por ríos de piedra
que me llevan
detrás de la fábrica
cerrada—y los montones
de carros asesinados
torturados, con estrellas
en los ojos
y tú
tú tambien
bailas ahora
a mi espalda
o
a mi lado
y a veces
yo te sigo
oyendo música
en el viento
de mi vacío
ardor
Lines for Neruda
Ay, mi Viejo . . .
We were the men who worked the machines
each anointed with oil on his knees—
when our families dreamed, machines came awake
to search us out. I didn’t know, I didn’t know where
poetry entered. The thousand smashed windows
that watched empty alleys, did the virus of verse
blow in them with the tubercular wind?
Or the poisonous voices of wet oleanders
on Interstate 5, were they calling my name?
The electrical smell, the machinery smell,
the cannery smell, the armpit smell,
the shoe polish smell, the bakery smell,
the gas station smell, the gunpowder smell,
the Thunderbird smell, the V-8 smell,
the dirt street smell after rain,
• • •
the bare belly smell, the open sex smell,
the hair tonic smell, the wood varnish smell,
the tortilla smell, the ashtray smell,
the Catholic smell, the Tijuana smell,
the refinery smell never hinted at poems.
The first poem I read
was the ragged V scrawled
in a brown sky by gulls
escaping the garbage dump at sunset
cutting under clouds
over the apartment blocks
going to a sea I knew
was there across the city
but never saw.
And then dear darkness.
Our lullabies were the inexhaustible keen
of overhot gears beseeching grease. Our fathers’ nightlights,
40 watt bulbs strung up on orange power cords: lynched stars
that swung over their heads, their shadows flapped
like wings of the machines. Old angels squinting
at nude magazines they couldn’t read—
coffee break black and white braille—the smudge of hard fingers
on thighs,
Pall Mall ash speckling sad night nipples—a touch of paper skin
deader than snow.
How did the Word ever hunt down our hearing?
The engines of hunger drove us deeper to silence.
What was it that urged us to sing? What handle
disengaged the gears, by what chain were we dragged
from the brink? We lost singers every day:
one lost to pistols, one lost to flames, one lost to
coughing night sweats, one erased by the highway. Each one
wore black shoes,
workingman soles as rippled as waves with no shore.
The ironwrack pounded unceasing around us,
the glass crash, the tire burn, the shotgun,
the shouting. Blue exhalations sighed from our cars—
were the vowels of my song gasping into the air?
Was the ratchet of pistons this consonance drumming?
Why did poetry come forth from cables, from coils,
punctuated by nails in veils of rust
to the beat of Border Patrol helicopters
from words as simple as hermano, hijo, compañero,
esperanza, amante, dolor—
how did you come to me to lay mothwings of song to burn on
my tongue?
Pinche Ernesto
In Tijuana, of an evening
Don Ernesto James
Drained his tequila, loaded
His revolutionary .44
Revolver and cursed
The Goddamn moon
Took aim above his outhouse
And fired off six rounds
Into its eye
As he reloaded
We scrambled under tables
La Flaca yelling
“Pinche Ernesto!
Kill that moon if you have to,
But don’t kill my chickens!”
As his bullets flew
Across the sky
Like burning little moths.
Tijuana Codex
Tijuana to here—
What a long rough walking road—
A red road, my road.
The Tijuana Book of the Dead
Bury me standing.
Bury me facing
West.
I could have been born
An eagle, or
A serpent caught
In its Mexican beak
But
I was born the son
Of coyotes
And crows.
I was born destined
For the temple of toil: born
To feel my heart
Fed to the blind
Fleeing sun.
• • •
Mazehalcuicatl Chichimecayotl.
Bury me
In Tijuana.
Bury me
Standing.
Bury me
Facing
Where the sun
Has run,
For the east
Is abandoned.
The gods
Are choked
With washing machines
In their mouths.
Bury me
Among tired men
• • •
Who smell too bad
To enter banks.
Bury me
Beside women
Old at 23
Who stoop
To garbage gardens
To pull bones
From the ruins
For soup.
Bury me
Among children
You have spit on
In fields
Of shattered glass.
Pick there for my name
Like the ibis
After mustard seeds.
Give me back
To the poor.
• • •
I was born
In the city of coughing.
Rough nights ran wet
In every arroyo.
I was born into hills
Where tubercular girls
Brought up their lungs
In mortal hymns
Coughed their spume
Into steel cups
And dumped their singing
In the mud.
Six inches
From my bedroom window
Holy
Holy
Holy their blood.
Holy the spores
That rose from their foam:
• • •
Holy the pollen
Of dying
That found me
And fed the roses
Of fever
In my chest.
I
Want to go home
To Tijuana
I want to be every
Fatcheeked kneeling boy
Firing marbles in the grit,
Suffering through morning mass,
I want to fly
Newspaper kites, I want
To be every Mixtec woman
My aunt ever kicked
For asking for pesos
Outside the pollo frito
Stand
Nursing a coughing little mouth
At her black nipple.
• • •
I want to be that mouth.
I want to be that nipple.
I want to be that milk.
Bring me back
Ten thousand times
Bring me back: let me be
The whore in La Coahuila,
The sicario,
Let me be the Jesuit
At tacos El Paisano,
Who still believes
In Guadalupe and the lotería,
In Quetzalcóatl—
Let me die
There again, let my dust
Mix among those that remain
Of my father.
Let me paint
A velvet Elvis.
Let me laugh
Until the coughing stops.
• • •
Bury me later.
Let me live
79 years
In la Independencia,
Raise chickens, bananas,
Cilantro. Let me sire
20 bright Mexicans.
Burn incense.
Kneel in prayer.
Every night
Let me sleep
Beside my old woman
Snoring.
Never
Learn English.
Dance to accordions
Play boleros
On a dusty out of tune piano
And die
At dawn
On the Day
Of the Dead.
• • •
So I might learn
To sing these songs
And make the world
Listen.
Bury me
In Tijuana.
Holy the coughing.
Bury me
Standing.
Holy the coughing.
Bury me
Facing west.
Allá.
NAHUI
Insomnia Machine
What is that engine coiled in cables and red hoses
That lurches at the darkest hour
As it pumps, pumps, churns
Desire and nightmares out the mainline—sends
Hot want into the alley down the hall
In the window as it rusts itself
Keeps us awake all night, all night, all night
Like a motel neon sign in the rain: pounds
To death: that working machine
That makes us weep that imagines God that
Drives the pistons that slog in hollow graveyard
Shifts, that dynamo that suddenly snaps and
Wrenches itself apart as we shout: human beings
Once called it a heart.
16 Lane
For Andy Prieboy
All my people are larger bodies than mine, quiet, with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds.
B. H. Fairchild
1.
Gone now, bulldozed for parking lots, gone as sure as the old
men in the corner seats
with their yellow White Owl fingers and green
suspenders. Gone
as childhood and the 4th of July, as lost as the kisses frosted on
your lip behind the public
pool that summer you were crazy with the earplug of
that Japanese radio
w/ yr antenna telescoped to the moon where some
33rd Degree Masons were planting flags & you were
looking into yr first bikini top. Gone.
Fever Tree, Spirit, The Chambers Brothers, Iron Butterfly.
Gone too the lonesome uptown wraiths who spent their last
hours of this used life
in the floor polish and cigarette smell of Hillcrest Bowl: those
wretches: those hard
wood 16 lanes: those jukebox records: those ghosts: that
mothball peppermint urinal trough smell: gone
those lavender/ blue/ red/ black & yellow two-tone bowling shoes
tucked into cubbyholes like letters in a demolished country
mailroom,
sizes inscribed on each heel in lathed leather cut-outs: 7,
8 ½, 10, 12 ½. Ladies’ 4, 5, 7 ½. Gone the cans
of fungus killer sweet talc powder, flat as the coat pocket tin
flasks the rummies
tipped in the shadows to hail every strike for the
Traveling League All-City
Tour from the Bowlero to Poinsettia Lanes to
the Hillcrest.
Gone the stains of sweat etching delicate housewife footprints in
those shoes.
Gone their rental balls, their pink-swirl, their red, their see-thru
orange, their pocked
black deathstar balls. Three holes each ball infused
with fingerprints. Fingers prodding the dark holes since 1948:
thumbs of cops,
of hookers, of Mexicans, sailors, soft boys with their
mamas’ curves & grease
in their flat-tops & fingerless bowling gloves as if this
here was a sport.
My old man’s fingerprints.
Cream, The Electric Prunes, Steppenwolf, Donovan.
You couldn’t call my old man my old man.
What if his girlie heard that bit of gringo disrespect.
She of the Wayne Newton records and the red cowboy boots,
the five dollar Chanel
Tijuana copy perfume & the stretch pants that cupped
her unbearable bottom,
that tucked into the sweet tight line of shadow
behind her
that awoke even the old cigarmen and made them kick.
Tenderest midnight
of her body that smelled night and day of rain
in spring aspens. Oh.
While her husband far dntn was tucked under rotten Buicks
in the rusted-out light of his failing Shell station: he
trotted out
when my old man clanged over the bell-hose thinking they were
pals, thinking
my old man was teaching his li’l cowgirl how to bowl.
Filled ’er up
to the radio spurt and called my old man Al.
Johnny Cash, Jimmy Dean, Kitty Wells, Peggy Lee.
If you called him my old man, you’d get one of the looks,
those looks
he played like the termite-chewed Thomas organ in his
bedroom, working
on tangos & boleros for the night he graduated from
shoe rental
& pin-machine Brunswick tending
to the Rip Van Winkle room
upstairs,
dark in its red purple velvet and bubble lights, white women
and whiskey, cigarette smoke & maraschino cherries on little
plastic swords. Gone, gone, every naughty
cocktail napkin
w/ its big breast cartoons gone, every Benson & Hedges 100 butt
w/ coral lipstick
prints, every lame come-on, every sigh, gone: pried
from the earth by a diesel Cat, tracks clotted w/ mud from the
last time
they decommissioned a useless memory & scraped a graveyard
downhill into a canyon. Gone now, man, and even his shirt
w/ his name stitched over his heart is pulled into threads in
pigeon nests.
I went yesterday to see what remained and just a taco
stand stood
behind a mall. It had the same name as my old man: how do you
like that happy crappy
as the old sports used to say.
And that name is Alberto.
2.
If it is true that everything good fades to zero, it is true that rust
awaits also everything bad. The cancer cell starves to death
when the patient passes. Even dreams run out of blood
when you die, even memories. Tumors punch a time-clock.
Not one of them noticed the Hillcrest then,
and now I am the only one left to tell.
What is there to tell? Nothing. Another song of a clanging place,
noisy with echoes: nothing men and no
thing women w/ nothing
days dropped
dimes in the juke selectors w/ their white & silver
flap pages
in their windows like vertical pies—and the pies all
drooling and
old beside the juke on the long burger grill counter—
one fly always caught
in the rack, drunk on cherry juice on its back kicking
black whiskerlegs
& going zzzzzzzzzzzzz with its wings making a circuit
going nowhere: nothing songs about nothing loves for
those who
had nothing going on in their beds back home or longed
for nothing to take them before they had to get back—a car
wreck, a heart attack
or the lottery, a lover or a miracle, or maybe
Armageddon would finally come and the crazy Negroes and the