Recuerdo : Agua
“I am born in the name of water
and water is born within me.” – Adonis
The shape of your face in sleep. I carry it to the river in my arms. What the water gave me. Was that all I wanted? A form to hold beneath the sea while I slept in a womb of starfish. A cry to wedge beneath stones, to find no place, to let you know where to drown silence. I gather seven years worth of rain. I am a burr of water. I am a mule of rhythm. A cup drawn by water marks a ghost of thirst. I am sweat across petals. I am the basin where you grow. I make you a man, rinsing you inside of a clear voice. You walk down the shining street muttering my name. At night you cry in the arms of a life you cannot remember. A blade of dew through the dream. My years arrive. Sand blown across currents. The house I carry on my tongue. Out to the sea where there is longing. I have become a droplet inside of your shell. Blink and I die. In a vision of water I am unburied. An omen in your skin.
*The italicized phrase “What the water gave me” is the title of a painting by Frida Kahlo.
Eyes To Fly With
after Graciela Iturbide
For the silver fish covering my mouth
in a field of water, the twilight of water,
rinsing my eyes. I have no tears
you can see. But that speech of
wind makes the stalk prostrate itself
beneath long yellow clouds.
I belong to my stillness.
What do you know
about the snakes that live
inside of my mouth?
Image is image & imagination
is a martyr clasping gold bells.
Look at the nettle of girls brushing
their innocence. Like a multitude,
I am the body
of swallows against a white land
of dreams. I get close to the body.
Give me the artist
in her bedroom of faces.
I have no mouth you can kiss.
Were you the shining water
in the morning that opened
the fish with light? I touch
its scale & silk. A woman moves
lightly inside of my eye.
She is uncovering
all the cages. She is
a riptide of water
swelling over
cobblestone. Dust,
dust. I have no ears
to give you.
Recuerdo : Primal Art
I was an object sometimes. With no sensible need but to be used, believed. Whose surface attracted light like a masterpiece on a master’s shelf. I rocked a little inside until I fell over, breaking in blood on my indigenous side. Hand-painted, forged in beauty. Something you noticed during your travels. When you look at me you forget the hands that gave me away. The look of the gums pulling back, the skull. The way the wilder ones laugh behind vivid masks. The pleasure of acquisition brings you something you have nowhere to display.
The Little Deer, 1946.
Say the skull is only antler,
a horn curving from the ribs.
Artemis dragging a story
in silver over her shoulders.
Stole of love. Sable heart.
We live in a coniferous
breath that leads to the sea.
At the slick of white I eat.
In the stream of sorrow
I rinse a hundred faces. Lost
in the ripple of whomever
I would have been
without the pain.
The wildness wilder.
Pierced in blue I gaze at trees
rising from my spine. What a weapon
Art is, bold in suffering & myth.
In moonlight I tremble my name. Burro,
little venadita. What is the difference
I bear? Is my death behind the brush?
I run for hours in these brazen trees.
Darts break shafts of wood to quiver.
Hear me
snap the body of the body.
Four-legged, I live in kindling.
My head like a painting.
In the nature of a feral woman
I crouch. Through brambles
& stillbirths, a hunter
with my name squints,
pulls her arm back.
The dying brings me no ease.
My answer was carried
away as I sank.
My front two legs first.
I twist on my side, the belly
you stroked turning upward
in the silent twigs.
It will take more time to die.
What did this life care
for a lightning girl
who gazed out of the dirt
that gathered her, broke her
into sculptures of bone?
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