Nogales, Mexico, dusky border town built on the remains of walnut groves. Brick and mud houses perch on hills above a murky strip with a hundred wistful shops selling woven blankets, tequila and pills. Nogales is a crossing place, the streets are busy with those making the move, and I follow. A few blocks off the strip at the end of a pitted road is a mesh of neon-lit cantinas, open all day, all night, no clear distinction between dusk and dawn, no clock clicking down, this, la zona roja, the red zone, a row of decrepit houses, doors and windows open to the hazy air, a child squeezing the skirt of a woman diapering a baby, a pile of dog shit steaming in the road, and to the west the unlikely view of the sun hovering over dry mountains, that glorious burn of orange.
The prostitute, I don’t know her name, never asked. My mistake. Let’s call her Patricia, a strong name, paternal, decisive. Patricia, whore and queen mother, a cousin of Mary Magdalene and Inanna-Ishtar, Goddess of Love. Fertile and ripe, open and vulnerable, hard and unpredictable, Patricia gives herself to strangers. Patricia who wears her stained blue dress tight across the ass and belly, who sits on my lap, says, You like me, no? In the bar, at the table, in my lap, a sales pitch, a question, lipstick and deodorant, she asks, You like me? Or, a declaration, You like me. Or incantation. You like me. You like me. You like me.
Yes, I do. I like your body, it frightens me. I’m fascinated, repulsed and attracted to the skin I touch, the brittle hair, the cold orifices, the rolls of dicey flesh, all that yes, no doubt, and the symbol I fall into, the hermeneutics of appetite and fear, what this life is made of, and who I am, and who you might be, and how we come together and depart.
Patricia was a few years older than me, probably in her early twenties. She led me by the hand through a dank courtyard to a tight windowless room behind the cantina. The room had a concrete floor and smelled of tepid milk, the same smell of so many of Mexico’s puddled riverbeds. I was a sun scorched, blue eyed, puberty stricken boy, all bony ribs and sunken chest. If I was bored I was bored properly, and if I was a failure it was because I was never the man of your dreams. In the hollow shadows of a cheerless room, that’s how I undressed Patricia, as a failure, took off her shoes and kissed her wavering leg, the sweet-scented flesh above the knee.
I wonder about Patricia. Was she amused, exhausted, bored? Did I remind her of other boys who had made such a crossing, or was she worried about children of her own? Did she think of her mother, her grandmother, the priest, the man she worked for, the man she loved, the man she planned to kill? Maybe she thought about scavenging the market, buying a new dress, picking up medicine for her sister’s diarrhea. Maybe she looked in the mirror to see a hungry face. Maybe she was numb and thought nothing at all. It was eleven in the morning. I gave her five dollars and she laughed and asked me a question I didn’t understand. Perhaps it had something to do with being self-determined. Or maybe she wanted to know my mother’s name, Pauline.
I have a question of my own: how does a sixteen-year old approach the borders of self? How does anybody?
Now I follow dirt trails up canyons and swallow parched air and look for Jimson weed, datura, the velvety-leaved plant that grows on the lips of overgrazed washes, narcotic cousin to morning glory, good for visions, the seeds can also blind or kill. I understand now these two trails, one to the prostitute, the other to the sacred plant, both ruled by poison, are intrinsically, spiritually linked. Bodies darkly perfumed, both bitter, both deadly, both open in surrender to a traveler’s feverish embrace.
Walking the earth, I accept the possibility of communion, that the body leads to the indigenous crow, to rock, to fiery processes, to the melt, to transformation, to resolution, you, me, all of us, if only for a moment, if only by chance. We converge, huddle, plan, hunt, trap, kill, dance, make love. We learn that some teachings are outside dogma. And if the earth has a core, which I suspect it does, it’s just a matter of getting at it, of perception, a gathering of the senses and pursuing them to their end. When I visit Patricia, it’s the smell of milk. Hence, I follow the drainages to an opening and descend.
In drought, the sun is fierce, my lips are cracked and the heels of my feet bleed. I am desiccated, thirsty, hoarse. The streams are low and the ponds thinning. War encompasses the planet and rages within me too. I’m watching the divides, the fences, the walls, the dams, how the world is railed in, pocketed, corralled, confined. No need to moralize. To be confined, enclosed, at times, to shelter and be sheltered, a good idea. Drop into the crack, find shelter, tunnels, caves, mines. In the desert, for sure, and near rivers. And the city has thousands of holes into the underbelly. I find one between boulders in a pile of rocks not far from my house. The hole is what you’d expect, shadowed, moist, a space of quickened breath and dim. I am a typical worshipper; I open my arms skyward. Dropping into dark holes is a collapse.
Critters swarm in moist places. Spiders and insects, demons both mythical and real. Insects bite, gnats and flies feed on flesh, and after swatting a few thousand, it’s time to give in, surrender to the exhaustion of killing, to death. From the beginning we are made of death. Lost, I close my eyes and the pain disappears. The crack in the world, the moldy dripping spring, the icy crevasse, the dusty fissure where the rock is hot to the touch—ah, Inanna’s lusty bed, a feverish head of hair, the caress of loins. Innana perfumes her hips with ointment, and when she leans to the west, at just the right angle, her skin shines bronze and holds the warmth tight as a knot. It’s difficult to drop out of the light. Who has the strength? To strike a match is to see the open pit below.
The earth’s crust is littered with bones. Likewise, we are microscopic jungles containing lizards and crows. Fall into a rabbit hole and it smells of blood, a link, a wisdom, a gaping underground river intersecting the body, a pumping heart penetrated by voices, by sound, down to the belly, through the bottom of the feet, to the ever shifting center of things. Dante journeys down, enters the wound, moralizes, names it sin. I don’t see it that way. Not entirely. I find the burning a delight, the part of me that meets the sun straight on, an open split in the timber, the alchemy of music, the burden of a lonely guitar.
Up from the transforming fires, out of the great dry earth, between the matted pelt and frozen crust, out of a natural dungeon, through a crevice in the rock, we stand on the earth enveloped by night and the beautiful things night carries. Someone quotes Rumi, says, “The world began in time, but eternity will inherit it.” Another says, “I only know what I see.”
We dust ourselves and stand straight. We practice tantra, reuniting what has been divided. Warned against the murky figures of gods and demons, we have no truck with mysticism. This is the earth’s surface, rivers and hills, its history the primordial taste of the wild flesh we eat in silence, washing the last bits down with melted snow. With salt between the teeth, we move on, skirting churches and banks, finding an alley, a quiet spot beside a dumpster where we exchange rings, touching, joining—I’m all over you, we lose ourselves in that.
Crazy.
A friend calls and wants to borrow money. If I give him twenty today he’ll give me twenty-five tomorrow. My friend believes in tomorrow, and tries to convince me that I should too. You can make five dollars, he says. I’ll pay you tomorrow.
Heraclitus says, The river where you set your foot just now is gone—those waters giving way to this, now this.
Some people say that Buddha and Christ reside within us. I say, Buddha’s the part of me that reaches for you, Christ the part that yearns to make love.
Our hands touch. We sit face to face, knee to knee, talk. You say, if we bring what is taboo to awareness our hearts will open to the moment.
I say, let’s do it now. What good is it to wait for a better life?
Heraclitus says, The earth is melted into the sea by the same reckoning whereby the sea sinks into the earth.
I ask, would you think me foolish to drive my car into the heart of Mexico?
You ask, what of God?
I say, God?
You say, I believe God smells of jasmine. God smells of musk. God smells of tree bark and chimney smoke and antelope sweat. I see God when I look in your eyes. When I look in your eyes and forget about you. Can I tell you this? I like you a lot. I’ve liked you a lot for a very long time.
We hug and cry. We know the past is impossible. And the present, right here, the now and the between, in everything we say and do, here, our words, here today, the beat of our hearts, some kind of opening, branches in snow, our radio songs, those songs that ask us to dream of the future and dwell in the past, ice on window sills, nightfall, the present, the thick filthy air, a failed test, the monkey off your back, here and now, an argument at Smith’s, a fender bender, a bowl of vegetable soup, a new dress for the dance, an eight foot cedar plank, a barking dog, a stalled car, a broken shoelace, my love, the color red, our jealousy and joy, white and orange and yellow, I go with you, today, now, in this moment, I reach for you as sun breaks across a field below the pinions, the hawk spots the rabbit, there’s an explosion in Iraq, on the Gaza strip, right now there’s a bomb going off, in Colombia, Brazil, Istanbul. Right now, as I reach for you, as I yearn and dream and pray, there’s an explosion in Guatemala, there’s a dead man on the bus. A heart attack, a swollen pancreas, the end of the line. There’s a child dying right now. Right now, right this very moment, connected to my breath as I speak, in all courage, to the touch of my hand upon your chin—ah, love, in this touch, in this moment belongs the last cry of the last diseased child, the last call, the last gasp for breath, all future at the end of our fingers, the child is dying as children can and always will as long as children wake to breathe and reach for yet another breath.
We’re dying, I know we’re dying, we’re being born and giving birth, there’s nothing to be done. All of us die alone. And all of us don’t.
You say, to be alive is to be not dead. You and me, us, all of us, this moment, you say, crossing paths, sharing stories, in the aspens, a bird, a single whistle, lovely whistle sing, sing down saint, sing down. You say, I am your lover, I have no threshold, no beginning, no end. Take me, enter me, stay inside me, and I will enter you. I will touch you in all places and I will be you and you will be me. Love, why wait to sing, sing now. Sing now.
I was raised Catholic. Baptized in a fountain at St. Joseph’s Church on the corner of Craycroft and Broadway, Tucson, Arizona. I was seven years old when I received my first communion and confirmed when I was ten. Those were hot days for me, the rituals, the memorized prayers, the long doctrine, the ambiguous nuns. I was enamored by the church, the building, the holy water, the sign of the cross, the confessional’s hard wooden bench, the small eerie screen separating confessor from priest. And following confession the low slant of light falling through stained glass over the pews where I knelt before the horribly wounded crucified Christ, eyes eternally sad and turned to the earth. Yes, God was everywhere and always watching and had me on the edge of my seat.
Prayer. I prayed because I was a boy of prayer, because I was conditioned to pray, because prayer was part of my breath. I prayed to Jesus, to God, I prayed to the Holy Ghost. Yes, the Holy Ghost, the third person of the Blessed Trinity, the feminine at once distinct from and consubstantial with the Father and the Son, the poetess at the heart of the Church’s spiritual mystery, this Holy Mother Ghost who haunted me then and haunts me still.
I returned from Patricia and the border, went straight to my room and stood in the doorway. My mother slept across the hall, breathed heavily through her nose, in a few short years would be dead of emphysema. I closed my door softly. I could smell Patricia on my hands and when I closed my eyes I envisioned her flat brown nipples and wiry sponge of pubic hair. Her flesh, her smell, the taste of her had become embodied in my own, and I was sad. I never consciously turned away from the church; it just happened that one day the church was gone.
As committed to the earth as I am, I feel myself reaching still. A part of me is always asking to leave, to dive upward, to move like a hawk into a sanctified aura of celestial beam. Rhythms of the forbidden drum push me along, the conjunction of body and music, one solo flight in a chain of many, life found and embodied in restless improvisation toward the goal of complete nothingness. It is through prayer, through open song that I become a force, a life created that exceeds itself crossing into the mystic, away from earth, toward the rim of the universe, where, at the violent edge of zero, we are seduced by the tender hum of light. This is the story of exile, the saddest part of which is the leaving behind forever, the cutting off from roots, the break from tradition, from the past, from all predictable passion, only to reconstitute in those vast heavenly winds, the ocean of emptiness, through the black nebula to a stargazing galaxy where the earth appears a dim wanderer in an endless field of burning stars. By design, we desire to kiss God, all matter disposed of, all devolving into a sea of bliss, the sublime.
And following the kiss, destroyed, we make the journey back. We must or our people will die.
For now, it is by chance that I walk these hills. Datura grows at the cave’s entrance and I go there and lie down on the stones and put my ear beside the plant and listen for my mother’s breath. The Huichols are said to call datura Kieri, the plant spirit who anthropomorphizes into a shaman. Some say he’s evil, others believe a prayer to him will insure rain and good crops. Datura is a nightshade, a distant cousin to tobacco. The Aztecs used it for a pain killer. I meet datura in my dreams. To bend beside it, to touch its soft leaves, is to bring my dreams to the flesh and blood world. I ask a question of datura and whatever happens next is part of the answer. I rest my face in the white flowers and ask for a dream, for an open door. I close my eyes and see spots of time, vagrant memories, Patricia unrolling a black nylon up her calf, over knee and thigh. If I listen closely I can hear the rosary turn on the bones of my mother’s poor fingers, her voice imploring mercy from an ever so distracted God.
In a saddle on the ridge I stop at a tree. It’s a lone tree, a tree I visit often. A large branch has recently split from the trunk near the ground. I rest my hand on the break, caress the splintered pith, the loin of Innana, remember how, out of fear, out of the need to dominate, out of pure appetite, her temples were destroyed by the priests, her sanctity crushed, buried, and nearly forgotten. The sun is hot, my skin is burned, the earth is cracked, the tree is dying. The bones in the earth’s crust are many. It is no surprise then that from the break in the tree I feel a rush of dark heat, a throbbing up from a vast system of hidden roots the ripe smell of decay, the sound my prayer makes when it meets the wind, a tongue flush with salt, and in ways I can’t explain any better than this, the bitter healing kinship of a whore.
No comments:
Post a Comment