They will return to the tree of the hanging head

Xibalbá gate at Ek Balam, Mexico Photo by Mardoz

Two Poems by Ivan Argüelles

XIBALBÁ
 
seeing a head hanging in a tree
they asked which is the Way
it replied and said use the feminine
plural for whatever you encounter
first is the House of jaguars infinite
followed by the cold that precedes
and supersedes space and time
then the House of bats eternal
and the world ruled by centipedes
no book is safe no knowledge sure
they wandered up and down
black and green and white and red
growing up the twins of Xibalbá
from the east they took the mountain
that dwells beneath the sea and set
it on its peak in the west of never-be
great clouds of reddish dust swarmed
north and south but the only path
they ever found was the route infernal
into earth’s seething bowels of smoke
they went playing ball with skulls
of discarded gods and learned
to speak in Spanish and court royalty
from afar and as knights from some
strange tale of yore they sported
with conquistadors and landlords
and built cities overnight that
stretched from lake to lake and
sank within a week its pyramids
and ocelots and incense altars loud
all vanished but for the hieroglyphs
that narrated in literature’s fac-simile
the true story of the rising solar vowel
in innocence and betrayal and deaths
as countless as the stars that swirl
unseen by the denizens of Xibalbá
and of the moon’s twenty-eight mansions
each an error of motion and sound
and of other celestial bodies and
cigarettes and stairways the twins
repeated in their unaccounted births
will come a day they will return
to the tree of the hanging head
to enquire again which is the Way
& set forth once more to Xibalbá
 
06-15-21

YESTERDAY
 
there were profanities and jingles the ruckus
and confabulation of the origins when gods
no larger than saliva or ink demand form and shape
the arms and excrescences of salt and helmets
the full panoply of the demons lurking behind
the cherry or poplar and the hills growing slow
but dense with sounds and commas and asterisks
speech was an impediment and the size of clouds
thunder rumbling and toxic in the shells where
nymphs take birth and hair and legends of opium
darker and stress of nightfall unexpected charms
the ululation behind the groves spark and tissue
will resignation and salvation ever be the same ?
somewhere the myth of time and the lesser entities
the moon plunging out of a comb or threads knotted
and the slender graceful waist of the woman whose
backside is missing or it is a lunation a shining
from afar when distance is only an echo the syllable
of a leaf  shaking in the tiny fragrance of sleep
what it is to dream that there is no beginning
only the surfeit and promise of death the marvel
and to learn to read before the hour is up and signs
written in erasable red and fictions tales of demigods
beings who stalk the backlands and ivy thick and
humid the steaming iridescence of the newest sky
can you remember a day when there was no light ?
 
06-12-21

​​Ivan Argüelles is a Mexican-American innovative poet whose work moves from early Beat and surrealist-influenced forms to later epic-length poems. He received the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award in 1989 as well as the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award in 2010.  In 2013, Argüelles received the Before Columbus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. For Argüelles the turning point came with his discovery of the poetry of Philip Lamantia. Argüelles writes, “Lamantia’s mad, Beat-tinged American idiom surrealism had a very strong impact on me. Both intellectual and uninhibited, this was the dose for me.” While Argüelles’s early writings were rooted in neo-Beat bohemianism, surrealism, and Chicano culture, in the nineties he developed longer, epic-length forms rooted in Pound’s Cantos and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. He eventually returned, after the first decade of the new millennium, to shorter, often elegiac works exemplary of Romantic Modernism. Ars Poetica is a sequence of exquisitely-honed short poems that range widely, though many mourn the death of the poet’s celebrated brother, José.

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