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UNDERGROUND VOICES: POETRY
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JOHN MACKER
Deep Song -after Jack Hirschman the sun is as far south as it’s going to shine, its apogee faces another solstice blaze of snow, it glints off their resurrected revolvers like an extra- terrestrial wink- the wind blows triggerfingers of desert zen across the stone mind of la frontera scattering the landscape with broken sleep & dreams.. a talon moon claws the west There’s an ancient deep song sung by poets, Andalusian gypsies & matadors, forever young, drenched in sangre as the desert wind blows roadside bombs over the solstice heart of Aztlan- & they explode in my dreams like gaudy flowers. On my front porch the wind blows deep song through the bitter- sweet jangle of the chimes, the wind blows out the incandescent hiss of my campfire, deep song blows a bounty through the truncated dreams of a Gila wolf, deep song pulses through the family blood of a future father’s trembling night-long wait in an arroyo under the border wire. Some days the gaudy flower of the sun shines down on me like A smiling stoned holy man wandering Sonora In July; Other days, when I think of war the deep song of the sun rises slowly from its apogee plaintive & raw-boned, sluggish, radiance more ritual than desire drought-chafed expressionless spews shadows without passion roams la frontera during these doldrums of January Mother of dry rivers, Sam Peckinpah & Garcia Lorca harbinger of imminent summers. Nana's Raid The most absolute of the predatory tribes Apache policy was to extirpate Every trace of civilization From their province. -Ed Dorn After the long, serpentine summer hemorrhaged the elegiac earth, southern New Mexico oozed with vipers at the news of Victorio’s death, implicit in all of us riding down the bones of history, is the temperature at which war kills; these are the first rogue hours of autumn, I’ve been there, the membranous red cottonwood leaves rustle restlessly scattershot across these arid echoless floors, the climactic pollen burns, the cholla spindly & pale in the sharp moonlight & something from the future, a harsh wind from another branded time assaults this ghost shirt of a border town, these dilated arroyos, what was once the placid succor of the October air, with invisible griefs. It won’t rain for months, now. Fellow warrior Nana, confidant, grandfather, respected elder, dreams ristras of dried blood, the color of the terminal leaves & they scatter what’s left of his Warm Springs band, Ojo Caliente; the buffalo soldiers north of the border are closing in on the mimbreño like thunder. Cochise dead, Mangas Coloradas decapitated, flesh boiled off the skull & sent to the Smithsonian, Victorio ambushed, Nana survives because coyote will burn his enemies’ last minutes alive against the moon with laughter, because a kind of nascent border satori is tattooed on his soul, because “their madness is my madness”, like Bird or Corso, later rebel Norte Americanos, he burned life at both ends & Robert Creeley, (unlike Lawrence in New Mexico): “I didn’t feel comfortable with Indians.” O Masked God Of Torturers, smile down upon this wasteland. Lozen, Victorio’s warrior sister, prophet, strategist, shaman, carries the medicine bag, has the power to locate enemies- joins Nana on his three-month long campaign of borderlands vengeance, 1881, spits tobacco on the eyelid of fate, has peyote visions of the end of Apache time, the psychedelic gecko, supreme deity Ussen, this “provoking figure of the horsewoman” seduces her incorrigible brothers into heretofore unheard of acts of endurance & brutality; between Janos & the Sacramento mountains, they cover over a thousand miles, 70 to 80 miles a day, kill 30-50 Americans, wound dozens, win all clashes with the army rustle hundreds of horses & mules; Nana, close to 80, has to be helped on & off every exhausted pony he leaves on the broiling pavement to die. No Pocahontas, she lives to be a funky, proud old woman. They were the desert’s curative response to the redundancy of a singular European conceit- a sovereign nation reacts to the squalid fecal hell that was reservation San Carlos in summer, the temperature at which war kills. |
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© 2007 Underground Voices |
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