Black Balloons
Clods
When I died — a long time ago — I was buried with wolf-fangs and transistor radio. While brain festered in my skull, I pondered negative numbers and the mess I had left: bills, some jottings reminding me to return a phone call from the black side of the sun. To gargle with laundry-detergent, as mezcal is now curated for silk cravats. A day later, I returned on the sly, peeked out the closet. When I died, they discovered fiction inside shoes I had left behind. The plumbers and auto-mechanics arrived, as they had been contracted weeks earlier. Aquatics, clogged. Sedan leaked ichor and plenty of soft jazz. I thought: enough with rats. Enough with the whiskers that sniff embryos. Supposedly there’s water beneath Mars’ surface. I sat up in my coffin before they could bury me. I was open arms. I declared rivers: Sluggish. Stones gushed freely wherever a mansion stepped inside the camel who found a loophole through the needle’s nostril.
Graciela Iturbide, Peregrinación, Chalma, 1984.
Attrition
Today the city spreads an unmistakable fragrance of lemon. Rain, yellow or blue, but it tastes of leaf, stone. When someone dies an odor of vanilla takes hold of the air. Cities sweat vinegar and stale tobacco, or cherry cough syrup. During summer, heat glazes its sugar-cubes. Trees turn into amphorae containing wine or grain. That’s when poetry flits and perches on the thin wires trilling from the laughter of children. The shadow retraces its step, crustacean, retrograde. Still, salt stings, open wounds never seal. Hunger unhinges, claws are honed, and the tombstone may prove too high for your hurdle.
Strata
The origin of red ants…dandruff and itchy armpit. The origin of wine, as much the grape as the hindquarters of a roan stallion. They took his toys away and he wept, he railed. The origin of sharks…the fluttering moth and insomnia, or twitching of nervous left foot. As an adult, they built a wall between his hands and lover. Her black hair turned into an octopus. That was the origin of a pistol and obituary. The erasure of lizards with wing-spans like the red wood, a thunderbolt deep in the desert. The razing of cheap housing, linked to mushrooms and the thinning population of possums. The origin of mathematics: an eclipse, a legion of crabs covering the esplanade. After she died, he paused to hear the wind and voice of insects. He knew the ants were stitching a scripture of venom. The madmen sniffed and laughed. Its ending is its origin, he said, picking up a handful of mud to smudge a target in the center of his chest.
Graciela Iturbide, Cementerio, Juchitán, México, 1988.
Predicated
You were born during a leaf-storm, as a result you’re adept at crossword puzzles. Mother made love to your father, and she dreamt of nail-clippers and running down a tunnel that tapered to a needle’s tip: this meant you would bully others. You already knew you shot blanks when your wife said she was pregnant. You were born during severe drought; hence, your preference for dim sum and off-track betting. The man you consider as your father loved cigars and cognac. He was infertile as a result of the mumps during childhood; your mother later admitted to a tryst with the liquor-store clerk. You were born during spring…you can’t resist fur or burnt sienna. You were born during the oil-crisis, and debtors dunned you until your death at 53. The newlyweds thought a Vegas wedding was deliciously camp. She insisted they honeymoon in the wine-country. The night you were conceived Father had Super Bowl indigestion; you can’t stand the sound of whistles. So much of what we taste, wear, or fidget has more to do with gloves, daybreak, unopened boxes than not sleeping with our mothers.
That Same Tune
Poem about three men in the same room. Or five men with bowler hats in the same literary salon and giant phonograph before them. Or poem about six women with blank eyes on the shore. None wear bathing-suits, for none have bodies. Only gauzy gush like waterfall beneath their faces. One woman discovers she is a shark. One man sits down on a stiff chair, another one walks towards the window, and he lights a cigar. Old recording crackles on the phonograph: could be jingle about shaving-lotion or dimensions of a ring orbiting Saturn. Another man siphons into medieval Baghdad. No civil strife, nor familial discord, will engender great poetry. But they can, at times. Especially if you have dead family members beneath the pink oleanders. Another woman laughs madly and finds herself on an assembly line, counting green bottles of beer. I woke up in the interrogation room, strapped to a metal chair. The mustache had yet to be waxed. Agent X and Strawberry complained about bathtubs and feral cats. In Helsinki or Bogotá, the cats rouse a din when in heat, and the moon is deaf … perhaps even in cahoots.
Graciela Iturbide, Los Pollos, Juchitan, Mexico, 1979.
Crew Cut
The origin of open windows…blue umbrellas and ribbons. The origin of delight…scissors, diorama of ant tunnels, zippers. Childhood remains something locked inside an empty DVD case. Adolescence sticks to one’s fingers and making art out of paste and construction paper results in a telepathy not different from ice floes or microorganisms feeding a lake the color red. As a boy, he loathed piano lessons. Crows perched on the staves, and his thumb resting on middle C ached for iguana rainfall and steam rising from asphalt. The music he heard, an origin of hibiscus, or panther. When his father died, he remembered his son’s birth. The skin, violet, flushed with redness. The origin of the death-rattle, infants bleating. When they took away his toys, he wept. He wanted the frigid dens of the deep. Ink spurting from startled octopuses. The origin of kites: the weight of water. So much of street-mutt originates from blue whale.
Can I Follow Your Bones?
Or just your hearse, or the ink on your Last Will and Testament while the microwave’s door is shut and a pound of ground beef defrosts? I open and close my balcony door, and a neighbor spits in his toilet, while the grammarian on the second floor above me peers out her spy-hole, concerned that the delivery of a dozen mangos and aspirin never arrived. I had reached a point with umbrellas and harpsichords and carbonaceous chondrites so that I swore I would never return to disco, pumpernickel bread, or wearing a T-shirt several sizes too short. But the metro car pulls in at the station, tires on a hotrod spin and burn rubber, and I am tempted to find myself behind the steering wheel of a coffin. Release me from clouds and mud. I am gripping the flowers in my gloves tonight, and I expect to reach the horizon in a second. Black balloon, fills with air. Bursts?
Eyelids
For now, the coyotes breed. They disturb the trash. They kill the smaller breeds kept as lapdogs. The gardens shrivel because of drought. Some passers-by remember when October stung, because of chill, rusted nails. The toddler boy screamed; they had taken away his toys; he had tried to eat blue and plastic. Thirteen trains and their destinations chug along desire, and all of them are slippery, erect. Now that the toddler is eight, he boarded the caboose, and he slept in a rocking hammock above cases of gunpowder. Eyelids have a way of revealing desire. Sometimes Eros is a green wool sweater on an iron hanger. Sometimes, what you have been waiting for: red stage, empty armchair, and the one who abandoned you for the wind, or a balcony, or better hand sanitizers. None of that makes you less earth, less stone, less fire, and less sugar. But the other voice hinges on doe slippers, finely ground coffee, the pen still jutting from the robe’s breast-pocket.
Graciela Iturbide, ¿Ojos para volar?, Coyoacán, Ciudad de México, 1991.
Fur For Fear
Birth, an odor of vanilla and rust. Sometimes the color blue licks the city and, summer, omniscient. Inside the tent of an armpit, a new mother remembers that fireworks inscribe bougainvilleas and their algebra in the night-sky. Stop begging for bread, stop weeping when the ferryboat has gargled diesel, its engine puttering across the lagoon towards a cabin and tobacco. Baptism takes place tomorrow, at the hour of a crow and tarantula. Everything, foundational. There is no verb without tired feet, no tired feet without the alphabet, no alphabet without the hunter, no hunter without the gun and the target, and the target is the gun that becomes the hunter’s spine as his rifle aims at his own geography of breathing.
Why Desire Rhymes With Fire
A fragrance of strawberry pervades the city and syntax turns aquatic. Now wine pours blue and rinses mud from eyes buried in work-boots. This means a season of coitus. The couple flutters past the purple curtains of their window, and the great thumb and forefinger pin their flame-tinctured wings against the moon. Fireflies now inhabit caryatids. Lighthouse at the tip of cigarette. Sphinx holding a bouquet of roses and the mantra of the staircase and garret which brims over with the fragrance of fruit. The boy scribbled plum and sky against the white construction paper. Scribbled and the paper opened. Lianas, bewitched. A weather like syntax became humidity. Words proved to be water, and just as ambulatory. The boy was laughing. The jilted bride picked up the pillow with His name embroidered. She put the pillow to her ear. Heard an alarm-clock ring. The white gulls in the wind desired, then expired.
Graciela Iturbide, Limpia de pollos, Juchitán, México, 1985.
Back in the Day
Each ancient tribe considered themselves the true people. The word in Yąnomamö for their name is “human being.” Lugal-zage-si reigned over Umma, Sumer. The god of storms, Enlil, anointed Him. His throne extended across the known world: five hundred miles. Tenochtitlan, navel of the cosmos according to the Mexica. Times Square during the 1940s: if you slowly sipped coffee at the Automat, the Milky Way was believed to rotate around you. The neon outside smelled of sweat and liquor. What can’t be expressed in words, let alone music? Does the lack of articles in Latin make each noun heavier? Is the subjunctive mood expendable? The Name that can’t be uttered, although Moses saw His sandaled feet and backside. We felt we had bull’s-eyes on our chest, learning too late that we had sinned. The prisoners were decorated. Some played flutes. 42 children sacrificed to Tlaloc to ensure rain and bountiful crops. They were slowly immolated so tears would quench the God. Witnessing a doe among the meadow flowers, the hunter couldn’t raise his rifle. It was the hour of the evening breeze when we heard Ha-Shem walking in the garden. On his last or first foray, the archer unleashed an arrow. The arrow didn’t budge.