"twilight sacrifices of grass and fingers"

Un par de poemas
​Por/by Ivan Argüelles

devuélveme la vida !
Poema para Hector Zamudio

Hector son of Hector ! myth and hieroglyph
and drizzling sun of Teotihuacan the many vowels
it takes to make a rope that climbs to the heavens
rock over rock masonry of the gods chiseled out of
basalt and quartz doorways and portals to infinity
blood-stone and flint and the myriads of hearts
tossed against the angry walls of eternity
Corazón ! if nothing is sacred then everything is Holy !
up and down the ghostly ramps and suddenly
the horse is invented and ruddy beards and white masks
and gun-powder reeking clouds all in Spanish
boats that sail the eternal skies above Texcoco
Madre de Dios ! sunslant and orient of the New World
megalopolis of serapes and Calaveras de azúcar
sleepless hydras and footless vendors of chili verde
rites of the necklaces of the dead and talking mummies
stalking the Zócalo and Paseo de la Reforma
remunerations of saints who have never seen the Cordillera
or the Carretera Panamerican and who have never slept
in the roofless motels of Yucatan’s insomniac peninsula
or deciphered thought-patterns of the Mayan prophets
twenty eight perfect days on a wheel that never turns !
Hector son of Hector ! you travel back and forth
on an invisible thread of saliva talking backwards
to priests of Coatlicue and dredging liquid infernos
that slumber beneath Avenida Insurgentes
when you wake up it’s in Los Angeles wearing
Boyle Heights mambo zoot suit but
when you pull night over your embroidered skull
it’s in Coyoacán and you are Cuauhtémoc on your knees
before a shrine to Frieda Kahlo and the histories
of five hundred years unravel on the destroyed syllables
of Quetzalcoatl and the wind is great with abortions
and embryos wrapped up like tamales and loud
sirens of mediodia in the midst of Zapatistas and
Cristeros who are packing a movie theater and shooting
stars on the painted ceiling putting civilization to an end
there is no frontera no nocturnal bus ride to a urinal
just south of Ciudad Juárez where the uncounted
assassinations of women keep being ignored
there is only the imperfect literature of papel higiénico
and the eyeless stumps of beggars pidiendo limosna
stoned on illegal vats of pulque or mezcal
and the enormous illegible map of Distrito Federal
crumpled shat upon and ripped into uneven hemispheres
where mindlessly jaywalking the mad poet Santiago Papasquiaro
meets death for maybe the second time
devuélveme la vida !

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Photo by Scott Duncan-Fernandez

​APUNTES PARA LA MEMORIA

am I the equivalent of my father ?
how can we be who we are ?
his was the gift of music
66 years ago drove through Oklahoma 
and Texas into Mexico on
the Carretera Panamericana all the way
to Teotihuacan which was a revelation
like a Sanskrit dictionary full of sun syllables
both pyramids to be climbed and conquered
the heights ! everything happened then 
when he died it was the 3rd movement 
of Beethoven’s Ninth // waves of sound
Aztecs transformed into shirts of light
transparencies of back and forth up and down
fireflies woven through the string section
followed by the lonely and brief horn solo
motels adobe stucco sleep heat oblivion
pan mohoso joyezuelas cazabe cues
the world is defined by the vowel it lacks
                                               nevertheless
twilight sacrifices of grass and fingers
blood : the planet Mars !
it’s in the dictionary and like music
must be mysterious shapeless drum and drifting
into the rust of the cosmos
the ear in the rust of the cosmos 
corn fields and motels motor oil seeping
through clouds higher than Tenochtitlan
siesta on stone pillows dreaming ancient
// scarab and Toltec heat ceremony 
black sun in the center of the lizard’s eye
yellow grain reaping tears
modulated skies in the key of Delta
home in a refrigerator !
what are words for ?
wearing corn skirts the serpent goddess
flint knife obsidian blade , mi corazón !
the book of canonical divides
photocopies of a language possibly
Anatolian in origin , rogations 
and a fierce god imitating human sorrow
descending above the milky cordillera
when it will be dawn again and forever
his breath always masked by sweets
to hide the alcohol hands deftly on the Wheel
moving through topographies of rock
vastness of pre-history and sandstone
up to the wrist in water the flowers
dazed corollaries of thought
migration of names like birds
in the depths of dreams rings inks
mosquito coast with canoes
ambush ! Aiyeee flechas y rodelas 
tell me with what you write
and I’ll tell you who you are 
pésimas cartas ! a fling with memory
each photograph precisely measured for
shade the way the bedrooms slant the oval
where they keep vanished cigarettes
prayer wheels and monographs about ant-hostilities
stylistics and devouring human cause
the greater gods on their tight-rope
drove several thousand miles across the Rio Grande
hurts the eyes the desert light 
how did we become who we thought we were ?
in front of the Palacio de Bellas Artes
posing for a portrait in cinematic sepia
hair glazed brow smoothed by flat conjecture 
guitars splashing nostalgic fountains
la hija de Don Juan Alba
dice que quiere ser monja !
it was in high school on the fortieth floor
a señorita with bougainvillea for hair
grammar lessons annexed to a single verb
to dispel dust and twilight
listening to the broken dream-speech
recover from memory the outline 
of distance 
//  transformed by the march up-country
returned to photographic chiaroscuro
as if scouring the sun for wounds
the cicatrix of identity 
66 years in a thumbnail sketch
childhood’s dead actors
who once lit up the summer stages
performing cigarettes and shoe-wax
the lifetime it took to get this far
Spanish and its suburban pools
dereliction of the Path
righteousness and fireflies
in which porch did one era end
and another begin ? 
the world’s toxic dance !
in the finish each gets his role
and sooner forget than drive
into the Sierra Maestra 
calling out Oh Diego ! Oh Diego !
escribir más es una locura !
set sail in eleven ghost ships
a crew of three hundred and fifty
hidalgos all indebted to the king
promised more gold than it was worth
a life a breath a ransomed leaf
mountains shivered into hemispheres
and questioned the half a dozen
who were at the bar that night
no one remembered seeing
María de la Luz //
the biography of Enrique Sabino
concludes here its tonal architecture
of neo-baroque fugue and spit
the land goes down dark
and hear no more the cadence
of footfall and lung
death the señorita shaking
her life-length hair
and guitars splashing endless inks 
la hija de Don Juan Alba
dice que quiere ser monja !
am I the equivalent of my father ?
 
September 15, 2019

Ivan Argüelles

​ Editor's note: Hector Zamudio is a young poet who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. A poem of his about Tenochtitlan inspired Arguelles to write this piece.

​Ivan Argüelles is an 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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