Bibliofreakblog

Free Verse: Black Mesa

Since today is Cinco de Mayo, I wanted to do something vaguely related to that for FreeVerse.  

After a great deal of consideration, I settled on this, admittedly long, poem by Jimmy Santiago Baca, who is as amazing for his life story as his poetics.  

So, think of something maybe sorta serious when you drink your margaritas and eat your burritos today.

“Black Mesa” by Jimmy Santiago Baca

for Rito

The northernmost U-tip
of Chihuahua desert
infuses
my house
with its dark shadow,
and leans my thoughts
in its direction
as wind bends a row of trees
toward it.

I want to visit
it
before winter comes,
and balance myself
across culvert that connects
my field
to Isleta Pueblo.
Strings of water trellis
from rusty holes
and bubble scum and black moss weed
below.
Branches barrage the passage,
and draw blood at my shoulder
as I crouch past,
then climb No Trespassing fence.

I don’t know what this year has meant to me,
but I’ve come here to find a clue.
Up Black Mesa’s east side,
‘dozed in ‘68
to run I-25 south.
Sky Showered stones
at children playing
on ditchbanks,
dynamite blasts cracked porches,

Foundations, and walls
with shuddering volts.

Rito was murdered here
by sheriffs,
brown beret Chicano activist
who taught cildren in the barrio
our own history,
tried to stop
them blasting Black Mesa.
And now, under my hiking boots his blood
crossbeds minerals
and forms into red crystals,
ceremonial Chac-Mool plate
on which Aztec warrior Rito
sacrificed his heart to the Sun.

Rito believed in a justice
whose history
is without margins.

To my right, a steep downdrift
gush of cutting boulders,
the jagged edges of a key
that opens my dark life
and gives it a certain meaning
of honor and truth.

I re-imagine myself here,
and plant the same breath
squeezed from these rocks 1000 years ago.

Etched on slabs,
wolf and coyote wear
skins of stone,
watch me pass, silent
at the shortness of my life, at my
brief visit here on earth.
I finger the rough braille
of each drawing
in the cool crevice slab,
and discover in this seeming destruction
a narrative of love
for animals and earth.
I go on,
climb boulders drained
down a rip gorge,
and stand on the flat cap rim
of Black Mesa, fuzzed
with chaparral, cacti and weeds.

In lava cracks,
I learn to read, smell, and hear
the darkness again ’til black depths
lighten slowly to twilight
and the old man who lives
in stone
offers me a different view
of life and death.

I believe that whatever tragedy
happens in my life, I can stand on my feet
again and go on.

I lay on a slab stone
and nap in the sunlight
unafraid of snakes that plume stones
around me.

In sluggish revery
I am in a small café
In Española.
Seat myself at a round wooden table.
A man approaches me,
sits across from me, and states,
                   “Thank you for the stone in my mind.
                   It sings to me and I still listen to it.”

I rub sun glare from my eyes and look around,
as if he sat next to me,
then walk over to the black lipped rim rock.
Languid whitewashed adobe houses below are
obscured by lush branches.
I bend
and pocket a lava chip as token
of my ascent from stone,
                                                  and go.

I have a vision of mountaine range
proportions,
to speak the heart’s language.
to write the story of my soul
I trace in the silence and stone
of Black Mesa.

My hope breaks this hour’s crust
and ferments
into tomorrow’s darkness, into
another year of living,
to evolve with the universe,
side by side with its creative catastrophe.