(Cuernavaca)
The jacaranda’s color,
clocking the air like a pollen,
and the poinciana,
the palm’s quill and the sprocket of flinty bananas,
come to me from a gorge’s Gehenna. There,
in the kingdoms of ordure,
the bamboo’s stave,
explosion of grasses where water is only a sound-
blood knocking a stethoscope, crepitations
that speak for the sibyl from a navel of rubble-
the waste of a city works under mangroves
and is forced underground.
All that remains of the starved and appetitive
life, acid and gall, moves down
under feces and bandages, newsprint, a tin-can
necropolis, cat-gas
in the verminous cane, toward a darkness’s
center where the rat mills its
plentitude.
I follow the gardens
aloft over gardens, the gush
of magenta, a shuttlecock seedling, toward
jacaranda again. Yes: it is there, and it thrives,
held by the eye to the cusps of those doubled
volcanoes, the male and the maiden: one, lying
drugged under snow, one erect,
like a mace of magnolias,
while equilibrists toil on the slopes toward a purity,
soiling the sheaths for a toe-hold,
out of eyeshot, and the condor imagines perfection.
According to legend, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, one vertical and the other recumbent, are male and female principles, respectively.
Leave a Reply