WEBVTT

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II.

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"Green Places."

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Look at me descend into holy
total entertainment, places

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of screeching fun,
speech overhead, not

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Earth's green dominion.

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Here, no creature gets
it wrong, no intellectual

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amends to perpend
in all day long.

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Perfection is clay in the
end, not what the plow did.

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Ancient landscapes
hardly exist any longer.

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They've retreated
to a future time.

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History comes at
you in that way,

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in a way when the
world is made by hands

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and minds of countless bodies
now dead, ghostly heralds.

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And it's not just the
humans, our sidewalks

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are made of mineralized
animal bone.

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The air is the side carbon
dioxide of trees long gone.

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When these Cantares were put to
paper in the mid 16th century,

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in colonial New
Spain, their world,

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the world of the Mexicans,
Texcocans, Tlaxcalans,

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Huexotzincos,
Azcapotzalcans, and others,

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many dead, who took with them
the knowledge of their world,

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must have felt strangely
absent from their cities, whose

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streets were then an emotional
compression of memory,

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forget, forgetting,
imagination, and wish.

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Some called to the old
gods with acts of magic,

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others to the new,
or even both at once.

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While still others addressed
the crisis directly with various

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spells and summonings.

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The songs themselves,
the Cantares,

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were understood in the
spectrum of liability.

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Those who helped
to circulate them,

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singers and the
patrons of singers,

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could be imprisoned or killed
for promulgating the wrong gods

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and the wrong magic.

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The songs were as
potent with the touch

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of these gods and this magic
as an idol, ceremonial bundle,

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or ritual act.

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They were like ghosts uprooted,
waiting to be planted again.

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