The Road to San Juan, Part I

Wicho and I sit down in a patch of gravel beneath a mesa where a rickety town shines like a carnival. It’s the middle of the Mexican night and the mountain looks like a black curtain spread out across the stars. A chilly January wind gusts from the mesa’s flattop. Wicho, bowlegged, removes his shoes and the imitation Dr. Shoal’s inside fall out like a pair of dead fish. He grimaces and peels off his sweaty socks and begins rubbing his feet with cream made from snake venom. It smells like Vicks. I saw him buy this bottle from a man in a Volkswagen bus playing a schlocky recording through a bullhorn. The pilgrims flocked to him like bald men after hair tonic. I have studied the outlandish claims on the side of the bottle with skepticism.

“Look,” I say to Wicho as I hold up the cream in mock advertisement. “It even cures cancer!”

Wicho rubs his feet patiently, mopping the soles and toes with the dubious salve. His eyes focus so softly on his tired feet that I suddenly feel like I’ve trespassed on some sacred anointing ceremony. My sarcasm seems to have thudded, while the scene around us is bright and lively.

Old ladies behind food stands cook tamales and enchiladas and serve these with steaming cups of cinnamon-scented atole to the tired pilgrims. They brew hot punch of orange, hibiscus, tamarind, and apple. The peregrínos, the ones who are awake, drink and eat and huddle in groups like drunk people playing cards. There are thousands of us. I see the others splayed out before us in the mesa’s bulky shadow, many with their eyes closed, wearing faint smiles, heads resting on backpacks, heads in the dirt. I hear bursts of laughter and, behind this human sound, boomboxes playing accordion-heavy ranchera music. Someone is enjoying “Eye of the Tiger” too. It’s like the midnight Mexican Valhalla, although we are not even halfway to our destination.

Wicho lets out a bruised grunt as he reaches for his socks and slides them back over his blisters. He takes a deep breath and looks ponderously, I think, at the moon. His Spanish, which has been described to me as almost Shakespearean by those who appreciate the campesino vernacular, catches me off-guard. He says,

“There’s a shitload of cancer in the United States, right?”

“Yeah,” I say, rolling my eyes. “There’s cancer everywhere.”

“No,” Wicho says with sage certainty. “Not like there, dude.”

This question of human frailty resolved, I lay back and listen to the rascally noise of ourselves, all the thousands of us. It is a poor sort of carnival with all the rides shut down and everyone playing the games for free or dreaming under the arcade of the sky. I forget that this is a Catholic pilgrimage we’re on, and I am not a Catholic. Little burrs cling to my green sweater and I hear fireworks.

Centuries ago, the Persian poet Rumi wrote that going on a pilgrimage is a way to “find escape from the flame of separateness.” I wish I could say that I had his lofty sentiment in mind when, a moment later, I removed my shoes and socks and reached for the snake venom.

Letter to the Vestigial Reptile

We share this home, you and I,
Though you come and go like a fever
While I crawl around our dwelling
Like a lizard in a fish tank.
How did you ever become the outward wandering, more
Adaptable one, and I the one poised
To jump from the scale? There are moments
When my hands feel like huge fossils
Before I move them and they turn
Into birds. The urge to fly comes then like a storm—
But I stay here because you are gone.
I know there were times of terror
For you too, when you heard thunder and were lost
In smoke, and you didn't have a home.
How did you find me at the end
Of all your epic searching?
I would ask you for that story
If you weren't off wintering on a southern rock.
I hope you aren't late in arriving this year;
Come even if your blood is still cold.

Mayflower

I spent ten days in May at a natural building school outside of San Miguel de Allende called Karacadir. Karacadir is the name for a nomadic tent found all over Asia. The one I stayed in was sewn together from Tibetan yak wool. At night, gusting winds presaging the thunderstorms of the coming rainy season whip the black plastic that covers the karacadir; it sounds like you're sleeping on the deck of a galleon in violent seas. (In this way, the karacadir makes anyone into a nomad.) The wind slackened the tent, so early in the morning I would go outside and readjust the rigging attached to poles that kept the tent's corners taut. Every time I did this, the geckos that lived in the upper shadows of the karacadir skittered down its side to the ground.

The center is located a half-hour´s ride from town in a white 1971 VW kombi named the Albatross. The road that leads to these eighteen acres of thorn forest is rutted and winding. Andy and Dorothy, who live and teach here, steer the Albatross over the bumpy course every morning before sunrise so that Dorothy can catch the bus to her job in Queretaro. I imagine that in the pre-dawn darkness, while I was sailing around the world in the karacadir, they were jostled in their seats like explorers riding a giant white bird on Antarctic swells.

I worked at cobbling the patio outside their yurt with basalt rocks we gathered from the property. One day I found myself walking along a trail looking for rocks when it occurred to me that I wasn't really looking for rocks--I was wandering. And really enjoying it. There is a cord that connects us to something greater and I felt it pulling at me, inviting me to intermingle with the heat of the day. Maybe I was dehydrated, or maybe I was having a numinous experience. For no reason at all the dry yellow grass seemed buttery and the breeze felt like a woman running her hands through my hair. I thought of Thoreau and Edward Abbey and especially of Annie Dillard and I imagined that for one afternoon I had found my own Tinker Creek. I walked with a leaf-in-the-breeze trajectory along the intersecting trails and took notice of the vermillion flycatchers and jackrabbits and all the flor de mayo that sprouted up after the last rain. No one else was there, if you don't count the hydra-headed garambullo cacti or the nopal with its hundred pads like open hands.

Andy and Dorothy teach earthbag building, but they do this intermittently in one-week workshops. I was at Karacadir as a wwoof volunteer when no workshop was happening, so I had few responsibilities and lots of freedom. After breakfast, I would take water to the donkeys and tell them how sweet and beautiful they were. In response, they would bray like rusty train whistles and try to eat my socks. Then I did some cobbling. Then I read. Later in my stay I learned how to make natural cob and apply it as a plaster. I cobbed and cobbled and read and wrote and ate and slept. Then I did the dishes from the previous three meals using the precious little water at karacadir, which is stored in fifty liter plastic jugs. Last year, a nearby broccoli farm owned by Birdseye Farms dug a well deeper than anyone else's in the area, essentially cutting off three hundred families from running water. So when taking a shower at Karacadir you're limited to as much water as you can fit in a small stew pot. It's best to do this at the end of the day when the air is starting to cool off, and the water that's been sitting in the jug outside is still warm from the day's radiation.

At night, when the wind was starting to blow, we would go outside and listen to an old cassette deck Andy rigged to the Albatross's speakers. "Sketches of Spain" has never sounded so right spread out over a thorny desert. "Let it Bleed" was garbled but bloody nonetheless.

I was told early on in my visit that there are roadrunners in the thorn forest. By the end, I was starting to doubt whether I'd ever see one. On the last morning, as I set off on new wanderings, I finally did see a roadrunner. It was running on the road.

Ginger with Haiku

Today I made scones for Alma del Sol, which has become my standard culinary contribution as the most unlikely bed & breakfast maître d' of all time. I love making bread, any kind of bread, because it combines the essential pleasures of mixing, measuring, kneading, and heating up. We should all do it sometimes. It doesn't hurt to have a good crew around, either. Wicho passed back and forth through the kitchen whistling his three-note birdsong, which gets under my skin but massages my ego at the same time because I know these notes are just for me. I emphasized the importance of ginger to him, since he'll be making the scones after I leave. Cristian was "enfadado" today, meaning bored and sick of mopping and ironing. He made sure I understood that he was bored, not angry. These Mexicans are proud of how they can keep their temper. Cris wore a navy blue turtleneck in the ninety degree heat--maybe he felt turtly. Kiti, the perpetually cute teenager, bubbled with enthusiasm for the world between bites of the leftover crystalized ginger with chocolate (an unmatched combination). And Hugo, the dear man, told me about the wonders of "Zorba the Greek" while dancing some steps to gypsy music playing on the University station. Then he leaned over the counter as is his custom and leafed through 'The Joy of Cooking' while bouncing around ideas for a dinner he's hosting next week. Prosciutto stuffed with crab meat, anyone? Taquitos with potato and salt cod? Coconut flan? Hell yes.

A Haiku.

Tonight, dunked hot bread
In penny-colored bucket
Filled with your red wine.

Winter mountain poem

Dear Mountain, I hear you
Are sick of the beautiful slopes
My glaciers spent so much time
Laying with debris. Listen:
If it’s a simple question
Of immensity and loneliness,
I can send a flock of birds
With strange songs of consolation,
Or a snow leopard deeply disciplined
To soothe you with its paws and purr.
My starlings keep good time
And my cat’s as lithe as one of your
Silvery veins. But if it’s more warmth
You need, more than what a small body
Can provide, I grant you permission
(If you’ll allow) to be patient, to muse,
And to wait for spring while I build
Another mountain.

To Summit the Mermaid

Just got back from a hike up to ‘la sirena,’ a mountain bluff on Guanajuato’s eastern border that is capped with a white iron cross. It was my first long walk-with-destination since the San Juan pilgrimage two weeks ago. Climbing up from the panoramica, there is no clear path to la sirena. I left a crumbling dirt road wide enough for one car and made my way straight up the mountainside. A ragged and no doubt thirsty horse seemed an unlikely animal to find on that hillside, but I did. Here you must pick and choose your way through the cactus and other brush and try not to slip on any of the abundant scree. Dry fissures in the folds of the mountains look like ancient riverbeds but I don’t know if they ever held any water. It seems doubtful. I followed one for a few minutes before veering off over the parched grass, which crunches underfoot and makes you wonder how (and why) it survives out here. The summer rainy season must supply the grass and other plants with the vast majority of moisture for the year, and they tough it out for the other eight months. The sun-baked landscape of central Mexico, and especially the unforgiving vegetation, gives me the impression of a great stubborn will to exist. The prevailing sense of manifest heaviness that D.H. Lawrence describes in “The Plumed Serpent” is here. I scrambled up a shoulder of bare rock, determined to reach the summit quickly, willfully. Still thinking of Lawrence, and of the question of will and desire that the main character, Kate, faces:
“But for herself, ultimately, ultimately she belonged elsewhere. Not to this terrible, natural will which seemed to beat its wings in the very air of the American continent. Always will, will, will, without remorse or relenting. This was America to her: all the Americas. Sheer will!”
I trust desire and I'm wary of the will, though conscious of being driven hard by it. It occurred to me that a riotous act of will might also be a way to rediscover a desire and give one the courage to go after it. It is a delicate balance, like trying not to slip on stony scrabble.* I don’t think climbing up to la sirena and back, a hike of a few hours, qualifies as riotous, but it’s at least a sort of brawl with the usual day.


* I slipped once.

Chichifo

Yesterday we got up before dawn to drive to San Miguel de Allende. Hugo had some paperwork for the immigration office there, another favor for another friend. A thin band of seashell blue sky rimmed the mountains surrounding Guanajuato as we drove to meet Wicho at La Casa de Espíritus Alegres.

"Wicho" is what you call someone named Luis. Sort of like calling a William "Billy." Inscrutable Mexican handle.

When we pulled up he was standing in the doorway shrouded in a grey hoodie, hands in the pouch pockets. Hugo had him fetch an inkjet printer that was in the trunk of the car and we followed him inside and stood in the dawn kitchen for a minute. Stars were disappearing in the first light of the madrugada. Hugo and I drank milk and ate a piece of bread and Wicho stood there stone silent and looking like he hadn't slept a wink and was no worse off for it.

I slept for most of the drive through el cerro, the rolling hillsides of scrubby nopales cactus and ubiquitous dusty earth, as the sun rose and burned through the windows onto my neck.

In San Miguel de Allende Hugo waited in line on the steps of the immigration office. Wicho bought me an orange juice and drank a smoothie (licuado) through a green straw from a bulging plastic bag, the kind they give you when you buy a goldfish.

Later, Wicho bought some tools for his work with silver, his platería: a metal clamp and a scraping tool fit for a dentist and a pencil-size blowtorch. He uses these tools to make ornate silver earrings and, with the pointy ones, to pantomime homosexual ambushes. At other times he makes a jabbing motion with his hand in the A-Okay sign, thumb and forefinger forming a hole and the other three fingers flaring out like a rooster's crown. This is to say, "Did you get any?"

The licuado gave Wicho a stomach ache and he became reclusive.

Leaving San Miguel we passed a brick manufacturer, stacks of ladrillos in the dusty yard awaiting some further formation and hunched men building thousands of them into great ochre rectangles. This was Wicho's first job, before he became Hugo's number two -- chauffeur, chef, accountant, messenger boy, toilet scrubber, 20 year-old wage-earning manservant. A fully committed and seemingly tireless body who Hugo would die for and with a mind that is elsewhere and unattainable, always disappearing down the driveway at midnight.

Hugo bought him a can of root beer which he'd never had before and this seemed to put things right for a few minutes. He said it tasted like coffee.

I like Wicho for being a hard worker, a talented artisan and a quick study in almost anything, unapologetically adolescent leather jacket James Dean mile-long stare, never reads a book, for the toothache he had, for calling me chichifo, for the hand on my shoulder out of nowhere.

The leaves on the trees are crinkled dark green and shine. I point at the horizon where the biggest mountain is and tell Wicho that it's his, just trying out saying it. "Nah," he says.

Meanwhile Hugo is sitting in the back seat and tells me I have a bald spot. He takes a picture with his phone and shows it to me. We discuss it for a few minutes, whether I'm actually going bald. We dissect the few pixels of white scalp for evidence. He says in his squeaky trickster voice, "You're going bald, man!" His English is perfect down to the common slang and intonation, and I am learning for the first time that the word for bald is calvo.

We turn off into el campo before reaching Guanajuato, heading towards an abrupt little hat of a mountain called Cerro del Sombrero. The rocky dirt road winds through fields of burnt out corn stalks where goats and burros browse in twos and threes. A disco song from 1980 called "Sexy Eyes" comes on the radio and Hugo and I clap and snap and drumbeat the headrest and dash. "I love this jam!" I yell, even though I've never heard it before. I'm just trying out saying it. I've got one arm hanging out the window and the animals are ignoring the thumping bass like another ray of sunlight. "Yeah," Hugo shouts back. "Isn't it beautiful? It's called 'Las Cajones!'"

"No more lonely nights for me, this is how it's gonna be...sexy eyes..."

The rural village we're bouncing through is called Las Cajones, Drawers. It's wide open. We're moving as fast as a tractor passing little bright churches and box houses where they hang the wet laundry over scrappy metal fences. I wave at a young girl walking the road in her school uniform, a spontaneous greeting from the sheer excitement stirred in me by "Sexy Eyes." Wicho says something that provokes Hugo to censure him in his mock paternal voice, the one he uses to enunciate Wicho's real name, José Luis.

I have tried telling Wicho who Joe Louis was, punching the air to illustrate my point, but he barely knows who the Beatles were and just forget about "Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show."

We arrive at the little home Hugo has inherited in Las Cajones. The backyard has a clear view of Cerro del Sombrero and a glittering dam, or presa, farther off.

I say to Wicho, Vamos a tener una barbecoa aquí un día pronto, ¿no? Unas chelas, unas muchachas. He smiles like someone who just got out and says sí and puts his hand on my shoulder and we gaze at the sombrero.

Hugo says this is where we will come, he and Dean and I, with bottles of wine and paints and easels, and we will all sit out and recreate the hat. I think everyone who comes here knows what dreamy thing they would do if they came back. Hugo calls the house "Las Lomas." So many words for "hills."

So I'm going bald, apparently, and it's late afternoon as we get back in the car and head for Guanajuato. We go through Wicho's home town of Puentecillas and neither of us says anything when we pass his midnight driveway. Outside Puentecillas is a high-security prison and Hugo says Wicho used to live there.

We're listening to a saccharine Seventies ballad by the guy who sang "Lady in Red." He's pining away, "I thought I'd spend my seasons trying!" Orchestral sweep. Trying, sighing, lying, dying.

Wicho is unmoved and staring softly down the road.

I'm pretty sure Hugo was joking.

Dim Night

I was walking under the bridge of Santo Café where friends and acquaintances always seem to cross paths. A man in rags stands a little way off with his zither or whatever it is and his can of coins on the ground. Boys and girls a stone’s throw away invent themselves in loving play and companionship. They hold hands and whisper low and the legs of their jeans inadvertently brush against each other like two people sleeping in the same bed. We stare at each other and if her eyes were not so strong I would likely get lost in the weird adornments of nose ring and rust red leather jacket. The scene itself is inadvertent, untested, difficult to place in my mind. On top of the little stone bridge are café tables and bright orange lights and always a sense of lonely transit and of being suspended willingly in isolation like a pigeon perched on a gargoyle. You can see the whole world from up here. You can see a rip in a pair of jeans from a hundred feet and you can perceive the outline of a hand in a pocket, a little unintentional gnarled knuckle. Just the breeze, the lightest suggestion of wind up there, could tear a frozen skullcap off a snowman. The bridge’s stone arc insinuates permanence and leaping lightness in the world. It reflects in a cornea’s gray striations like some kind of first motherly caress crossing one’s consciousness. Not a hair’s breadth separates your atomized stare from its cold rock body. All the summer fairs have danced its span in plain steps and it remains outstretched. Winter passes like a dream in which you must carry rocks up a hill.

Even if you have no faith in anything you can still be persuaded by the motion of passing days and the unexpected moment that comes at you gambling. Once again you have that executive look in your eyes that undoes all your usual simple expressions and makes you seem incredible, as if you might become a bird. Your metamorphic rise into the trees is a regular vision at breakfast, church bell sound and coffee tongue. I think while wandering in a certain garden I saw you joined up there by a whole flock of the spiritually reversed.

Notes from Café Tal

...that humbling moment comes along when you remember how much you are like the guy at the next table scribbling into his notebook.

Lately I have fallen into an oubliette of the mind where one casually interprets tremors from the outside world. Then I ordered a Hurricane tea at Café Tal and found myself staring at the mesh tea ball, thinking about last night...

Hugo and I ate the sugarcane I'd brought from a recent Posada. He showed me how to strip off the outer layer of cane with my teeth, the kind of delicate tearing movements that make a chimp look preternaturally clever. Chomping on the inside cane until it's just a lump of dry fiber in your mouth, then spitting that out and tearing into the next piece. We agreed that sugar taken in this way gives you an unlikely instant rush, something that clarifies whatever strength you have in your body and induces kid mentality for a few happy seconds. As a shared experience it outpaces even the most frantic game of tag.

Quince de diciembre

Wicho throws a chopping knife at the stool and smiles his almost menacing country boy smile with the sweetness of his brown eyes and the crooked front teeth. Now we know what happened to the other knife with the bent tip, the one we had to throw away. Wicho plays with knives.

Something was bothering him this morning. His hair which is normally combed back into like rolling hillsides of gelled black bungees had a conspicuous horn in the back, a fucked cactus sticking out of the confused region of his head. I think he lacked sleep; he works too hard.

It seemed that I had done something to offend him. But it was like he couldn’t find the words to tell me what was wrong. Perhaps a single word was lacking, the one that fits this gesture. He threw the knife onto the stool and it stuck in there and he looked at me with all the misunderstanding laid bare. Then he pulled the knife out of the stool and continued chopping the vegetables for the quesadillas.

G-L-O-R-I-A!

Is the Virgin of Guadalupe the same as the Virgin Mary? It depends who you ask. Mexican Catholic hagiography is, in any event, a cloudburst of fiestas. Here in Guanajuato the water runs down the cajellones towards el centro. Suds slipstream through the cobblestones after a good scrubbing on some bodega’s grungy patio at the end of the day.

The people defy gravity going up. Today they ascend the Calzada de Guadalupe offering their baskets of tangerines, eggs, carrots, radishes, and baby Manzano bananas to the Virgin. They find her ensconced in an altar of flowers in the peach-painted church at the crown of the road. The women wear white blouses embroidered with flowers and long skirts arrayed with rich pigments. The little boys dress like Juan Diego, the neatly pressed peasant garb and straw sombrero and a painted-on mustache. Babies with bandanas resemble cute pirates, little laughing Zorros.

Wicho and Cris make a burlesque of our trek up the Calzada, lighting little cuetes with their sulfur afterstink and exploding confetti-filled ice cream cone bombs on the sweaty head of this silly guero. I buy a bag of steamed garbanzo beans with chili and lime, partly just to amuse this unrivaled duo from el campo. Watch the guero struggle to free the bean from the pod and nearly spit the macerated green mush onto his shoe. Òrale!

The familiar sewer whiff, a ten foot passage, and the intestinal smell of carnitas frying in their own fat.

Me: Do you really believe in the story of Guadalupe with the flowers?
Wicho: [undecided, looks at Cris] Tú?
Cris: No mucho.

By ten o’clock the Calzada is emptying, one can enter the church without so much as brushing shoulders with another. I look closely at Juan Diego’s face and he looks like Jesus. A handsome man dumbstruck by a shimmering woman in green robes. A cherub holds her aloft. Next to me a woman prays, and next to her a boy eats three hotdogs. The loud band outside is doing ‘Gloria’ for the boys and girls with spackled black hair.

I descend via the Russian Baths.

Our Lady of Guadalupe

Just went for a walk up to the Iglesia of Guadalupe where they are already starting to celebrate the Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe two days in advance. The cobbled road that rises to the church is bannered with red and white and green flags that hang down like Mexican crocodile teeth and intersect and crisscross with strings of glowing light bulbs.

Outside the church people were gathered around vendors of the traditional foods: tripe tacos, tamales, pozole, ponche. The ponche (punch) from a styrofoam cup was hot and sweet with flavors of guayaba, orange, hibiscus, tamarind, sugarcane, cinnamon, and apple.

Mass was being given to a full congregation inside the church, the holy electric light pouring out over the steps and me peering in just as the priest raised a white disk of bread symbolizing the body of Christ and intoned sacred Spanish words into a microphone. They normally leave the church doors open here, so passing by an evening service is not unlike passing a theater where a film is showing. A woman in front of me was kneeling on the stone, the best seat she could get.

On my roundabout return I bought a copy of Juan Rulfo’s “Predro Páramo” for sixty pesos and later wandered into the little video arcade off the Jardín that I have passed a hundred times. Teenage girls with streaks of pink in their dark punk hair huddle on the steps smoking cigarettes and sharing a secret joke that goes round and round.

Inside the arcade I came face to face with Chun-Li, the coquettish Chinese character in Capcom's "Street Fighter."

The mysterious hole in the wall, part I

The Embajadoras market in Guanajuato springs up on Sundays. It's a big market in my view; I imagine that square-feet-wise it might rival a Wal-Mart, though the disorientation one feels wandering through its arterial passages is more satisfying than the false order of a big box store. The closest thing Guanajuato has to a Wal-Mart is a place called Pozuelos, which comprises a "Mega" chain grocery/retail store, a movie theater, and a mall that would be considered small by American standards. I walked there today, passing through a long tunnel on the way where I encountered the preceding hole in the wall.


The Embajadoras market was enjoyable for me. I dug into piles of jeans that I think must have been sitting in warehouses for years. They were new but not in particularly good condition and freak sizes were common, like a 40-inch waist and 30-inch inseam. Brands like "Macho" that I've never heard of, another world of jeans I didn't know existed! It satisfied a vague longing to be among so many man-made things and among so many people choosing among them. I didn't really go there to buy, I went shopping for the whole experience. A Nike Air Max 360 hanging on a wall with a hundred other right-footed shoes sucked me in for a closer look at its red and white curvature and its gratuitous Velcro strap wagging there like a dog's shiny tongue. It was the joy of description to muck around in so much finished product.

Visions and Revisions (El Pípila)

Well, it's time for some visions. I've been here for almost a week now and have wandered through Guanajuato every day except yesterday, when I was laid up with problemas de la digestión. This morning I drank mango flavored water through a straw from a plastic bag.

Perhaps the most visited, and certainly the most visible, tourist spot here is a 25 foot tall statue of a man, called "El Pípila," that overlooks the city from one of the surrounding little mountains. Historically, El Pípila played a key role in the Mexican liberation movement emanating from this region. He is hewn from rough reddish stone with the thick features of one of Picasso's women. For me, the corpulent legs and huge feet stand out especially, suggesting that if El Pípila were to come to life he could stomp some serious ass. First, he'd have to jump down into "el centro," the city center, from the big stone terrace where tourists snap his photo before turning around to take in the view below. This drop of a couple hundred feet over the scrabbly hillside would pose little challenge, I imagine. At that point he could use the stony torch he weilds to wreak havoc on the unjust -- though finding many of them might prove difficult these days, when the Spanish haciendas - Mexican versions of the old American plantations - have been rid of their vassals and converted into charming B&B's, like the one I'm staying at.

The Grand Tour (of Guanajuato)

Here are some pictures from the first few days. I will post more later with more substance, when I'm not feeling so chistoso.




A photo from my third full day in Guanajuato. I came upon something mysterious. Is this a karaoke joint posing as a "bar" or something far more sinister?



This picture speaks for itself, if you are a Queen or a Magician. Clare, Kristen, I'm thinking of you.



That shoe really can fly anywhere!

“Man in Chair with Beer” by Duane Hanson, 1973

That other voice calls
From your fiberglass throat,
Look-alike in wifebeater.

Or it comes from your forehead
Telepathic, like an alien
Just home from work.

And this here is no voice
But rather a picture of you
Rising from polyester.

And I think that I’m really you
Approximately, as your endless
End of the day approximates me.

But did you crack open that beer
Just before I got here?

I will do
The listening, beautiful,
Tired statue.

Farmhouse Model T

I'd talk about old movies
I liked when you nodded off.
When I said silent era
You'd start snoring and I'd notice
A ragged cobweb blowing like hair
On the offbeats of your breath.
It would cling to the pincushion
Headliner of the old Model T
Where we had arranged ourselves
In the backseat.

Knowing that it couldn't happen anywhere
But the farm on this day
With the sun freezing to the snow
And the freeze seeping into the shed,
I'd finally be silent myself,
With your head on my shoulder
And my head on your head.

On Valentine's Day

To Drudgery

Why must you wait with me,
Drudgery, while other noses are out
Smelling roses? Do I solicit you
With a promise of lightness and air?
Do you imagine yourself – unloved, an invalid –
To be fair?

Truth be told, I think you suffer
Behind your one-tooth grin, having bitten
Too often into that old wooden apple.
Would you be willing – if I treat you
With sweet vapors and brush your long, steely hair –
To go away, just for today?

Dream Poems

Two nights ago I dreamt about two dangerous guys with death in their eyes.
They would have killed me if I hadn’t manifested blind rage.
Last night my parents didn’t love me and I raged again.
I met a younger woman whose name I immediately forgot
And we got drunk on a mixture of water and rock salt. Water
Rained through the ceiling and spilled over the rims of our too-small vessels
And I kissed her mouth and found it thin and real.

A Détournement

I took a bus up to Boston this weekend, and in the seat behind me was a teenage girl having a loud and annoying conversation on her cell phone. I gave her a sour glance but she didn't seem to notice. I thought it would be funny if I had a microphone to hold up to her, so she would understand what it's like to be trapped in someone else's absurd notion of time well spent. Then I remembered that I did have my camera, so I took the following picture of her by holding it up over my head and shooting blindly behind me. The social ethics here are fuzzy -- I won't pretend to go into it, except to say that I felt guilty about being such a dick and I'm not sure I would have done the same thing if she had been a 200 lb. dude. Her expression (she's on the right): someone waking in a dark room to the buzz of a mosquito:

Art Brut

I have recently been exposed to some modern art movements through my reading, and to actual pieces of contemporary art and design in magazines that I was scanning for a guy. The guy is not immediately important. I'll say that the art movement I'm most interested in is Art Brut, a term coined by the French artist Jean Dubuffet in the 1940s. He heralded the art made by mental patients and the criminally insane that was first treated extensively in Dr. Walter Morgenthaler's 1921 book "Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler" (A Psychiatric Patient as Artist). Art Brut does away with tradition in place of the erratic, ecstatic, and primitively constructed works of untrained, sometimes disturbed people who are inspired to create art in much the same way a child is inspired to play with his food. One of my favorite Art Brut artists was Ferdianad Cheval, a French postman in the 19th-century who spent 33 years building his "Palais idéal." It actually looks like it might be made of expertly molded mashed potatoes (purée de pommes de terre):



Dubuffet himself had enough talent to sustain an artistic career, a term he probably would have rejected for himself. Here's a beautiful collage of his from 1977, "Les Vicissitudes":



This reminds me of a time in about 6th grade when I made a collage of cut-out pictures of supermodels and anonymous lingerie models. I cannot provide an image of this piece because it has been lost.

Sunday Evening Blues

It's been a rainy weekend in the Northeast. Today it poured so long and so deliberately that when I went outside the sidewalk was covered in some places with a livid green paste, buds raked from the trees, engorged with water. Squish squish. And now this poem:

"Mapmaking"

As a child in the family trade
I drew, though not to scale,
Sea creatures and the rogue crests
And troughs of stupendous ocean waves
Tossed by calligraphic gusts
Towards the edge of the page.

And on the long, sunlit boards
Of our old Binghampton
Street porch, I wandered.

Once or twice—No,
Many times—I remember now:
Dragon's breath blew through the yard.

Catholic Charities Maine

I spent the last two days at Catholic Charities Maine, "where everything's a dollar, but people are priceless." My favorite department is Refugee & Immigration Services. A Somalian woman with very little English and a babe in arms comes to me at the front desk and eventually I discern that she is here for an appointment with her case worker, Slobodan, a nice man from a former Soviet Republic and the only one of the staff who signs in and out with each trip to the bathroom. I imagine he is gifted at paperwork. I call Slobodan, he comes out, the two of them have a fluent conversation, and I am stunned by the efficiency and aplomb of their bureaucratic mingling.

But mostly I read from "The Cloister Walk" by Kathleen Norris. She says, "Poets understand that they do not know what they mean, and that this is a source of their strength." In other words, a poet can unburden himself of devotion to literal meanings if it interferes with his ability to be receptive to and communicate figurative meaning. The knowledge of poetry is closer to that of the feeling body than of empirical fact.

Love Note

In the shower this morning I thought "you kiss like the rich" and wondered for the life of me why I liked the sound of it so much. I thought drawing a pair of lips might help me understand. But my own drawing didn’t come out so well, so I just traced some lips from a book of someone else’s drawings. Just like that, their drawing became mine—and maybe mine becomes yours for a moment or two while you look at the lips (how green they are!) How easily we give to and take from one another, and how easily this can upset or surprise us! How light is the touch that tickles. The hot water wasn’t working this morning, so I just crouched down in my nakedness and used the tepid gush to make a Clearasil lather for my face. Somewhere deep in my mind the green lips were kissing. Maybe they were green with envy—maybe green with riches.

Walch Blues

Under the flourescent light and humming air conditioning of the offices of Walch Publishing I am patient with my impatience. (There's no reason why "air conditioning" can't refer to heat, I would like to point out. The air here is being conditioned, ruthlessly).

"Nothing's worth noting that is not seen with fresh eyes." -- Basho (1644-1694)

Today it is a coin rolling cleanly down the fire-retardent carpet, doing away with complication as it heads for its host. Probably Sheila in the Art Department. A sad woman with a shiny face, as if rubbed with oily tears, who is getting laid off in a week. On Friday I was her confessor and today she treats me with more deference than a temp usually gets. She is not ambitious; she wants to switch careers and work in a hospital. The thought depresses me, wondering if a hospital may indeed be the best place for her. She looks and sounds exhausted and seems aware of her condition like a frog in an open field. The coin, a rare silver dollar, runs out of speed at the foot of Sheila's cubicle and waits to be noticed.

The Death of Blatt

In keeping with the title of my blog, this post levels a bad rhyme and then deals what could be considered punishment via smart apology--not unlike an unfunny joke that needs its punchline explained:

Today I found out that I won't be returning to Stephen Blatt Architects on Monday. A permanent hire, Claire C., is joining the team. She is 20 years older than me if stress in the bones of one's face is any indication. Her bob of steely gray hair and civil, thwarted countenance will probably generate more business for the firm than I have been able to. I have youth on my side, but this woman wears a black wool pea coat down to her ankles, which are shod in decent boots. I can't compete with anyone so eminently sufferable. Graciously, Claire wished me the best in my pursuits and I shook her hand, my bare skin against her black leather glove. Her available smile and cool grip. The grip of death. Surely, this moment signified for me "The Death of Blatt."

Here, study the famous Neoclassical painting of the French Revolution by artist, executioner, and Jacobin genius Jacques-Louis David, "The Death of Marat":

Here we see the famous psoriatic revolutionary Jean Paul Marat soothing his plaque-ridden epidermis in the bathtub after being stabbed to death. The note in his hand is the petition sent by his political adversary and killer, Charlotte Corday, used to gain entry to his home on July 13, 1793.

Stephen Blatt Rules

I thought I'd start my blog with a sarcastic swipe at my current and temporary employer, Stephen Blatt Architects. I answer their phones, sort their mail, smile sheepishly, etc. The woman at the temp agency called me last week and said I would be needed for receptionist work and "admin," a Latin term I'm not familiar with. Everyone at Stephen Blatt seems to be speaking English, however. I am writing this blog post from their Dell Precision 330, which gives me shit occasionally. But the computer is perhaps my best acquaintance in the office. Together we process and destroy junk email. The Internet is a constant soothing serenade.

The financial guy in this office is C. Cromwell. To protect anonymity I would normally say "Charles C.," but I can't resist the Anglo-pull of his surname. For the curious, you may find him in your Who's Who. Charles is scruffy in a bulldog-on-the-chesterfield sort of way; his big belly completes a satisfyingly round and sanguinary bearing. He has a trusty fireside baritone. Usually he comes in late and smells of aftershave, maybe Old Spice. The other day I caught him napping at his desk, head down on folded arms--a barefaced rest technique I perfected myself in Algebra III. Every day in 12th grade, I came to class early to get the jump on my fatigue. The wet-behind-the-ears student teacher didn't bother me with attendance, and soon enough I became invisible. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of a test and jot down poetry of difficult-to-render associative fancies sprung from my subconscious. I don't think C. Cromwell does this. He manages some residential property and deals in wampum for Blatt. "That's why I'm tearing my hair out all the time," he says, referring to having two professional commitments. His wispy brown hair is combed and left alone with retired musketeer flair.

A pomegranate comes floating into my imagination, red and leathery, and I project it mentally into my physical surroundings. It travels through the air across the reception area, disappears through a passageway in the wall, maybe turns the corner and heads down the hall to C. Cromwell's office. A gift from me to him.

I take a bite of cinnamon raisin bagel and notice how the dough squeezes together where my front teeth have left a bite mark. At the microscopic level the airy cells of bread try to spread away from each other. They have springiness. And maybe their natural expanding is the afterthought of their mother yeast.

I'm not done yet trying to be my biggest self. The suggestion of a bite mark left on my body calls into question what unseen enormity could be treating me as its bagel? My thoughts on the subject yaw in sloshing consciousness. I am tickled by the sight of an office plant's prickly green leaf-spears. The plant is just two stems, each 5-7 inches long, emitting from a woody stump with chopped digits splintering. The 3.5 inch diameter titian plastic pot of soil is itself divulged in a simple blue-grey ceramic with a clean ridged rim. The leaf-spears are the lacquered green of fake plastic vegetation. They shoot off the stem thinly like bullet tracings at a jagged upward angle and splay out from each other like the fingers on two hands joined at the heel to create a supplicant Vee. They look like they could be clapping; stiffly clapping; slowly clapping.

Every posting should have a link. For more satirizing of office culture, read Nicholson Baker's short but labyrinthine novel, "The Mezzanine": "This book may hold the record for the most footnotes in a work of fiction," says a fan. http://j-walk.com/nbaker/mezzanine.htm