Sitting against the heart with eyes closed and the translation brings a light so divine, you are embarrassed. When one praises, one demands a secret in return. The walk down the mountain was easy, though there was an empty cup and a mortician full of joy. This time of year there is grief and a silent celebration where every single thing you do is preserved in a clay jar decorated with Arzltkohaklytl’s face.
You could close your eyes and instill the soil to reveal its monolith, though it would create faith in what came before and napalm already kissed the spot. What if the question was a stone throne with a hard cushion where the emperor dodged his farts and survived? After laughter, there is a document. After shaking the head, there is revelation and the habit of smoking the historic moment so smoke can teach a language that will present you with your cathedral.
Sitting on your head, no one wants to read this, yet they are paying attention to the lonely cemeteries, the shaved heads, and the instruments of peace. When you sit there, close your eyes to make room for a bed of roses that poison the mind into evolving against the map of terrain that was swallowed by a white whale that has nothing to do with this. Stand up and wipe your forehead because the document is complete.
You can guess their silence is for attracting the quiet man to the shore of the smallest lake where the mixed herd can’t be identified because he is used to zebras, elephants, and horses making some kind of noise. When the man turned quiet after his hunch-backed mother made him feel guilty, he never saw lizards, snakes, or scorpions again.
Those creatures filled the second lake and were served to the gods as animal soup sweated from the glands of a man trying to speak. When the gods hated the taste of the soup, it rained on the world his entire lifetime. The quiet man concluded that the lack of sunlight kept the water of his dreams green and forced the gorilla, bald eagle, and domestic cat to wait in silence.
A third lake was discovered the day the man was born. It carved canyons through his mother’s womb and painted strange symbols on her internal organs. When this was written about, instinct made the gorilla tear a tree apart and guided the eagle to fly into a valley the man can’t describe. This left the cat to sit on the window sill and purr as it waited for the quiet man to arrive, yet a cat’s purr is not enough to make the mother straighten her back before she dies.
If you look, you might climb up to them, though the hidden gardens of history have fed everyone their burning tea and loaded wagons, a silver speckled green dotting the houses at the top, the cliffs damaging the temple when they were erected up there to thwart dreams of happiness, chains and verification. Delicate tones can be heard whispering to you as if marvels from cliff edges will fall to meet you, the attention you pay to survival rewarded with the night mask of the blind man who designed the biggest white house, mentioning it delaying your climb to the rooftops. If you look, you could walk under the greatest arch and be delivered before a number of codes—god, faith, and sun painted in white letters upon the white walls and the first blinding white door.
He is certain the grammar of pain was infested with Cesar Vallejo’s spiders, though the web was created inside his heart and not on the glowing window. He is engaged to a fiction about the burned grasses and how the saguaro looks like a tall and proud man guarding his shadow. He turns his feet into a present state of awareness and crosses the smoky street, pulls the allegory to the front and the spider webs to the back. He is certain the grammar of rain was muddied with Vallejo’s eyebrows, though the dying figure spoke on Thursday and resurrected his toenails on Sunday. He denies there is something wrong with collecting the yellow and black toenails of mythical figures that suffered so he could see the world without smelling their feet. He is sure the grammar of staying is louder than the whispers of going home, his shovel stuck in the tree, his music discussed in the cafes at night memorials to the black marble body of the last spider he killed.
after Robert Duncan
The yellow field turns
thought into a cottonwood
that shaded me as a boy.
If a sentence holds memory,
why do I erase these words?
After they disappear,
they make me a stranger learning
what I thought I already knew.
The birth of my mother is
mightier than this sentence.
Not the sentence,
but the thought under the tree.
Ray Gonzalez is the author of 14 books of poetry, including Cool Auditor (BOA Editions).
ISSUE:
S P R I N G
2014
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