I, People of the Llano
I, People of the Llano
by
Carol Hamilton
* * *
GoodSamaritan Press
c2010 GoodSamaritan Press
Prepared in Chonburi, Thailand
* * *
I
East if earth's ridges,
we have come down,
down from the Andes,
the Rockies, down from
the Sangre de Cristos,
arteries rushing,
gorged with oxygen,
lips snow-burned, swollen.
Our inheritance is
a flattened desert place
where winds slash
with ice or dust
and cast a kind of fury
over our daily rounds.
We Plains people sing
litanies to the opulence
hurled up day after day,
eastern illumination
curling into the coils
of self knowledge.
You, you there, passerby,
my cup awaits the clank,
the glitter of coins.
I have forgotten the warmth
of our Eden. I need you
to notice me, my ragged nails,
my cap with missing earflaps.
I am the bloated boy. I wait still
for the transplant. I am the girl
with the ulcerated shin.
I am the old woman
with the tooth abscessed
clear down my chin.
Can you fill this empty can
at Love's, return to me
with just one gallon---
2- (no stanza break)
just enough to move me from this
God-empty desert?
II
What I hold here is a fist-full of sky.
A bare light bulb
dangles down
as I trace our history,
limp as these lace curtains
filled with dust.
A killdeer scurries past,
then another, seen only
in motion. They will
stagger, cry out if they
see me. They know
all the camels, the wild horses,
the saber-toothed tigers,
all the Folsom men
are gone. The dinosaur
mother and her young left
footprints, steps
turned to stone.
Near Amarillo, the Cadillacs
are tipped tombstones.
they turn geometric,
let wind slide through
the empty spaces
like light at Stonehenge.
They speak portents
which I cannot make
out in this dim light.
The truck stops and used car
lots jangle together,
smash me up flat
against the saw-toothed ridges.
I know Geronimo's grave sits alone,
3 - (no stanza break)
cut off from Ft. Sill and Arizona
by I-35 and gales of traffic
and misunderstanding.
At evening the icy breath
of Andes slashes
across Lake Titicaca,
makes those spirits
which brood over mystic waters
dance and jerk, almost to heaven,
almost to earth, almost making
contact, the flickery fires
balled up along the paths.
The medicine man
tosses coca leaves,
reads their portents.
The silver backs tell me
we were born
to bear troubles.
III
Dvorak whips at the air
in this room. He sings
his music into mine
at my calling. I will not
wait for revelation.
These moments are the ones
I choose, a resting place
for the fretful hands of clocks.
A see-through rainbow
is portal for a past
of prairie dogs, the thunder
of stampede, and a red tailed hawk's
stringy cry hovers, has never
quite been silenced.
All the drawing rooms
4- (no stanza break)
fit in my palm,
and three men make music,
make passion, make sound.
The confluence of us all
belongs to not one of us.
Despite my selecting
these walls this cube of land,
the sound pulses off
to its own mad distance.
The far-off peaks are
sun-touched, and the ridges
of moon craters cast shadows.
The piano hurls a message,
then the cello overtakes
with its own song
until the violin makes a turn.
At the same moment we speak,
watching five astronauts
awaken. They sail high
above us in a Babel
of dark and light.
I caress you, slather
your skin with my own gibberish,
and we rise, hand in hand,
praise the coming of the day.
IV
There under artificial lights
we almost touch,
almost finger each other's worlds,
there before someone else's passion,
the arias, the washes of thin color,
the airy lifts and twirls.
5 - (stanza break)
We stand, we sit, we wander on
with secrets still packed down,
parachutes compressed, neatly borne.
In truth, we pushed west to come here
... if there is a west.
All that the restless men knew
was if they followed the Sun's path,
they would come
to where the frontier died at last.
There on someone else's lush,
watery rim,
great chunks of earth
crashed into a thirsty sea.
They could not stop themselves,
scatched at the earth's scabs,
and they tried, found
Pharoah's ancient plagues rained
down on them, their faces
turned to leather,
their hands hardened.
They watched as Apache,
Comanche, Iowa tried
one solution after another
to the tidal wave
which heaved itself, mindless,
over the conquered virgins,
no nubile, so enticing.
I do try to turn away from you.
How can we mingle?
We are so strange, so distant,
and our stories have been told
in a thousand different dialects.
I understood when you said
there was a Fountain of Youth,
Seven Cities of Gold, Cíbola
hidden somewhere
along your secret skin.
6
VI
I must touch you everywhere,
everywhere, for my dreams
are hidden somewhere in your flesh,
and from the first instant
I have gobbled at this moment,
then that, without ever
\
ever true transubstantiation.
I have fingered crinoid stems,
dreamed the ancient seas.
Brachiopods and ammonites
have waited for a million years
and more, and more, and I,
I brought them home. That
imbedded shark's tooth tells
me of this ocean floor,
and we, even when we hold hands,
we are so light, so lost,
so far from any answer.
We are so fragile,
and even now my skin is thinning.
VII
And now the rain balls up
like mercury on the dust,
releases that smell first rain
always gives. We forget
that a miracle can be counted on,
this return from slee
7 (no stanza break)
this next swell breaking
on a silent sand. I comment
on such dreams, such smells,
such shared illusions,
such weird lights dancing,
swirling at eddies of green
before the storm.
The sky is a stranger
crouched behind the sofa
frightening, and today,
in the damp air,
streets crawl with fog.
I cannot see my face
in the rearview mirror.
Some frightened person tries
to make sense of the street names,
but veils drift between me
and those letters arranged
on tall poles with faith
that those markings can
explain everything.
VIII
Borges y yo
Hoy leí su milagro de nuevo,
how this humor reinvented
the landscape and
how the circular ruins
lapped around his years,
brought him full circle
to a sighted world
alight with what waits
at the center of its galaxy,
that pulling down
we circumnavigate,
accelerate against,
8 (no stanza break)
push my centrifugal motion
against, rush hysterical from
light to dark against, hurl
epithets against. His necessary
tension seems
ever gentle somehow.
To keep alive, to keep moving,
we must push, ever, against
gravity. The pull of stars
is distant, faint.
You set crisp ratiocination
to follow Father Brown,
The Cabal, the Gold Bug,
you balance on a rim
of thought and daily outings
and self-depreciation
to see yellow sunrise
a lo lejos y más y más dentro,
and I, too, try to skate and slide
cheerfully up and down
the tiger's gaping incisors,
admiring the slick sheen
of the enamel. And you
keep telling me there is
a secret there at the heart
of things. I blindly
run my fingers
over the classification numbers
of that library you said
loomed as far as you
could not see in space,
which curves,
the astronomer's promise.
I follow your lead,
not to reach distances,
but to a pleasant table
at sidewalk's edge
where I sip coffee
9 (no stanza break)
with a friend and listen
to life clatter and clap
along the pavement
to its destination.
IX
A new finch is on the roof
this morning, red head
glossy in slanted light.
The feeder dangles
from the droopy clothesline,
useless except as potential decapitator
for unwary backyard walkers.
I heard a mourning dove
and thought of you, perhaps
now on your lakeside
morning walk, struggling
to grasp threads of your
cancerous past and wrestle
them over the barrier
which bars you now
from owning your then.
I walked, will walk there
and many other blessed places
with you and will again.
I hear the cardinal
you now hear. He is calling
for his future. You must
fight to pull a bit of memory
into yours. I see your lake,
hear your song, step beside
your steps, will a burst
of prairie light for you.
10
El Día de los Muertos
Ephemeral gifts are prepared
for the dead, the tissue paper,
papel picado, wind-torn,
perhaps water-soaked to mush,
mescal on the table,
the mole on turkey,
even the live turkey the young girl
held tucked under her arm
at the market where she talked
with her novio.
Everything is prepared.
Then the marigold and cockscomb
dry, fall away, still red and gold,
the music ends, the candles melt,
the cemeteries are again dark and quiet.
We danced on our own graves,
found ourselves also expendable
when Quetzalcoatl and
Miclantlecuihtli whirl and pool
together and we nahual
our beastly ways into reality.
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