Last one from The Accidental, and Joshua
is also working with this poem.
"The Spirit Is Blood from a Stone."
To bed, I guess, that weary enough I can erase
For a night those accidents of spirit and flesh
Who amuse themselves by bringing the lynch mob behind me--
Whose old glittering eyes have made me
a guest in my mother's house,
An orphan, an illiterate, and a law-abiding whore.
In whose eyes I find my brother again,
And dream him among the order of fathers
Whose work made a desert of me,
Just as I worked to desert them in the desert,
Rock picks in their belts,
The shade of their hats against miles of sand
that dazzle the mind with the tracks of those
who followed too,
Mulish, towards veins of metal running through the land
up north,
So rich, the mother lode, you can dig it out with a spoon,
So certain that bolas de plata some four thousand pounds
were found
Even after the days Francisco Vásquez de Coronado
went seeking the cities of legend for God and gold.
Granted, the expedition of fourteen
hundred men and fifteen hundred animals
did not find the riches of which they had been told.
They arrived in this country with swords and the pope
When shovels and prayer have profited better on the wayside,
As it goes, lined with the sun- bleached bones
of unfortunate men.
The earth did not devour them, much as they compassed,
all their days-- what a thing to do--
to eat dust.
Going south and further south, I saw
the adits carved into the high red cliffs.
They mouth the gritty attending silence of the Coronado Trail.
I did not understand.
Consider, salt of the earth, sulfur, rain, copper, air,
rolling down in drops, seeping into the mine shafts,
bubbling, hissing in the limestone,
Weeping tears over tears, following
slow, indiscernible, involuntary, relentless,
It trails from the walls, eats with abandon, rains.
It makes its way in the dark, its crystalline habits,
its metallic and sweet taste,
Its incomprehensible electric blue,
So blue the gamblers carry it for luck
And the women say it protects against el
ojo, a necessary evil,
this bluestone, Roman vitriol, blue copperas, chalcanthite,
copper sulfate,
All the beginnings of a caustic--
all the makings of a caustic beginning.
One thing is clear, blue water means copper, a lot of it,
resting just below the iron-red soil
you see driving down route 666 into town
Past Cole's Pizza and the schoolyard, the dealership,
Maud's,
The courthouse where I carved my name into the old soft brick,
And the river whose hundred-year floods
would bring my father to hang Saint
Christopher around his neck,
To call his son, my brother, by the name of one so surely cast
out even the nomadic children of the sun
might be lifted up and carried from one turn
to another in his hands, as the river turns water.
Be patient, my love, I am telling you:
In the crossing the light breaks you,
Hailing, dying in cries, praising you
among tongues like white wings darting on the surface,
and below, where moss pulls at your legs,
Entrails of legions who have sworn themselves over
to guard your will against your will,
Say yes, indefinitely, here you are at last,
But where you thought you could get to is not for you to end.
What did you think?
That the whole would unfold at once in a breath, in birth,
this child at home, cast out, whose task in this world
is to carry you in his chest, behind his ribs,
You, pouring in, out, of the two halves of his heart?
I kept you wandering through the mazes
of the underground mines, far below the roots of the shrubs,
where blue water seeps through the shafts and bluestone
gathers in the veins.
Against my will and yours, I held the considerable weight
of you in my hands.
I dig you up, find you watering the small swelling lawn,
Unearth you in front of the little green-shingled company
house
weeding a trellis of pink roses by the door
And the cactus you planted in the flower beds.
You rake, dig into rock and clay,
Break clods of earth in your hands,
Plant seeds you buy at the company store.
You hum through copper wires running through my house.
I would have walked the earth without the earth you walked,
I would not have looked back, backbone, stone,
What are they doing now but looking up from their work
towards the sky, Díos mío?
In the east and the north, just beyond the next border?
Had you not decreed my silence.
Wise up, güerita.
Spanish wasn't allowed.
Forced at gunpoint into cattle boxes,
Deported to New Mexico, left in the desert.
Communists, enemy aliens, obstructing production
in a time of war.
We strike.
We await contracts with hands at our brothers' throats.
Walk the earth if you will, since you will not find shelter
in your father's company,
This much I promise, for that mouth.
It is unfortunate.
Perhaps you would like to negotiate
the terms of the impasse.
Who would notice it?
Bear in mind, we wish to state one conclusion with all
the emphasis at our command.
Every day this difference is prolonged
constitutes a threat to our general welfare.
We realize the stakes are high.
We understand why you have found it difficult to reach
an agreement.
It is the nation itself, however,
which here has most at stake.
No loss can compare with what the country between you suffers.
Backcountry, wading next to you in the green pools of the river.
We bake fish on hot stones beside our fire,
watch the cliffs for bighorn scaling the rock above us.
Downstream, where the figs grow wild
we make our way to the abandoned mineshaft, our destination.
The bats have taken over and the stench of their droppings
stops us,
Even as the cavernous heart, so old, so difficult,
Pauses, is silenced, sleeps by us patiently,
Even as we are silenced in my memory of us
transfixed in its eye.
We've come all this way to our ruin,
All but in our having known it, vanished.