when skies did battle with skies !

Català: Hernan Cortés lluita amb dos indis by Antoni Gómez i Cros  (1809–1863) 

Two new poems by Ivan Argüelles ​

Historia Verdadera de la Conquista

great cadavers of heat circulating
like unspoken romance dialects in the ivy
& to sleep in summer’s ornate diphthong 
yielding to the profound ampersand
woven into the nexus of eyelid and sight –
why go on piercing darkness with 
Toltec lightning riding cordilleras that
differ from Spanish or Sanskrit as much as
distance diverges from the porphyry of longing ?
inversions of the horse and swart perspiration
armor soldered to glistening herculean frames 
and the flotilla of imported hills charging surf
the whiteness of the outer rim the deep indigo
that is fatal to the eye the immensities of cobalt
even as its avenues sprawl into nopal underbrush
flowers fired from archaic muskets like troops
of cloud-elephants prepared to seize the continent
blinding whatever passes for light in the gloaming
boomerang and volcano and ninety-degree alcohol 
when skies did battle with skies !
the ungovernable envelope of siglo de oro
with its plethora of misdirected synonyms
shepherds and avatars of lazar-house gods
the unique digit that transforms sound into space
echo after echo of an unheard Basque consonant
ready to detonate the lacerated backside of Cuba
the life of the ear and its golden assonance 
in the rushing welter of oceans on the other side
of the perforated and pearly Lobe
ringing syllabic disunities in rock and moss
mufti and corduroy of the managerial knees
sequences of traffic racing the invisible storms of Tampico
where gun-runners and affidavits of bright toxicity
lounge half-drunk in the ravaged tropical greenery
saliva and boredom of the new ruling class
borrowed gypsum thoughts heaving mountain-peaks
dialects of Chapultepec childhoods the works
hobbling with Franciscan mountebanks from the Old Country
gringo hospice dereliction of the Carretera Panamericana
where it is always the summer of 1953 BCE 
when the twins besieged the Popol Vuh motel 
ransacking dust and brick the bath of fame inches
within the insect who bears History on its carapace
and corn fields planted with munitions and
the unending Communist Revolution of Cuauhtémoc
the motor buried deep in Xochimilco floral beds
water follows water into the reverse of the leaf
whose exhausting idiom divides night 
into the multiple hemispheres of Oblivion
 
10-14-20

LAS AZOTEAS DE TENOCHTITLÁN  

half way through time in the center of space  
all directions go from the meridian straight north 
avoiding south where the dead thrive on monosyllables 
and the third hemisphere of time is shortened  
by the inch of light it takes to cross sleep’s boundaries  
mortals puzzle over birth and etymologies 
the eye’s memories are a confused reticulation 
a brief phase in eternity’s unfinished ant-hill  
dark labyrinth of coagulated stars and waters 
spectral resonance of the unfinished noon of marble 
when nothing moves but an incremental shimmer 
glare and intimation of a sun too soon blackened 
by coruscating elements of an aggravated city 
traffic of bacchants and hieroglyphs totem Spaniards 
who have left behind Galatea and her phantom shepherds 
for the colossal gold bricks and unstemmed tide of silver 
for the canals of sacred sewage Aztec immolated stone 
the top and pinnacle of a single multicolored plume 
signaling the end to the first day of a tropical infinity 
bulwark of crescent shaped frogs hidden in San Ángel 
the possibility that a new year might begin at last 
frame of water shivering Toltec vowels embossed 
in a mental armor the blaze and rutilation of horses 
climbing bone masses and the bruited nonsense 
of cadavers by the thousands left to be counted 
by augurs who imitate almanacs and friezes 
depicting enormous Revolutionary symphonies memory 
of children left to dry on rooftops with bleached linens 
sacrosanct rags panoply of rust and sugar skulls deaths 
by the hundreds with tiny horns blowing hats and wings 
terrific parades of cinematic automobiles Dolores del Rio 
the saint who ate the pyramids the offal of transgression 
mimics and sinners liars at the wheel Porfirio Díaz fading 
in the photograph of the Volcano and its slattern wives 
gesture of a phonetic pistolero to gain his daily share 
bread divided into fractions of oxygen and kneeless penitents 
of Guanajuato looking for the Surgeon of Nayarit 
who will soon be knocking at the door flummoxed and  
insensate with pulque the famous red margin of the Hours 
draping the pharmacy windows and the blow-out of night 
furious and intellectual the dialectic of darkness  
smoke and unending neologisms about the Life eternal 
to be sought somewhere in El Norte fiction of Hollywood 
countless abandoned motors and skins the frontera 
where the scales of justice tilt gagging on days-old urine 
cycles of pathos and iceberg lettuce spine chilling 
dreams recollecting the azoteas de Tenochtitlán  
Chabela and her amazing ink-spent hair the wind  
that takes its ropes and ties them around the Cathedral 
lifting from earth the archaic architecture of oblivion 
while worms with the mistaken eyes of devastated gods 
who live on cigarettes and cerveza in cantinas 
of peeling wallpaper and fly-swatters create words 
circular and soundless echoes tinny subtractions  
discarded illegible typescript on onion skin History 
 
10-19-20

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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