitous bad guys.
Now, Uncle Elfego
sings in his grave.
Hot air balloons
float above Albuquerque,
balloons for his funeral
to rise with his spirit
and carry his memory into song.
Frozen, these figures
face the camera
to be caught in pure form.
The university student
dressed like a thirties dandy
raises his hand and salutes me
from his time to my own.
Another man, then in his 20s,
stares at me dumbfounded
from the west corner just north
of the old Fords and Chevies
on Fifth Street
more than half a century away.
The American afternoon crowd
in front of the KiMo
caught then by the camera lens
is now what it must be,
the frozen images within
the reduced and still life
dimensions of a photograph.
Three young businessmen
who try to sell arid mesa
and blue sky
greet each other.
The shadows of the distant future
cast by the camera
are too thin for them in this brilliant sun.
Too thin, also, for the heavy-set optimist
wearing the good suit
and smiling into the end of his era.
He stares like the last
black-and-white buffalo
into the dispassionate camera,
the last of his God-fearing kind.
He stands on the hood
of the Pierce Arrow.
Beside the Pierce Arrow
stands the happy baker from Lola's Cafe.
A woman and her daughter pause
to smile at me before they, too, exit
to their own half century.
Another Pierce Arrow continues east on Central,
black arrow crossing the bright day,
black arrow in black-and-white photograph,
black arrow crossing before my eyes.
It is New Mexico, late '20s or early '30s,
black-and-white photograph of the KiMo Theatre
appealing to the history minded
except for him, the ghost, the one who didn't pause
for the camera!
He's the fast-moving blur
him the clown,
sideshow barker,
seller of popcorn and cotton candy,
well dressed, it is plain to see
from the cloud puffs of form
which caught his hands
and sport coat sleeves,
also the pant legs and spats.
It is for him I sing--
him, the ghost
walking smartly along Central
to the El Fidel Hotel
or perhaps on to Old Town,
him, the ghost,
too slick to be caught by the camera,
too much to do
to be trapped by his own time.
Bones pass through his shadow
every day in Albuquerque.
Him, the ghost who stares at Uncle Elfego and me
in the KiMo Theatre
watching Gene Autry and Roy Rogers movies,
a shadow on an old photograph,
a hope solid but shapeless,
fleeting as faith.
Him, the ghost in the KiMo Theatre.
A train whistle echoes again
and is gone.
The train sits on a siding.
The rails turn into rust.
Weeds numerous as headstones
grow inside the roundhouse
crying like an old woman to herself,
longing for her dead children.
I am reminded of the whistle's
shrill lament,
the purpose-bound engine
coming down the tracks,
remorseless as memory.
To the west on the map,
Mr. McCarty's house
is the thick rectangle.
The square behind it
is the tin-roofed garage
where Donny McCarty showed me
how to parachute out of the attic.
It was our airplane
and it was our fortress
deep behind enemy lines,
our secret cave in a cliff
where our small bodies
became immortal shapes
of comic book and movie heroes.
Across the street
is the Manzano Day School
with its playground
open to the children
of the country club set.
We invaded that forbidden wonderland.
Once the watchman caught us,
Donny and me, talked of jail,
tossed us out of paradise
and warned us not to be caught here again,
warned us never to return.
I became an enemy of the state.
Nearby is the large square
meant to be Old Town Plaza.
The little domino on the north side
is the San Felipe Neri Church.
The other large square is the stone castle
Bernalillo County Court House of the 1880s
that became San Felipe School.
Every gloomy room held for a child
the ghost of an outlaw,
a cattle rustler, a hanged man.
The short leg of the L-shaped building
on San Felipe Street
is where I lied for one year
with good songs and a woman I dearly loved.
That thin rectangle on Lomas Boulevard,
New York Avenue, as it was called then,
stand for the word which is my center.
The bird of memory comes winging back
strong as my child lungs
gasping for air in an oxygen tent,
strong as the coal and cedar
in the wood-burning stove,
strong as the fresh-based wild pheasant
my father hunted and killed,
strong as the July sun
across the worn linoleum floor,
strong as the outhouse stench
even in freezing December,
strong as the wind-and-rain-polished
adobe walls in the back yard
that stood broken and gaping,
strong as the horsehair and straw
mixed in those mud bricks,
strong as the vanished voices
that held together the singing vision.
On such wings
the bird of memory flies
and then falls back to earth,
to silence, to velorios,
to all the weeping women.
Where the map leaves off
there is a great white empty space,
the rest of the world.
Beyond Old Town, la Plaza Vieja,
the old women in black shawls,
the old fires turning to white ash,
there is only terra incognita.
I populate these boxes and lines
made of ink on paper
as best I can inside my head.
Then I turn away
to my own place and my own time.
El unicornio
malherido por estos tiempos
corre al margen del mapa.
Bajo la luna llena
las blancas abejas
labran panal de luz
en una noche serena.
He visot pasar el unicornio.
Hechizado, lo he seguido
a la margen del ancho mar.
No sé si me quedo
para simpre dormido
o al punto de despertar.
Pero ya veo cristalizar
los granitos de sal
en el panal de las abejas.
The unicorn,
badly wounded by these times,
gallops along the margin of the map.
With the full moon above,
the white bees
build a honeycomb of light
in the calm evening.
I have seen the unicorn pass by.
Spellbound, I have followed him
to the edge of the sea
where I know not if I sleep forever
or if I am about to wake.
Still, I see
the salt grains crystallize
in the honeycomb of the bees.
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