I
In the city
they wrap you
in their white
wings and fly:
From here
the red light
blinking,
the night black.
They carry
you where
you sleep
to dream
but you know
elevators because
this was the second
today
the first in the city
your friend asking
questions
you never answer
now on the edge
of the lake,
football stadium;
above, seven stories
about to be told.
How I kicked
persimmons
across the highway,
how I rode the horse
my friend led
to Grandma’s house
giving me the bridle,
the horse weaving
its hooves between
the persimmons
all the way to town–
creak of the saddle,
smell of leather
the horse also heard,
no doubt smelled,
and that is only one
story, six more to go
but that’s all for today,
the one with white wings
says, ascending.
I keep on with the story
telling to myself
looking out the window
wired for safety
between the patchwork
to find a horse to ride
on the earth, and make it
to the country
where I was born,
my gift tethered
and fed and stalled
for one night
so another day is
another story
and then five
to go, the girls growing
to be women and I
approaching manhood
someday
the very long sixth
story, followed by
mine own Damascus . . ,
how so like a blackguard
caught in flagrante delicto,
as my city friend says
though he refers to
something not a crime . . .
that leads to this fourth story,
where I am, where
birds are called elevators
paths sidewalks, trees temples
or skyscrapers or simply
buildings where denizens
buy and sell and see how
they wear their skins . . .
and after that, the third story
I already know by heart,
it is my heart
or was then,
before and after red hair,
sailor’s walk, Manuela Roma,
whereupon Irish Cathleen
returned, she said, to stay
and that begins
the penultimate story
still to be lived or written,
I don’t know which, . . .
if ever I may love my gamine
until finally I I die happy
and go on loving all
my world’s seven wonders.
(14 December 2010)
copyright 2010 by Floyce Alexander
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Friday, December 17, 2010
Los Retablos
Somebody says, God damn! why you choosing San Juan de la Cruz
for your patron saint? –The fourteenth of December comes and goes.
I recite "en la noche oscura de la alma" but he doesn’t know illiteracy
when he hears it, or he’d say, How many summers did you live there,
in Mexico? And I’d say, If you can call it living. And he’d say nothing
more. You can’t stay in the City two summers in a row and remember
everything a near half century later. You could get all wound up, jive
yourself, but Hilda Gadea was there only for an afternoon, red fingernails
flashing like I already said somewhere, throwing sparks. In that room,
Che dead a year. Don’t tell me you didn’t approve of what he tried to do,
you just slum around his remains in your head. Urn of forgetfulness,
ashes and bones of hell quiet after the guns in the Bolivian jungle
and cackle from the generales who think the peasants know nothing
to do but shuffle in the dust and smile. Could fat shits even guess why?
I can’t abide it, I want to say, but don’t and go off and drink my café
con leche in the cantina out the door of the hotel where we are staying
as long as we have dinero. I don’t go back. I walk around the corner
to Palacio de Bellas Artes, where the Siqueiros triptych hangs, the cry
La Nueva Democracia straight out to the spectator: Cuauhtemoc under
the knife; Rivera’s four panels of Carnaval de la Vida Mexicana, then
Orozco’s Katharsis. Who remembers now Teresa de Avila covered up
Juan’s self-inflicted wounds and kissed his feet, and norteamericanos spit
in the street and swear disgust is not their greatest expression of distaste.
From Mina y Buenavista, up Calle Alvarado, the zona rosa is open now.
But I’m in Tokyo as long as I can bear it. Then back to the Kyoto digs.
I could be in Chimayo if I’d stayed home. I think of a little mountain
that loomed as you round a bend on the highway nearing the village.
It looks larger than it is. And beyond the sanctuario lies Las Truchas,
then Las Trampas. They paint what they feel on the walls of houses,
pero no iglesias. Red letters and black, it’s all the same, but not to those
who are told to be quiet and choose to speak. I understand such impulse.
The guy who asks about St. John of the Cross could never understand
why there’s never a human reason to sweep altars clean of los retablos.
(17 December 2010)
copyright 2010 by Floyce Alexander
for your patron saint? –The fourteenth of December comes and goes.
I recite "en la noche oscura de la alma" but he doesn’t know illiteracy
when he hears it, or he’d say, How many summers did you live there,
in Mexico? And I’d say, If you can call it living. And he’d say nothing
more. You can’t stay in the City two summers in a row and remember
everything a near half century later. You could get all wound up, jive
yourself, but Hilda Gadea was there only for an afternoon, red fingernails
flashing like I already said somewhere, throwing sparks. In that room,
Che dead a year. Don’t tell me you didn’t approve of what he tried to do,
you just slum around his remains in your head. Urn of forgetfulness,
ashes and bones of hell quiet after the guns in the Bolivian jungle
and cackle from the generales who think the peasants know nothing
to do but shuffle in the dust and smile. Could fat shits even guess why?
I can’t abide it, I want to say, but don’t and go off and drink my café
con leche in the cantina out the door of the hotel where we are staying
as long as we have dinero. I don’t go back. I walk around the corner
to Palacio de Bellas Artes, where the Siqueiros triptych hangs, the cry
La Nueva Democracia straight out to the spectator: Cuauhtemoc under
the knife; Rivera’s four panels of Carnaval de la Vida Mexicana, then
Orozco’s Katharsis. Who remembers now Teresa de Avila covered up
Juan’s self-inflicted wounds and kissed his feet, and norteamericanos spit
in the street and swear disgust is not their greatest expression of distaste.
From Mina y Buenavista, up Calle Alvarado, the zona rosa is open now.
But I’m in Tokyo as long as I can bear it. Then back to the Kyoto digs.
I could be in Chimayo if I’d stayed home. I think of a little mountain
that loomed as you round a bend on the highway nearing the village.
It looks larger than it is. And beyond the sanctuario lies Las Truchas,
then Las Trampas. They paint what they feel on the walls of houses,
pero no iglesias. Red letters and black, it’s all the same, but not to those
who are told to be quiet and choose to speak. I understand such impulse.
The guy who asks about St. John of the Cross could never understand
why there’s never a human reason to sweep altars clean of los retablos.
(17 December 2010)
copyright 2010 by Floyce Alexander
Another Night of Dark Soul, Three in the Morning
Last thing of a night, reminder to awake and sit za-zen.
The master is in town, bamboo in hand. Say nothing
you know or don’t know, disappear into your body,
but welcome him to this house with bay windows
not in San Francisco. Next thing, share morning tea,
slow calm setting over the brow, frost on one window,
sun through the other, I have run out of words. What do
they do? Nothing can come true through words only,
Words, like tongues, grow quiet and, with a body, leave,
one cat following another, back and forth, my itinerary
in precis. After the master goes, I hear echoing
on out where the scar heals a reprisal to blows.
In Japan a bridge leads through the house across the floor,
eyes aligned with eyes, one way to love, a line across rocks
to the lagoon where I have never forgotten the way. I am
nowhere now that the no-mind is up for auction in the West.
Here the noumenal world takes its course through no aid
of mine, I have so little to give abstraction. Or that is all . . .
They say the storms assaulting Kyoto leave temples unfazed.
I have heard the lash of wind carries the words of the dead.
(3–4 a.m., 17 December 2010)
copyright 2010 by Floyce Alexander
The master is in town, bamboo in hand. Say nothing
you know or don’t know, disappear into your body,
but welcome him to this house with bay windows
not in San Francisco. Next thing, share morning tea,
slow calm setting over the brow, frost on one window,
sun through the other, I have run out of words. What do
they do? Nothing can come true through words only,
Words, like tongues, grow quiet and, with a body, leave,
one cat following another, back and forth, my itinerary
in precis. After the master goes, I hear echoing
on out where the scar heals a reprisal to blows.
In Japan a bridge leads through the house across the floor,
eyes aligned with eyes, one way to love, a line across rocks
to the lagoon where I have never forgotten the way. I am
nowhere now that the no-mind is up for auction in the West.
Here the noumenal world takes its course through no aid
of mine, I have so little to give abstraction. Or that is all . . .
They say the storms assaulting Kyoto leave temples unfazed.
I have heard the lash of wind carries the words of the dead.
(3–4 a.m., 17 December 2010)
copyright 2010 by Floyce Alexander
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Of Leila Shulamit and Her Pagan
Her shimmer falls with rain that turns to snow.
Does she know him now? Or is he one wraith
more would turn joy to sorrow in lieu
of love? Does she ask only to be loved?
Ice lies under a blanket of powder.
Tires grip all they can. She knows to keep her
feet vigilant, heel and toe, poised
to free the car to carry her to bed.
Where is she now? Maps that fall to the floor
of his house leave her tracks on the hard wood.
He could never love her more nor she him
than in absence seeking only presence.
And how can love breathe? How can they know now
in the wilderness of cities and plains
with her lips tattooing the face he wears
to meet hers at the end of this journey . . .
--And this man having written his new love
in the characters only she can read . . .
a man whose limp is a little less now
that he feels her conjure him at her side . . .
Will love work now the night is so far gone
loneliness is painted with solitude’s
acrylic shades, and could he fill her with
such warmth he could never give another . . .
What is this silence but the bowl he fills
with a prayer that she come here to be
dazzled by the day’s joy and the night’s calm
and never be memory for his heart’s
dull ache without her. How can he say more?
He may. The sound of water in winter
roars, heaves the ice that breaks, whose voice he writes
in patois under the cacophony . . .
–Thus is written one part of her first day.
Let this be her talisman to keep her safe.
(16 December 2010)
copyright 2010 by Floyce Alexander
Does she know him now? Or is he one wraith
more would turn joy to sorrow in lieu
of love? Does she ask only to be loved?
Ice lies under a blanket of powder.
Tires grip all they can. She knows to keep her
feet vigilant, heel and toe, poised
to free the car to carry her to bed.
Where is she now? Maps that fall to the floor
of his house leave her tracks on the hard wood.
He could never love her more nor she him
than in absence seeking only presence.
And how can love breathe? How can they know now
in the wilderness of cities and plains
with her lips tattooing the face he wears
to meet hers at the end of this journey . . .
--And this man having written his new love
in the characters only she can read . . .
a man whose limp is a little less now
that he feels her conjure him at her side . . .
Will love work now the night is so far gone
loneliness is painted with solitude’s
acrylic shades, and could he fill her with
such warmth he could never give another . . .
What is this silence but the bowl he fills
with a prayer that she come here to be
dazzled by the day’s joy and the night’s calm
and never be memory for his heart’s
dull ache without her. How can he say more?
He may. The sound of water in winter
roars, heaves the ice that breaks, whose voice he writes
in patois under the cacophony . . .
–Thus is written one part of her first day.
Let this be her talisman to keep her safe.
(16 December 2010)
copyright 2010 by Floyce Alexander
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
The Long Way
The love of my life. What is it compels us to go on?
The body slows, but the mind becomes stronger
each day. The desire to live fully:
Love has its curious way. The arms holding you
and would ask only that you hold her . . . Arms
aching for other arms, lips for other lips, body
for another body:
Is that the way? Count them.
I am dying in a dying country. You are the more
alive. May we see America again as one flesh.
America without borders, without secrets.
There are miles. There are rooms. There are trees.
There are rivers. There are mountains. I remember.
There is human love . . . the long way.
(14 December 2010)
Copyright 2010 by Floyce Alexander
The body slows, but the mind becomes stronger
each day. The desire to live fully:
Love has its curious way. The arms holding you
and would ask only that you hold her . . . Arms
aching for other arms, lips for other lips, body
for another body:
Is that the way? Count them.
I am dying in a dying country. You are the more
alive. May we see America again as one flesh.
America without borders, without secrets.
There are miles. There are rooms. There are trees.
There are rivers. There are mountains. I remember.
There is human love . . . the long way.
(14 December 2010)
Copyright 2010 by Floyce Alexander
Monday, December 13, 2010
Memory's Banks
"There is a kind of pressure in humans to take whatever is most beloved by them and smash it"–Anne Carson
1. trust do not dishonor
What is there to us we don’t yet know?
Will you ever? Or I?
How?
What does a heart do when it breaks?
Throw away words and see.
I have nothing more to say, I said. Then began saying it, endlessly, breath out of breath.
2.
He remembers how he got here, sure. You gotta want to, first of all. Then go. What’ll you find? Look at all there is. More than eyes take in. Tongue talks. Mind meshes. That’s life over there.
This river’s not Lethe. The gods go after. They take tiny steps, the weight of memory is too much to bear, and they are humble in their power to take on your life and show it to you a reel at a time.
3. take your time
Let’s dance on broken knees and go to bed and fuck forever, I love you so in the dawns I know now.
That old canard about Orpheus, how he couldn’t help but look back and lost what he was going to have and the maenads caught him by the river and disembowled, dismembered, and dutifully sent his corpse down to Lethe’s falls.
Who believes it?
4.
The angel came at dusk. He wanted to tell Jacob what to do. Jacob wrestled with him all night. Nobody, not even God, tells Jacob what to do. He ends up taking the angel’s advice. You climb the ladder that you build first.
She was very kind. She brought water to the elders. They were too greedy. They took her body. They destroyed her youth. Elders? of whom?
All the stories are stories. Ruth and Boaz. Jonahand the Whale. The wisdom. The prophecies. Stories must be true before they become stories. Who says? They who tell the tales, who lived them, no matter when. The mistakes men make are called history, their triumphs the same, but their stories lies, at best imaginative fabrications to curry favor.
After so long in the city, she moved to the country. Now years later she’s coming home.
5.
Reynolds dreams of Isabel. She dreams of Tim. Juan Flores dreams of Irish Cathleen. She dreams of flowers. He is calling himself by that name, save when he sees the gamine on the street corner beckoning and he goes. He dreams of the gamine. The gamine dreams of him.
The gamine. What is her name? Irene Castenada maybe. Tall, slim, loving without end. No, not her, she’s happy now, a mother somewhere, aging with the pores of her skin in a smile.
The gamine. She is the dream. She is blood of his blood, bones of his bones. And she says it seven ways.
6.
I was walking by the river today. I saw her in my mind’s eye. She was walking in the woods, and did not want to leave. Tearing up her roots, she called it. I asked, What roots do you mean, my love? She said, These, and undressed and pressed her nakedness against me, These bones with this flesh that I made myself in the kiln of my God’s foundry.
I was walking across the city then. It was night. The cars were lights and sounds. The stories I told myself were set in Mexico City, but only after Mazatlan. In those days I drove. Now I walk. Los Angeles is not a city for walkers, not for long distances. Wilshire to Fairfax. And back. Web between thumb and forefinger tattooed. Pachuco? Gringo.
I walk everywhere. I stop and talk to bums. I buttonhole bankers. I do everything but sing. I need her piano for my voice, they are inseparable. I have gone from her and stayed. I am going farther soon, further into myself, where the falls give upon a calm pool and after that another river, this one for keeps.
The gamine is named and known and loved and treasured and unforgettable, ever, and mine always, I cannot be too clear, I run my own inquisition and my only witness is the one who stands accused, myself, and I listen, and I talk so I can listen, and I want only to go to be with her. The gamine. We are growing older as we wait to meet. Why do we, I mean I, wait?
7.
There is a place in the South where the fireflies light up nights the moon sleeps behind clouds. The no-see-ems. The pine trees. The little mountains, the hills, the one-way houses you can shoot a shotgun through and hit nothing but where the door gives on another door. Windows always open. It is so hot there you can’t wear clothes or stop making love, ever.
I wish I could remember how to get there.
There are places in the North you can freeze to death in no time. That’s how you get out of the wind. Fear. There are places like that, frozen until you thaw the ice, all that water below. I love the taste of cold air. It tells me I will live a long life, longer even than the one I’ve lived.
Irish Cathleen. The gamine. The woods. The city. The air. The wind. The rivers. The great mountains of my childhood. One for each eye through the window where I sat many hours.
Otherwise, the fields, the orchards, the vineyard, the canneries, the warehouses: the jobs.
The job of love. Of staying alive somehow without the love of one but with the other’s love, depending on how much I take away when I go to give all there is of me left to remember.
again, to the gamine
(13 December 2010)
copyright 2010 by Floyce Alexander
1. trust do not dishonor
What is there to us we don’t yet know?
Will you ever? Or I?
How?
What does a heart do when it breaks?
Throw away words and see.
I have nothing more to say, I said. Then began saying it, endlessly, breath out of breath.
2.
He remembers how he got here, sure. You gotta want to, first of all. Then go. What’ll you find? Look at all there is. More than eyes take in. Tongue talks. Mind meshes. That’s life over there.
This river’s not Lethe. The gods go after. They take tiny steps, the weight of memory is too much to bear, and they are humble in their power to take on your life and show it to you a reel at a time.
3. take your time
Let’s dance on broken knees and go to bed and fuck forever, I love you so in the dawns I know now.
That old canard about Orpheus, how he couldn’t help but look back and lost what he was going to have and the maenads caught him by the river and disembowled, dismembered, and dutifully sent his corpse down to Lethe’s falls.
Who believes it?
4.
The angel came at dusk. He wanted to tell Jacob what to do. Jacob wrestled with him all night. Nobody, not even God, tells Jacob what to do. He ends up taking the angel’s advice. You climb the ladder that you build first.
She was very kind. She brought water to the elders. They were too greedy. They took her body. They destroyed her youth. Elders? of whom?
All the stories are stories. Ruth and Boaz. Jonahand the Whale. The wisdom. The prophecies. Stories must be true before they become stories. Who says? They who tell the tales, who lived them, no matter when. The mistakes men make are called history, their triumphs the same, but their stories lies, at best imaginative fabrications to curry favor.
After so long in the city, she moved to the country. Now years later she’s coming home.
5.
Reynolds dreams of Isabel. She dreams of Tim. Juan Flores dreams of Irish Cathleen. She dreams of flowers. He is calling himself by that name, save when he sees the gamine on the street corner beckoning and he goes. He dreams of the gamine. The gamine dreams of him.
The gamine. What is her name? Irene Castenada maybe. Tall, slim, loving without end. No, not her, she’s happy now, a mother somewhere, aging with the pores of her skin in a smile.
The gamine. She is the dream. She is blood of his blood, bones of his bones. And she says it seven ways.
6.
I was walking by the river today. I saw her in my mind’s eye. She was walking in the woods, and did not want to leave. Tearing up her roots, she called it. I asked, What roots do you mean, my love? She said, These, and undressed and pressed her nakedness against me, These bones with this flesh that I made myself in the kiln of my God’s foundry.
I was walking across the city then. It was night. The cars were lights and sounds. The stories I told myself were set in Mexico City, but only after Mazatlan. In those days I drove. Now I walk. Los Angeles is not a city for walkers, not for long distances. Wilshire to Fairfax. And back. Web between thumb and forefinger tattooed. Pachuco? Gringo.
I walk everywhere. I stop and talk to bums. I buttonhole bankers. I do everything but sing. I need her piano for my voice, they are inseparable. I have gone from her and stayed. I am going farther soon, further into myself, where the falls give upon a calm pool and after that another river, this one for keeps.
The gamine is named and known and loved and treasured and unforgettable, ever, and mine always, I cannot be too clear, I run my own inquisition and my only witness is the one who stands accused, myself, and I listen, and I talk so I can listen, and I want only to go to be with her. The gamine. We are growing older as we wait to meet. Why do we, I mean I, wait?
7.
There is a place in the South where the fireflies light up nights the moon sleeps behind clouds. The no-see-ems. The pine trees. The little mountains, the hills, the one-way houses you can shoot a shotgun through and hit nothing but where the door gives on another door. Windows always open. It is so hot there you can’t wear clothes or stop making love, ever.
I wish I could remember how to get there.
There are places in the North you can freeze to death in no time. That’s how you get out of the wind. Fear. There are places like that, frozen until you thaw the ice, all that water below. I love the taste of cold air. It tells me I will live a long life, longer even than the one I’ve lived.
Irish Cathleen. The gamine. The woods. The city. The air. The wind. The rivers. The great mountains of my childhood. One for each eye through the window where I sat many hours.
Otherwise, the fields, the orchards, the vineyard, the canneries, the warehouses: the jobs.
The job of love. Of staying alive somehow without the love of one but with the other’s love, depending on how much I take away when I go to give all there is of me left to remember.
again, to the gamine
(13 December 2010)
copyright 2010 by Floyce Alexander
On Two Poems by Sandra Cisneros
STILL LIFE WITH POTATOES, PEARLS, RAW MEAT, RHINESTONES, LARD, AND HORSE HOOVES
for Franco Mondini
In Spanish it’s naturaleza muerta and not life at all.
But certainly not natural. What’s natural?
You and me. I’ll buy you a drink.
To a woman who doesn’t act like a woman.
To a man who doesn’t act like a man.
Death is natural, at least in Spanish, I think.
Life? I’m not so sure.
Consider The Contessa, who in her time was lovely
and now sports a wart the size of this diamond.
So, ragazzo, you’re Venice.
To you. To Venice.
Not the one of Casanova.
The other one of cheap pensiones by the railway station.
I recommend a narrow bed stained with semen, pee, and sorrow facing the wall.
Stain and decay are romantic.
You’re positively Pasolini.
Likely to dangle and fandango yourself to death.
If we let you. I won’t let you!
Not to be outdone I’m Piazzolla.
I’ll tango for you in a lace G-string
stained with my first-day flow
and one sloppy tit leaping like a Niagara from my dress.
Did you say duress or dress?
Let’s sing a Puccini duet–I like La Traviesa.
I’ll be your trained monkey.
I’ll be sequin and bangle.
I’ll be Mae, Joan, Bette, Marlene for you–
I’ll be anything you ask. But ask me something glamorous.
Only make me laugh.
Another?
What I want to say, querido, is
hunger is not romantic to the hungry.
What I want to say is
fear is not so thrilling if you’re the one afraid.
What I want to say is
poverty’s not quaint when it’s your house you can’t escape from.
Decay’s not beautiful to the decayed.
What’s beauty?
Lipstick on a penis.
A kiss on a running sore.
A reptile stiletto that could puncture a heart.
A brick through the windshield that means I love you.
A hurt that bangs on the door.
Look, I hate to break this to you, but this isn’t Venice or Buenos Aires.
This is San Antonio.
That mirror isn’t a yard sale.
It’s a fire. And these are remnants
of what could be carried out and saved.
The pearls? I bought them at the Winn’s.
My mink? Genuine acrylic.
Thank God this isn’t Berlin.
Another drink?
Bartender, another bottle, but–
!Ay caray and oh dear!–
The pretty blond boy is no longer serving us.
To the death camps! To the death camps!
How rude! How vulgar!
Drink up, honey. I’ve got money.
Doesn’t he know who we are?
Que vivan los de abajo de los de abajo,
los de rienda suelta, the witches, the women,
the dangerous, the queer.
Que vivan las perras.
"Que me sirvan otro trago . . ."
I know a bar where they’ll buy us drinks
if I wear my skirt on my head and you come in wearing nothing
but my black brassiere.
(from Loose Woman)
* * *
DECEMBER 24th, PARIS–NOTRE DAME
The Seine runs along.
Merrily, merrily.
The river. The rain.
Water into water.
A blue umbrella fading into fog.
A child into his mother’s arms.
Buttresses leaping delirious.
Wind through the vein of trees.
The rain into the river.
Tomorrow they might find a body here–
unraveled like a poem,
dissolved like wafer.
Say the body was a woman’s.
Ophelia Found.
Undid the easy knot and spiraled.
Without a sound.
A year ends
merrily. Merrily
another one begins.
I go out into the street once more.
The wrists so full of living.
The heart begging once again.
(from My Wicked, Wicked Ways)
* * *
LA PALOMA
1. The Glamour of Evil
One always wonders why the church calls glamour evil, or vice-versa. What is there about beauty that might offend God? Don’t tell me glamour is not beautiful, and vice-versa. Why divide the spirit and the flesh?
No one who reads these poems seeks to judge them. Do they? Why should we want to be less than human? We may well never be more . . .
It’s hard not to know what to do with these poems. They are by a moxie mejicana who lives inside herself the way those not as brave as she live outside, burning and burning with rage and desire. She can’t help them, she will help them–it’s up to them. She can convey, impart, evoke how it is for her. If we are going to know anything about this country, we are going to have to listen to her. Read her.
There is a story, undoubtedly true because in it she’s in trouble with the so-called city fathers. She paints her house bright colors and the city council explodes in fury. She defends her way of living. She writes another poem. And another. She writes a novel. She writes stories. And other stories. She’s already told how it was to grow up in Chicago, chicana. She stays close to home now, next to her own skin. She’s in San Antonio in one poem, in Paris in the other. A reader likes to know where she is. What she says and how she says it makes a reader feel more grounded somehow, like this gringo who dreams he lives somehow, for some reason, in a barrio nobody leaves until somebody else is born, and then not too soon, mind you.
I want to call her a moxie mejicana, but it’s not for me to say. She says who and what and why she is Sandra Cisneros.
How much, to me, the poet resembles a gandy dancer laying down tracks on a railroad through the nerves. In one poem she’s in Venice and elsewhere, one of Pasolini’s ragazzi, all this time celebrating life and death in a bar in San Antonio. In the other, shorter poem she’s not talking but taking in a moment in Paris: the Sienne. Notre Dame. Our Lady. The joy of life, the inevitability of death, the waste, what remains, the turning of time over into another year. The flow of the faces she sees, the foreboding of what she hopes not to see, not here, not ever, but that’s not possible. The longer poem provides the limits of the shorter one. Or does it? What Paris evokes is simply a world apart from her bright house, the lively bars, the laughter, tears, the time, all a way, hers, it might be mine or yours, of paying homage through the breath of blood and bones to the beauty of flesh, its own flow–what survives through poems as well as music or visual art–any art that respects its limits and still must break through and try to surpass them.
She’s wholly herself. Anglos call such selves individuals, but usually only when they refer to those of like skin and speech. They, of course, don’t know the half of it. Or even a quarter. Or an eighth. Or a sixteenth. Or nada. Hard to say. What are Anglos worth on God’s market? Spaniards? Latino/as? Let the Market decide, eh? You may as well destroy those who bring no money to the table. You do, Market, you shed them like a snake sloughs its skin.
Myself, I need to see through the haze a country throws up between its citizens, so blurry we believe it’s foolhardy now to risk seeing ourselves in the so-called other, too threatening, too mind-numbing. We could go down to city hall and ask the town council to give Sandra Cisneros everything she wants. It’s not much. Not as much as you have. You don’t have her. She has you if she wants, but she doesn’t need you, she has her house. She lives there. Let her alone, but listen to her, read her words, learn to grow up. She’s a good teacher, one who makes you laugh at least as much as weep.
Why not let her be herself? Ah, but that’s the trouble, no? You can’t let people paint their houses blue and red and yellow, flaunting their disrespect for the laws of the city. Besides, property values . . . think of your neighbors. But what if she started something? People loving rather than fearing each other, say, based on who they want to be seen as when they are next to whomever this is I don’t know and doesn’t know me but maybe that’s because I don’t know myself.
These are not poems so much as raw slivers of life, even the brief capture in Paris of condensed time, its ephemeral and evocative and inevitable passage. Yet it’s in San Antonio where the surface of life bleeds like a human soul, lively, energy without end, or fighting the soul with the mind like two hands grappling with some angel dreamed.
2. La Paloma
Where I once lived, there’s a bar under a bridge going over railroad tracks to and from downtown Albuquerque. La Paloma I want to call it. In La Paloma men and women are happy to be alone with each other and with themselves. They dance and laugh and drink and talk and flirt and fight. They have no need of strangers. You go in there and depending on your entrance the silence may be ice or go unnoticed. The door opens and for the moment it takes to go to the bar and order a beer and make yourself comfortable, you may be and most likely are happy. But to stay, you have to earn your keep. You have to mind your own business. You talk their language as best you can and they may even applaud your diction. Or you keep your mouth shut and pull it off. I knew one guy took a friend in and he just smiled and flaunted his pearly whites in a gesture of what he thought should indicate goodwill. They got it. When I was alone I tried to actually feel what the room would be like if it were empty. That way I settled in and drank my beer. This guy with his friend, they must have thought they were in a place not only novel but a comedy, one they imagined seeing themselves see themselves: these gringos being in here, where they might as soon have their throats slit if they don’t stand back slowly from the bar and pull their pockets inside out and make the gesture of standing aghast, showing what they have that the others do: See what we have! Nada!
But on good days, and always in the early afternoons, before the booze flows too fast, say to yourself, even then, Look out, hombre, your magic is about to evaporate. Clear the air that may be full of suppressed outrage. Don’t even think, just drink and live for the time you’re here as deeply inside yourself as you can reach. It’s good for you. To others, your very presence is likely to be an insult.
You think you can do what you want in La Paloma and walk out like you walked in? Look at us, these eyes might say: We have scars on our faces, on our hands, pull up our shirts and see the scars on our bellies, drop our pants and show the scars we have down there, and listen to how I say it, there’s a scar in my voice, and another scar somewhere not even I can see it. You see, a knife never knows what or who is at the end of its blade, they skewer the one who wields them as much as those into whom they are thrust. And that’s one way to read these poems, maybe.
Imagine the simplicity of what happens. Cops come in here, like they do, and tell you to break it up. You stand back, they let you alone. For the moment. That’s all anybody has and you may has well make the most of it. Imagine! You have to put yourself in their shoes. And they can’t afford your fancy shoes. Your cut of clothes. Your hat size. Your money belt. The way you waltz in and out like you own the city. You don’t own us, their eyes say all a body needs to say: You don’t own La Paloma, you don’t own the dove .
Floyce Alexander
(13 December 2010)
for Franco Mondini
In Spanish it’s naturaleza muerta and not life at all.
But certainly not natural. What’s natural?
You and me. I’ll buy you a drink.
To a woman who doesn’t act like a woman.
To a man who doesn’t act like a man.
Death is natural, at least in Spanish, I think.
Life? I’m not so sure.
Consider The Contessa, who in her time was lovely
and now sports a wart the size of this diamond.
So, ragazzo, you’re Venice.
To you. To Venice.
Not the one of Casanova.
The other one of cheap pensiones by the railway station.
I recommend a narrow bed stained with semen, pee, and sorrow facing the wall.
Stain and decay are romantic.
You’re positively Pasolini.
Likely to dangle and fandango yourself to death.
If we let you. I won’t let you!
Not to be outdone I’m Piazzolla.
I’ll tango for you in a lace G-string
stained with my first-day flow
and one sloppy tit leaping like a Niagara from my dress.
Did you say duress or dress?
Let’s sing a Puccini duet–I like La Traviesa.
I’ll be your trained monkey.
I’ll be sequin and bangle.
I’ll be Mae, Joan, Bette, Marlene for you–
I’ll be anything you ask. But ask me something glamorous.
Only make me laugh.
Another?
What I want to say, querido, is
hunger is not romantic to the hungry.
What I want to say is
fear is not so thrilling if you’re the one afraid.
What I want to say is
poverty’s not quaint when it’s your house you can’t escape from.
Decay’s not beautiful to the decayed.
What’s beauty?
Lipstick on a penis.
A kiss on a running sore.
A reptile stiletto that could puncture a heart.
A brick through the windshield that means I love you.
A hurt that bangs on the door.
Look, I hate to break this to you, but this isn’t Venice or Buenos Aires.
This is San Antonio.
That mirror isn’t a yard sale.
It’s a fire. And these are remnants
of what could be carried out and saved.
The pearls? I bought them at the Winn’s.
My mink? Genuine acrylic.
Thank God this isn’t Berlin.
Another drink?
Bartender, another bottle, but–
!Ay caray and oh dear!–
The pretty blond boy is no longer serving us.
To the death camps! To the death camps!
How rude! How vulgar!
Drink up, honey. I’ve got money.
Doesn’t he know who we are?
Que vivan los de abajo de los de abajo,
los de rienda suelta, the witches, the women,
the dangerous, the queer.
Que vivan las perras.
"Que me sirvan otro trago . . ."
I know a bar where they’ll buy us drinks
if I wear my skirt on my head and you come in wearing nothing
but my black brassiere.
(from Loose Woman)
* * *
DECEMBER 24th, PARIS–NOTRE DAME
The Seine runs along.
Merrily, merrily.
The river. The rain.
Water into water.
A blue umbrella fading into fog.
A child into his mother’s arms.
Buttresses leaping delirious.
Wind through the vein of trees.
The rain into the river.
Tomorrow they might find a body here–
unraveled like a poem,
dissolved like wafer.
Say the body was a woman’s.
Ophelia Found.
Undid the easy knot and spiraled.
Without a sound.
A year ends
merrily. Merrily
another one begins.
I go out into the street once more.
The wrists so full of living.
The heart begging once again.
(from My Wicked, Wicked Ways)
* * *
LA PALOMA
1. The Glamour of Evil
One always wonders why the church calls glamour evil, or vice-versa. What is there about beauty that might offend God? Don’t tell me glamour is not beautiful, and vice-versa. Why divide the spirit and the flesh?
No one who reads these poems seeks to judge them. Do they? Why should we want to be less than human? We may well never be more . . .
It’s hard not to know what to do with these poems. They are by a moxie mejicana who lives inside herself the way those not as brave as she live outside, burning and burning with rage and desire. She can’t help them, she will help them–it’s up to them. She can convey, impart, evoke how it is for her. If we are going to know anything about this country, we are going to have to listen to her. Read her.
There is a story, undoubtedly true because in it she’s in trouble with the so-called city fathers. She paints her house bright colors and the city council explodes in fury. She defends her way of living. She writes another poem. And another. She writes a novel. She writes stories. And other stories. She’s already told how it was to grow up in Chicago, chicana. She stays close to home now, next to her own skin. She’s in San Antonio in one poem, in Paris in the other. A reader likes to know where she is. What she says and how she says it makes a reader feel more grounded somehow, like this gringo who dreams he lives somehow, for some reason, in a barrio nobody leaves until somebody else is born, and then not too soon, mind you.
I want to call her a moxie mejicana, but it’s not for me to say. She says who and what and why she is Sandra Cisneros.
How much, to me, the poet resembles a gandy dancer laying down tracks on a railroad through the nerves. In one poem she’s in Venice and elsewhere, one of Pasolini’s ragazzi, all this time celebrating life and death in a bar in San Antonio. In the other, shorter poem she’s not talking but taking in a moment in Paris: the Sienne. Notre Dame. Our Lady. The joy of life, the inevitability of death, the waste, what remains, the turning of time over into another year. The flow of the faces she sees, the foreboding of what she hopes not to see, not here, not ever, but that’s not possible. The longer poem provides the limits of the shorter one. Or does it? What Paris evokes is simply a world apart from her bright house, the lively bars, the laughter, tears, the time, all a way, hers, it might be mine or yours, of paying homage through the breath of blood and bones to the beauty of flesh, its own flow–what survives through poems as well as music or visual art–any art that respects its limits and still must break through and try to surpass them.
She’s wholly herself. Anglos call such selves individuals, but usually only when they refer to those of like skin and speech. They, of course, don’t know the half of it. Or even a quarter. Or an eighth. Or a sixteenth. Or nada. Hard to say. What are Anglos worth on God’s market? Spaniards? Latino/as? Let the Market decide, eh? You may as well destroy those who bring no money to the table. You do, Market, you shed them like a snake sloughs its skin.
Myself, I need to see through the haze a country throws up between its citizens, so blurry we believe it’s foolhardy now to risk seeing ourselves in the so-called other, too threatening, too mind-numbing. We could go down to city hall and ask the town council to give Sandra Cisneros everything she wants. It’s not much. Not as much as you have. You don’t have her. She has you if she wants, but she doesn’t need you, she has her house. She lives there. Let her alone, but listen to her, read her words, learn to grow up. She’s a good teacher, one who makes you laugh at least as much as weep.
Why not let her be herself? Ah, but that’s the trouble, no? You can’t let people paint their houses blue and red and yellow, flaunting their disrespect for the laws of the city. Besides, property values . . . think of your neighbors. But what if she started something? People loving rather than fearing each other, say, based on who they want to be seen as when they are next to whomever this is I don’t know and doesn’t know me but maybe that’s because I don’t know myself.
These are not poems so much as raw slivers of life, even the brief capture in Paris of condensed time, its ephemeral and evocative and inevitable passage. Yet it’s in San Antonio where the surface of life bleeds like a human soul, lively, energy without end, or fighting the soul with the mind like two hands grappling with some angel dreamed.
2. La Paloma
Where I once lived, there’s a bar under a bridge going over railroad tracks to and from downtown Albuquerque. La Paloma I want to call it. In La Paloma men and women are happy to be alone with each other and with themselves. They dance and laugh and drink and talk and flirt and fight. They have no need of strangers. You go in there and depending on your entrance the silence may be ice or go unnoticed. The door opens and for the moment it takes to go to the bar and order a beer and make yourself comfortable, you may be and most likely are happy. But to stay, you have to earn your keep. You have to mind your own business. You talk their language as best you can and they may even applaud your diction. Or you keep your mouth shut and pull it off. I knew one guy took a friend in and he just smiled and flaunted his pearly whites in a gesture of what he thought should indicate goodwill. They got it. When I was alone I tried to actually feel what the room would be like if it were empty. That way I settled in and drank my beer. This guy with his friend, they must have thought they were in a place not only novel but a comedy, one they imagined seeing themselves see themselves: these gringos being in here, where they might as soon have their throats slit if they don’t stand back slowly from the bar and pull their pockets inside out and make the gesture of standing aghast, showing what they have that the others do: See what we have! Nada!
But on good days, and always in the early afternoons, before the booze flows too fast, say to yourself, even then, Look out, hombre, your magic is about to evaporate. Clear the air that may be full of suppressed outrage. Don’t even think, just drink and live for the time you’re here as deeply inside yourself as you can reach. It’s good for you. To others, your very presence is likely to be an insult.
You think you can do what you want in La Paloma and walk out like you walked in? Look at us, these eyes might say: We have scars on our faces, on our hands, pull up our shirts and see the scars on our bellies, drop our pants and show the scars we have down there, and listen to how I say it, there’s a scar in my voice, and another scar somewhere not even I can see it. You see, a knife never knows what or who is at the end of its blade, they skewer the one who wields them as much as those into whom they are thrust. And that’s one way to read these poems, maybe.
Imagine the simplicity of what happens. Cops come in here, like they do, and tell you to break it up. You stand back, they let you alone. For the moment. That’s all anybody has and you may has well make the most of it. Imagine! You have to put yourself in their shoes. And they can’t afford your fancy shoes. Your cut of clothes. Your hat size. Your money belt. The way you waltz in and out like you own the city. You don’t own us, their eyes say all a body needs to say: You don’t own La Paloma, you don’t own the dove .
Floyce Alexander
(13 December 2010)
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