Hunger's Brides (168 page)

It is part of our faith, which is the land, this mountain that flattens churches and villages, even the capital. Mexico City in '85 was like the end of the world I was there. The earth itself died that day. There is much we could teach you about loss. Before you eat they wish you to understand something.

Some say tomorrow is the first day of a new sun. We will make a special ceremony borrowed from what is still known of the old days. They have built an effigy of our San Gregorio del Popo—a volcano from seeds of amaranth and on it put a mitre and
sambenito
as though the mountain itself is jury and judged, saviour and condemned. Then we eat—we cut it up and every one of us gets a part to eat of the mountain of seed that consumes us until the end of time—but each time it dies leaves the richest soil behind.

And when it is done—down to the last seed, we cry—

Teocualo, god is eaten … do you say this still?

Yes, child, we say this, you know even this. We believe nothing escapes the cycle of the suns. Not even the mountain, not the gods themselves—and who is around to eat god if not us?

Will you eat with us?

Cedar man with the laughing eyes so strange jesterfriend I know now what you've come to do, why you've come so late.

When the music's fled.

I have lost the music. I've lost, and it's like you say. It is loss you've come to teach. You came for me. I've never had a friend like you. How strange, a friend. Here, now in this noplace….

Yes cedar man I'll eat. For you.

It is pulque they drink
. Would you like to taste?—fermented cactus juice a very ancient recipe.

Yes this sacred drink is a must. I can get through this, I try to be calm. Here,
pruébalo, ándale
. Sip of latex over the tongue, ferment of saliva and bile, rolling pincushion of pricks behind these thimblejaws. Old seamed faces smile and nod around the fire. Black glitter of eyes rimmed in cup. All huddle for warmth of shoulder and hip. Tanglehair waif scratches her pet piglet's pink gut / plucks out a snuffled melody of love and contentment.

This old man would like to talk with you. Will you allow me to translate from our tongue?

Susurrus of a soft, clicked sibilance …
this is Nahuatl
.

Raúl here says you are from the North, young one, yet I see you feel cold just like us…
.

They say gringos have walked on the moon what do you say to that?

How far do you think the moon is tonight just behind the snow, white with the moon's snowwhiteness?

I have heard a man could walk up to her in ten thousand days, or if he is lazy, twenty…
.

Ah here comes the food I hope you will find it savoury.

I can get
through
this—skip the thick redstew
pozole
, take the bowl of peppery broth instead feel its burn untouched in this lap of ice. How nice how nice until it cools….

But then they bring in the tall coneycake, volcano of seed feel the pitch and yaw / chaw and cheer near and nearing—this I have to eat they are watching me. Tanglehair waif shares out the cake on pigscent fingers what difference can it make? Rage of hunger blast of whine through the mind time to eat IT'S TIME—come home Beulah come home for supper—what was their ancient recipe for obsidian wine? you've done everything / tried all but this—

Try then, try. Take the cake open your lips—
swallow the earth that
vomits life as time runs down to die, chew the seedy mountain of molarshards all crumble and thrash / tongue bracts of godchaff to a slime of honeyed amaranth / bolt loss's sup / suck and flush the cosmogonic cud—stomach the stormseed of theomachy sweet theodicy diced and iliac / Godflayed flesh threshed / gutted, quelled. And all shall be well and all shall be well—

No! You WILL eat—for him—you said you would you
can
.

You are tired and sick, you have lost and it's done let it go give it up get over it get on with it, do you understand?—
enough
.

When you taste the cake this little girl gives, see her sweetness as what you eat. There, see? This meal, this night you can, even in front of them.

Especially them. Just eat, and sleep.

I wake from a dream. They are all watching TV. This is why the car battery, sisyphean haul up and down the mountainside for evenings televised at ten thousand feet.

Tentwalls spill the blue caravan of icons across a desert screen—shadowmask fire fed on optic cones and rods. Soft disembodied bundles here we sit stranded before garlanded ads for retirement beaches, and operatic soaps—O the creole heartbreak of blond Mexican elites! Then, this truth stranger than the strangest dream … ‘we pause for station identification, this is channel 13—
TV Azteca.'

Here at last we are arrived at the thirteenth level of heaven.

Aztec TV. Channel 13.

Here beneath the snow in Cortés Pass, Indian mothers—bodies workbroken and careworn—slump in wonder before nymphs blue-eyed like Jesus in white bikinis, stunning icons of statuesque perfectibility—

These are the griffins. Fabricated from a wishlist of beauty …

    helium breasted, negress haunched

        barbie-legged, waxy-crotched—

          labial notch thonged from cunt to hip—

                a perfect pelvic V for all things Virtuous.

Twist-tie waists, collagenic lips / butterfly lashes, Nefertiti necks. O how we worship you. Sphynxes of a monstrous scientific beauty, V for victory over earthborn nature. Women with wings of wax, scales of gold. Winged heralds of our mute self-denunciation—
de nuestro auto-particular
—heretics all, the we of all flesh and superfluity….

And in the smoking mirror blearily we see—see? how they are adored /
adored by the Eye unrestored. See them bask in the love of god, so near us yet so far above, all aglow in its bluish love. Godlove of a billion blue suns that ring the great globe itself, and burn.

Burn like salt.

Who broke the meaning machine—and left us this? this thing this box—decoder / decanter of our obsidian wine. That in its effervescent thrall, up to the altar we all go—stunned and quiescent, mumbling
textos de neutralización
… the sacrificial victim's numbing psalmody that strokes our pink gut / plucks out our hearts' melodies while our corpses still live. TV Azteca, Channel 13.

Electronic pillory, virtual confessional that adores the Image profanes the Verb. Get a bigger screen mute the sound!—the better to adore the blue van of vatic visions scrolling down and deeper down through mirror smoke. Channel of home sacrifice, glowing hearth of a heartsick hopelessness. Show host that melts like candyfloss on our tongues.

I've followed my cedar Virgil down to here I've come all this way … haven't I? So write it, write it calm, slow it down. Try to get this right. This once, this time. For explorers of a future time.

This is not just the death of fire and air. Or water and earth.
They
call it only entertainment, I call it the death of the fifth element. Not ennui, not absurdity but accidie—Inquisitorial relaxation's soulslack laxity. Call it indifference, inertial victim of the sun.

This is the death of the soul.

Name this!—the dragon Apophis—enemy of both storm and sun. Indifference, Enemy of Both Sides.

FEED US—life love hate anything not this

Together everywhere—even here in this pass we bend before the aura/cling of vastly meaningless event. Oracling of unrequited Godlove rendered down to purest semblance. Welcome to the god channel, vision on a global scale that wakes our hunger for communion.

Once this was the divine ground of archetypal myth … this neuron-bombed lot strewn now with spent Cokes and surrendered Nikes—our cathexis confected on Madison Avenue by bluebloods steeped in Classics and Humanities. This … vacant scatter of voided universals on the scale of race, the shared needles of a virtual experience—

Rapturous.

And over this, our everlasting Conquest's littered battleground of broken glyphs—cross and eagle, serpent and thorn—transcendent at
last, one blue banner waves its parabolic ascendency above the harrowed field….

And higher still a starry sky of burnt out satellites. Beckoning.

Six billion frail hummingbirds hover round an electron bath … sugary solution too thin too dissolute to nourish us—endless cycling of little wings—cycling recycling one last lovesong—we the lovestarved, consuming ceaselessly … even the BlueHummingbird of the South starves now—for love, for an end.

And hapless, calmed, in this faint blue grasp we are danced to death.

Bear witness. This snowy night, before this blue altar, we are the same. Pressed close for warmth … weary shoulders, chilly knees. Here there are no differences. We are together, one, all at last in this…. Tonight you are all beautiful to me.

Women broken bodied, living eyes /

    tanglehair waif, pinkgut pig …

        cedar man.

Howl of dogs outside, tame to wild.

Scribbler,
you are not here to verify. You are here to kneel, where prayer was once valid
. Lay your stub of pencil down. Close the notebook, the last of books.

S
UBLIMINAL
S
NOW
        

[21 Dec. 1994]

L
AUGH AND STUMBLE
of children's voices between the heaves of dream.

Day, morning it must be, but such a light!—swirl of orange and lavender—here in this mountain pass we are woken into
cloud
. Through the flap of canvas I see the other tents, their snowbent brows / frowning down the dawn. Softest of snowdrifts.

Step thigh-deep into morning!—children running laughing waist-high in this lambent cloud torched by the sun's rising / screened yet in the sway and swirl and bloom—prismed, dry and crystalline—of an icepetal mist. The littlest imps charge up to their chests—launched and caught—fall back cradled, upright still, backed and banked in drifts.