No Angel Came

Since 1993 somewhere between 600 and 2,000 women (nobody really knows, and nobody is keeping count), mostly young, mostly poor, have been killed or gone missing in Juarez, Mexico.  Tomorrow in Taos an art show titled The Daughters of Juarez will open at Parks Gallery in Taos, New Mexico.  The works and the exhibit are intended to highlight the ongoing deaths and disappearances, and the unwillingness (or inability) of the Mexican authorities to stop the bloodshed, or to bring anyone to justice.  Artists including Amy Cordova, Erin Currier, Deborah Rael-Buckley, Charlie Strong, and Olga Torres-Reed will have works in the exhibition.  Opening is 4:00-6:00 on Saturday the 6th of November.  If you're in Taos, don't miss it, and be sure to check out Deborah's piece Cosecha Amarga (Bitter Harvest): simply stunning.

Last March in Taos, SOMOS sponsored a reading under the same title, The Daughters of Juarez, and local poets and authors read works written about the ongoing events in Juarez.  I was one of the poets asked to read, and as a tribute to the show opening tomorrow, I reproduce that piece below.  It is not comfortable or lyrical, nor are the events to which it graphically bears witness.   Forgive me my trespasses...

  

                  No Angel Came

             (a poem of witness)

Hail Mary, full of grace

…llena eres de gracia…

the mephitic incense

of her charred carcass stains

a blameless desert with its dying flame

air black with buzzards and ravens

pecking at her remains

where no angel came.  

September 5^th, 1995,

name Unknown, 24 years old,

right breast amputated,

left nipple mutilated,

possibly raped then strangled. 

…bendita eres entre todas las mujeres…

and young and provocative deigning

to work or afterwards to go to a bar

“After all, it’s very hard

to go out on the street when it’s raining

and not get wet,” Chihuahua’s

attorney general admonishes us. 

October 23^rd, 2004,

Sandra Rios Salmon, age 15,

autopsy showed that she had been raped,

beaten to death, her neck broken,

found abandoned in a construction site.

…y bendito es el fruto de tu vientre…

women used as punching bags

beaten stabbed and strangled

then left somewhere where no one ever goes

naked or in rotting rags

just dumped their mangled

bodies left carrion for crows. 

December 15^th, 1993,

Yolanda Tapia, 50 years old,

found in her home

with puncture wounds in her skull

and a log in her vagina. 

…ruega por nosotros los pecadores…

where authorities no longer care to see

and no one can hear her muffled plea

in a city plagued by drugs and death

while alone unseen someone’s breath

is beat or throttled out of them

a savage end to a fragile dream.

March 4^th 1999,

Helena Garcia Alvarado, 33 years old,

found in a brick oven,

incinerated,

her arms and legs amputated.

…ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte…

when it’s dust to dust and ash to ash

clotted with blood and fetid flesh

abandoned buried or burned

many unknown and most unmourned

and each senseless vicious death

another minor crucifixion of faith.

March 26^th, 2006,

name Unknown, 20 to 27 years old,

found on a small hill

naked from the waist down

with blood on her feet.  

And no angel came

…amen.  

After the Party - Drinking with Basho

sharing hot sake

the master and I swap lies

no more truth than this

Outside autumn stars dance, and the milky way arcs north to Colorado.  Chill settles into the sage, and the last rumble of departing tires on gravel melts into the background of night without even a coyote bark to disturb a brief private meditation.  But tonight shirtsleeves are not enough; I shiver, come back to the moment, and retreat into Rancho Relaxo. 

After the party is gone, food put up, dishes done and the sink drained, a grudging calm stills the house.  No clink of glasses or dull hum of conversation, no rolling laughter or poetic expostulation.  From the kitchen no wafting reamins of posole on the stovetop, just the slightly acrid background note of wick and wax from the recently extinguished candles on the ofrenda.  Then, subdued but undeniable, the sound of something liquid, and a fleeting nuance of warm sake. 

Against the fainter black of night outside the open shade, between the hanging paper lanterns, below the now dark party lights, I dimly discerned the outline of a slim figure alighted on the table, where Basho's shrine was supposed to be; maybe it was a trick of dark, but I swore it was the honoree.  As my eyes adjusted, my mind's eye imagined the thin trace of a smile, as Basho proferred to me a cup and a cast chinese pot normally reserved for tea.

Sake? he asked, Of course, I said.  He poured and gestured towards a chair, as I took the cup and sat.

I always enjoyed a good party he began, and so regret it when they end.  So I thought I'd make myself comfortable, and savor the night while I finish a bottle.  I hope you don't mind that I borrowed your teapot, but I wanted hot sake and it's all I could find.  No sense to leave the sake sit while night is left to drink it.

So we let the stars drift, engrossed in talk, and quietly laughed at dog snores from the other room, and critiqued the night's events.  Of all he heard, and he heard it all, he was most surprised to hear haiku, and found the form strange in a foreign language.  I liked it though, he finally said.  After three hundred years the form might as easily been dead.

He talked of Nippon and ages gone, and of places like Ueno, Kyoto, and Edo.  I admire your mountain, it reminds me of home, and of stars hung with cloud, on cold nights like this one.  But there there was water, always an incessant motion moving towards something new.  Having lived near the ocean, I felt a familiar susurration, but I told him wind in the sage was now my constant reminder, and fragrant as well when the wind blew up a gale, or in the morning after rain, or an afternoon hail.

And he spoke of young love, and his companion Yoshitada, and how he wept when Yoshitada died, and knew that only poetry could ever take his place.  And of my lovely bride, sleeping amid perfumed sheets in an adjoining room, he questioned the mathematics of more love and fewer poems.  No regrets, said I.  In the long dark my lines would have been thin comfort.  I knew I could not write the sound of one hand clapping.

And so we sat and drank and drank and sat, and solved no problems that I know, settled in like starlight letting the silence grow.  At length he said to me, The bottle is empty, and the sky tilts towards dawn.  Time to put away the night and follow the long path into a different day.  I stretched and yawned, and his apparition faded away.

So off to bed, to greet my wife warm sheets.

But I'll keep a bottle always against the time, when a poet comes again to share his night with mine.