Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey), "Gone to Croatan"

WE HAVE NO DESIRE to define the TAZ or to elaborate dogmas about how it must be created. Our contention is rather that it has been created, will be created, and is being created. Therefore it would prove more valuable and interesting to look at some TAZs past and present, and to speculate about future manifestations; by evoking a few prototypes we may be able to gauge the potential scope of the complex, and perhaps even get a glimpse of an "archetype." Rather than attempt any sort of encyclopaedism we'll adopt a scatter-shot technique, a mosaic of glimpses, beginning quite arbitrarily with the 16th-17th centuries and the settlement of the New World. 

The opening of the "new" world was conceived from the start as an occultist operation. The magus John Dee, spiritual advisor to Elizabeth I, seems to have invented the concept of "magical imperialism" and infected an entire generation with it. Halkyut and Raleigh fell under his spell, and Raleigh used his connections with the "School of Night"--a cabal of advanced thinkers, aristocrats, and adepts--to further the causes of exploration, colonization and mapmaking. The Tempest was a propaganda-piece for the new ideology, and the Roanoke Colony was its first showcase experiment. 

The alchemical view of the New World associated it with materia prima or hyle, the "state of Nature," innocence and all-possibility ("Virgin-ia"), a chaos or inchoateness which the adept would transmute into "gold," that is, into spiritual perfection as well as material abundance. But this alchemical vision is also informed in part by an actual fascination with the inchoate, a sneaking sympathy for it, a feeling of yearning for its formless form which took the symbol of the "Indian" for its focus: "Man" in the state of nature, uncorrupted by "government." Caliban, the Wild Man, is lodged like a virus in the very machine of Occult Imperialism; the forest/animal/humans are invested from the very start with the magic power of the marginal, despised and outcaste. On the one hand Caliban is ugly, and Nature a "howling wilderness"--on the other, Caliban is noble and unchained, and Nature an Eden. This split in European consciousness predates the Romantic/Classical dichotomy; it's rooted in Renaissance High Magic. The discovery of America (Eldorado, the Fountain of Youth) crystallized it; and it precipitated in actual schemes for colonization. 

We were taught in elementary school that the first settlements in Roanoke failed; the colonists disappeared, leaving behind them only the cryptic message "Gone To Croatan." Later reports of "grey-eyed Indians" were dismissed as legend. What really happened, the textbook implied, was that the Indians massacred the defenseless settlers. However, "Croatan" was not some Eldorado; it was the name of a neighboring tribe of friendly Indians. Apparently the settlement was simply moved back from the coast into the Great Dismal Swamp and absorbed into the tribe. And the grey-eyed Indians were real--they're still there, and they still call themselves Croatans. 

So--the very first colony in the New World chose to renounce its contract with Prospero (Dee/Raleigh/Empire) and go over to the Wild Men with Caliban. They dropped out. They became "Indians," "went native," opted for chaos over the appalling miseries of serfing for the plutocrats and intellectuals of London. 

As America came into being where once there had been "Turtle Island," Croatan remained embedded in its collective psyche. Out beyond the frontier, the state of Nature (i.e. no State) still prevailed--and within the consciousness of the settlers the option of wildness always lurked, the temptation to give up on Church, farmwork, literacy, taxes-- all the burdens of civilization--and "go to Croatan" in some way or another. Moreover, as the Revolution in England was betrayed, first by Cromwell and then by Restoration, waves of Protestant radicals fled or were transported to the New World (which had now become a prison, a place of exile). Antinomians, Familists, rogue Quakers, Levellers, Diggers, and Ranters were now introduced to the occult shadow of wildness, and rushed to embrace it. 

Anne Hutchinson and her friends were only the best known (i.e. the most upper-class) of the Antinomians--having had the bad luck to be caught up in Bay Colony politics--but a much more radical wing of the movement clearly existed. The incidents Hawthorne relates in "The Maypole of Merry Mount" are thoroughly historical; apparently the extremists had decided to renounce Christianity altogether and revert to paganism. If they had succeeded in uniting with their Indian allies the result might have been an Antinomian/Celtic/Algonquin syncretic religion, a sort of 17th century North American Santeria. 

Sectarians were able to thrive better under the looser and more corrupt administrations in the Caribbean, where rival European interests had left many islands deserted or even unclaimed. Barbados and Jamaica in particular must have been settled by many extremists, and I believe that Levellerish and Ranterish influences contributed to the Buccaneer "utopia" on Tortuga. Here for the first time, thanks to Esquemelin, we can study a successful New World proto-TAZ in some depth. Fleeing from hideous "benefits" of Imperialism such as slavery, serfdom, racism and intolerance, from the tortures of impressment and the living death of the plantations, the Buccaneers adopted Indian ways, intermarried with Caribs, accepted blacks and Spaniards as equals, rejected all nationality, elected their captains democratically, and reverted to the "state of Nature." Having declared themselves "at war with all the world," they sailed forth to plunder under mutual contracts called "Articles" which were so egalitarian that every member received a full share and the Captain usually only 1 1/4 or 1 1/2 shares. Flogging and punishments were forbidden-- quarrels were settled by vote or by the code duello. 

It is simply wrong to brand the pirates as mere sea-going highwaymen or even proto-capitalists, as some historians have done. In a sense they were "social bandits," although their base communities were not traditional peasant societies but "utopias" created almost ex nihilo in terra incognita, enclaves of total liberty occupying empty spaces on the map. After the fall of Tortuga, the Buccaneer ideal remained alive all through the "Golden Age" of Piracy (ca. 1660-1720), and resulted in land-settlements in Belize, for example, which was founded by Buccaneers. Then, as the scene shifted to Madagascar--an island still unclaimed by any imperial power and ruled only by a patchwork of native kings (chiefs) eager for pirate allies--the Pirate Utopia reached its highest form. 

Defoe's account of Captain Mission and the founding of Libertatia may be, as some historians claim, a literary hoax meant to propagandize for radical Whig theory--but it was embedded in The General History of the Pyrates (1724-28), most of which is still accepted as true and accurate. Moreover the story of Capt. Mission was not criticized when the book appeared and many old Madagascar hands still survived. They seem to have believed it, no doubt because they had experienced pirate enclaves very much like Libertatia. Once again, rescued slaves, natives, and even traditional enemies such as the Portuguese were all invited to join as equals. (Liberating slave ships was a major preoccupation.) Land was held in common, representatives elected for short terms, booty shared; doctrines of liberty were preached far more radical than even those of Common Sense. 

Libertatia hoped to endure, and Mission died in its defense. But most of the pirate utopias were meant to be temporary; in fact the corsairs' true "republics" were their ships, which sailed under Articles. The shore enclaves usually had no law at all. The last classic example, Nassau in the Bahamas, a beachfront resort of shacks and tents devoted to wine, women (and probably boys too, to judge by Birge's Sodomy and Piracy), song (the pirates were inordinately fond of music and used to hire on bands for entire cruises), and wretched excess, vanished overnight when the British fleet appeared in the Bay. Blackbeard and "Calico Jack" Rackham and his crew of pirate women moved on to wilder shores and nastier fates, while others meekly accepted the Pardon and reformed. But the Buccaneer tradition lasted, both in Madagascar where the mixed-blood children of the pirates began to carve out kingdoms of their own, and in the Caribbean, where escaped slaves as well as mixed black/white/red groups were able to thrive in the mountains and backlands as "Maroons." The Maroon community in Jamaica still retained a degree of autonomy and many of the old folkways when Zora Neale Hurston visited there in the 1920's (see Tell My Horse). The Maroons of Suriname still practice African "paganism." 

Throughout the 18th century, North America also produced a number of drop-out "tri-racial isolate communities." (This clinical-sounding term was invented by the Eugenics Movement, which produced the first scientific studies of these communities. Unfortunately the "science" merely served as an excuse for hatred of racial "mongrels" and the poor, and the "solution to the problem" was usually forced sterilization.) The nuclei invariably consisted of runaway slaves and serfs, "criminals" (i.e. the very poor), "prostitutes" (i.e. white women who married non-whites), and members of various native tribes. In some cases, such as the Seminole and Cherokee, the traditional tribal structure absorbed the newcomers; in other cases, new tribes were formed. Thus we have the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, who persisted through the 18th and 19th centuries, adopting runaway slaves, functioning as a way station on the Underground Railway, and serving as a religious and ideological center for slave rebellions. The religion was HooDoo, a mixture of African, native, and Christian elements, and according to the historian H. Leaming-Bey the elders of the faith and the leaders of the Great Dismal Maroons were known as "the Seven Finger High Glister." 

The Ramapaughs of northern New Jersey (incorrectly known as the "Jackson Whites") present another romantic and archetypal genealogy: freed slaves of the Dutch poltroons, various Delaware and Algonquin clans, the usual "prostitutes," the "Hessians" (a catch-phrase for lost British mercenaries, drop-out Loyalists, etc.), and local bands of social bandits such as Claudius Smith's. 

An African-Islamic origin is claimed by some of the groups, such as the Moors of Delaware and the Ben Ishmaels, who migrated from Kentucky to Ohio in the mid-18th century. The Ishmaels practiced polygamy, never drank alcohol, made their living as minstrels, intermarried with Indians and adopted their customs, and were so devoted to nomadism that they built their houses on wheels. Their annual migration triangulated on frontier towns with names like Mecca and Medina. In the 19th century some of them espoused anarchist ideals, and they were targeted by the Eugenicists for a particularly vicious pogrom of salvation-by-extermination. Some of the earliest Eugenics laws were passed in their honor. As a tribe they "disappeared" in the 1920's, but probably swelled the ranks of early "Black Islamic" sects such as the Moorish Science Temple. I myself grew up on legends of the "Kallikaks" of the nearby New Jersey Pine Barrens (and of course on Lovecraft, a rabid racist who was fascinated by the isolate communities). The legends turned out to be folk-memories of the slanders of the Eugenicists, whose U.S. headquarters were in Vineland, NJ, and who undertook the usual "reforms" against "miscegenation" and "feeblemindedness" in the Barrens (including the publication of photographs of the Kallikaks, crudely and obviously retouched to make them look like monsters of misbreeding). 

The "isolate communities"--at least, those which have retained their identity into the 20th century--consistently refuse to be absorbed into either mainstream culture or the black "subculture" into which modern sociologists prefer to categorize them. In the 1970's, inspired by the Native American renaissance, a number of groups--including the Moors and the Ramapaughs--applied to the B.I.A. for recognition as Indian tribes. They received support from native activists but were refused official status. If they'd won, after all, it might have set a dangerous precedent for drop-outs of all sorts, from "white Peyotists" and hippies to black nationalists, aryans, anarchists and libertarians-- a "reservation" for anyone and everyone! The "European Project" cannot recognize the existence of the Wild Man-- green chaos is still too much of a threat to the imperial dream of order. 

Essentially the Moors and Ramapaughs rejected the "diachronic" or historical explanation of their origins in favor of a "synchronic" self-identity based on a "myth" of Indian adoption. Or to put it another way, they named themselves "Indians." If everyone who wished "to be an Indian" could accomplish this by an act of self- naming, imagine what a departure to Croatan would take place. That old occult shadow still haunts the remnants of our forests (which, by the way, have greatly increased in the Northeast since the 18-19th century as vast tracts of farmland return to scrub. Thoreau on his deathbed dreamed of the return of "...Indians...forests...": the return of the repressed). 

The Moors and Ramapaughs of course have good materialist reasons to think of themselves as Indians--after all, they have Indian ancestors--but if we view their self-naming in "mythic" as well as historical terms we'll learn more of relevance to our quest for the TAZ. Within tribal societies there exist what some anthropologists call mannenbunden: totemic societies devoted to an identity with "Nature" in the act of shapeshifting, of becoming the totem-animal (werewolves, jaguar shamans, leopard men, cat-witches, etc.). In the context of an entire colonial society (as Taussig points out in Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man) the shapeshifting power is seen as inhering in the native culture as a whole-- thus the most repressed sector of the society acquires a paradoxical power through the myth of its occult knowledge, which is feared and desired by the colonist. Of course the natives really do have certain occult knowledge; but in response to Imperial perception of native culture as a kind of "spiritual wild(er)ness," the natives come to see themselves more and more consciously in that role. Even as they are marginalized, the Margin takes on an aura of magic. Before the whiteman, they were simply tribes of people--now, they are "guardians of Nature," inhabitants of the "state of Nature." Finally the colonist himself is seduced by this "myth." Whenever an American wants to drop out or back into Nature, invariably he "becomes an Indian." The Massachusetts radical democrats (spiritual descendents of the radical Protestants) who organized the Tea Party, and who literally believed that governments could be abolished (the whole Berkshire region declared itself in a "state of Nature"!), disguised themselves as "Mohawks." Thus the colonists, who suddenly saw themselves marginalized vis-·- vis the motherland, adopted the role of the marginalized natives, thereby (in a sense) seeking to participate in their occult power, their mythic radiance. From the Mountain Men to the Boy Scouts, the dream of "becoming an Indian" flows beneath myriad strands of American history, culture and consciousness. 

The sexual imagery connected to "tri-racial" groups also bears out this hypothesis. "Natives" of course are always immoral, but racial renegades and drop-outs must be downright polymorphous-perverse. The Buccaneers were buggers, the Maroons and Mountain Men were miscegenists, the "Jukes and Kallikaks" indulged in fornication and incest (leading to mutations such as polydactyly), the children ran around naked and masturbated openly, etc., etc. Reverting to a "state of Nature" paradoxically seems to allow for the practice of every "unnatural" act; or so it would appear if we believe the Puritans and Eugenicists. And since many people in repressed moralistic racist societies secretly desire exactly these licentious acts, they project them outwards onto the marginalized, and thereby convince themselves that they themselves remain civilized and pure. And in fact some marginalized communities do really reject consensus morality--the pirates certainly did!--and no doubt actually act out some of civilization's repressed desires. (Wouldn't you?) Becoming "wild" is always an erotic act, an act of nakedness. 

Before leaving the subject of the "tri-racial isolates," I'd like to recall Nietzsche's enthusiasm for "race mixing." Impressed by the vigor and beauty of hybrid cultures, he offered miscegenation not only as a solution to the problem of race but also as the principle for a new humanity freed of ethnic and national chauvinism--a precursor to the "psychic nomad," perhaps. Nietzsche's dream still seems as remote now as it did to him. Chauvinism still rules OK. Mixed cultures remain submerged. But the autonomous zones of the Buccaneers and Maroons, Ishmaels and Moors, Ramapaughs and "Kallikaks" remain, or their stories remain, as indications of what Nietzsche might have called "the Will to Power as Disappearance." We must return to this theme.

Gloria Anzaldúa, "The Coatlicue State/La Herencia de Coatlicue"

protean being

dark     dumb     windowless     no moon glides

across the stone     the nightsky     alone     alone

no lights just mirrorwalls     obsidian     smoky     in the

mirror she sees     a woman with four heads     the heads

turning round and round     spokes of a wheel     her neck

is an axle     she stares at each face     each wishes the

other not there     the obsidian knife in the air     the

building     so high     should she jump     would she feel

the breeze     fanning her face     tumbling down the steps

of the temple     heart offered up to the sun     wall

growing thin     thinner     she is eyeless     a mole

burrowing deeper     tunneling here     tunneling there

tunneling through the air  in the photograph a double

image     a ghost arm alongside the flesh one     inside her

head     the cracks ricocheting      bisecting

crisscrossing     she hears the rattlesnakes     stirring in

a jar     being fed with her flesh      she listens to the

seam between dusk and dark     they are talking     she hears

their frozen thumpings     the soul encased     in black

obsidian     smoking     smoking     she bends to catch a

feather of herself     as she falls     lost in the

silence     of the empty air     turning      turning

at midnight     turning into a wild pig     how to get back

all the feathers     put them in the jar     the rattling

full circle and back     dark     windowless    no moon

glides across the nightsky     nightsky     night

Augusto Monterroso, "El Dinosaurio"

Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí.

Hermeto Pascoal, Música da lagoa

Rubén Darío, "Tutecotzimí" (Fragment) [1890], trans. Greg Simon and Steven F. White

Digging in the topsoil of the ancient city
the pick's metallic point strikes something very hard:
some golden gem, perhaps, a stone that's been carved, 
an arrow, fetish, some god's ambiguity, 
or the enormous walls of some temple. My tools
open America's still undiscovered lands.

Let poetry's tools sing like harmonious jewels!
Let them discover fine, rich stones, gold, or opal, 
temples, or statue's hands.
And mysterious hieroglyphics that foretell
my own Muse. 

From the thick mist of time emerges the strangeness 
of annulled peoples' lives, and legends, once confused,
now shine. The mountain reveals its secret access 
to ruins underneath the plants of the jungle...

Then the ferocious cry
of the oppressors stopped. Their reviled leader's heart
would beat no more, his bloody body torn apart. 
And then, singing loudly, a person journeyed by.
He sang to earth and sky and used an Aztec song
to praise the gods and curse all wars as being wrong.
The people cheered: "Can you bring peace and work?"
"I can."
"Take this palace, these fields, arms, and huepiles, please; 
lead the Pipil nation and praise our deities."

That's how the reign of Tutecotzimí began.

Rubén Darío, "Raza" (1907), trans. Jose-Luis Moctezuma

Hyssop and blade
have been crux,
spreading waters holy
and spilling the wine
of blood. Centuries
have thus nourished race.

Together they've nurtured offspring
of the blessed and children
of landed gentry, with 
those who carry the mark
of descent from african slaves,
or from magnific indios,
like lofty Nicarao, to whom an amiable cacique
gifted a bridge of canoes
to traverse Lake
Managua. That is what's epic, what's lyric. 

Roberto Fernández Retamar, from "Caliban" (1971), trans. Edward Baker

Caliban is Shakespeare's anagram for "cannibal," an expression that he had already used to mean "anthropophagus," in the third part of Henry IV and in Othello and that comes in turn from the word carib. Before the arrival of the Europeans, whom they resisted heroically, the Carib Indians were the most valiant and warlike inhabitants of the very lands that we occupy today. Their name lives on in the name Caribbean Sea (referred to genially by some as the American Mediterranean, just as if we were to call the Mediterranean the Caribbean of Europe). But the name carib in itself--as well as in its deformation, cannibal--has been perpetuated in the eyes of Europeans above all as a defamation. It is the term in this sense that Shakespeare takes up and elaborates into a complex symbol. Because of its exceptional importance to us, it will be useful to trace it history in some detail. 

In the Diario de Navegación of Columbus there appear the first European accounts of the men who were to occasion the symbol in question. On Sunday, 4 November 1492, less than a month after Columbus arrived on the continent that was to be called America, the following entry was inscribed: "He learned also that far from the place there were men with one eye and others with dogs' muzzles, who ate human beings." On 23 November, this entry: "[the island of Haiti], which they said was very large and that on it lived people who had only one eye and others called cannibals, of whom they seemed to be very afraid." On 11 December it is noted: "...that caniba refers in fact to the people of El Gran Can," which explains the deformation undergone by the name carib--also used by Columbus. In the very letter of 15 February 1493, "dated on the caravelle off the island of Canaria" in which Columbus announces to the world his "discovery," he writes: "I have found, then, neither monsters nor news of any, save for one island [Quarives], the second upon entering the Indies, which is populated with people held by everyone on the island to be very ferocious, and who eat human flesh." 

This carib/cannibal image contrasts with another one of the American man presented in the writings of Columbus: that of the Arauaco of the Greater Antilles--out Taino Indian primarily--whom he describes as peaceful, meek, and even timorous and cowardly. Both visions of the American aborigine will circulate vertiginously through Europe, each coming to know its own particular development: the Taino will be transformed into the paradisical inhabitant of a utopic world; by 1516 Thomas More will publish his Utopia, the similarities of which to the island of Cuba have been indicated, almost to the point of rapture, by Ezequiel Martínez Estrada. The Carib, on the other hand, will become a cannibal--an anthropophagus, a bestial man situated on the margins of civilization, who must be opposed to the very death. But there is less of a contradiction than might appear at first glance between the two visions; they constitute, simply, options in the ideological arsenal of a vigorous emerging bourgeoisie. Francisco de Quevedo translated "utopia" as "there is no such place." With respect to these two visions, one might add, "There is no such man." The notion of an Edenic creature comprehends, in more contemporary terms, a working hypothesis for the bourgeois left, and, as such, offers an ideal model of the perfect society free from the constrictions of that feudal world against which the bourgeoisie is in fact struggling. Generally speaking, the utopic vision throws upon these lands projects for political reforms unrealized in the countries of origin. In this sense its line of development is far from extinguished. Indeed, it meets with certain perpetuators--apart from its radical perpetuators, who are the consequential revolutionaries--in the numerous advisers who unflaggingly propose to countries emerging from colonialism magic formulas from the metropolis to solve the grave problems colonialism has left us and which, of course, they have not yet resolved in their own countries. It goes without saying that these proponents of "There is no such place" are irritated by the insolent fact that the place does exist and, quite naturally, has all the virtues and defects not of a project but of genuine reality.
[...]
There is no doubt at this point that The Tempest alludes to America, that its island is the mythification of one of our islands. Astrana Marín, who mentions the "clearly Indian (American) ambiance of the island," recalls some of the actual voyages along this continent that inspired Shakespeare and even furnished him, with slight variations, with the names of not a few of his characters: Miranda, Fernando, Sebastian, Alonso, Gonzalo, Setebos. More important than this is the knowledge that Caliban is our Carib.
[...]
Our symbol then is not Ariel, as [José Enrique] Rodó thought, but rather Caliban. This is something that we, the mestizo inhabitants of these same isles where Caliban lived, see with particular clarity: Prospero invaded the islands, killed our ancestors, enslaved Caliban, and taught him his language to make himself understood. What else can Caliban do but use that same language--today he has no other--to curse him, to wish that the "red plague" would fall on him? I know no other metaphor more expressive of our cultural situation, of our reality. From Túpac Amaru, Tiradentes, Toussaint-Louverture, Simón Bolívar, Father Hidalgo, José Artigas, Bernardo O'Higgins, Benito Juárez, Antonio Maceo, and José Martí, to Emiliano Zapata, Augusto César Sandino, Julio Antonio Mella, Pedro Albizu Campos, Lázaro Cárdenas, Fidel Castro, and Ernesto Che Guevara, from the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, the Aleijadinho, the popular music of the Antilles, José Hernández, Eugenio María de Hostos, Manuel González Prada, Rubén Darío (yes, when all is said and done), Baldomero Lillo, and Horacio Quiroga, to Mexican muralism, Heitor Villa-Lobos, César Vallejo, José Carlos Mariátegui, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Carlos Gardel, Pablo Neruda, Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, Aimé Césaire, José María Arguedas, Violeta Parra, and Frantz Fanon--what is our history, what is our culture, if not the history and culture of Caliban? 

José Martí, "Our America" (1891)

The conceited villager believes the entire world to be his village. Provided that be can be mayor, humiliate the rival who stole his sweetheart, or add to the savings in his strongbox, he considers the universal order good, unaware of those giants with seven-league boots who can crush him underfoot, or of the strife in the heavens between comets that go through the air asleep, gulping down worlds. What remains of the village in America must rouse itself. These are not the times for sleeping in a nightcap, but with weapons for a pillow, like the warriors of Juan de Castellanos: weapons of the mind, which conquer all others. Barricades of ideas are worth more than barricades of stones.

There is no prow that can cut through a cloudbank of ideas. A powerful idea, waved before the world at the proper time, can stop a squadron of iron-clad ships, like the mystical flag of the Last judgement. Nations that do not know one another should quickly become acquainted, as men who are to fight a common enemy. Those who shake their fists, like jealous brothers coveting the same tract of land, or like the modest cottager who envies the esquire his mansion, should clasp hands and become one. Those who use the authority of a criminal tradition to lop off the hands of their defeated brother with a sword stained with his own blood, ought to return the lands to the brother already punished sufficiently, if do not want the people to call them robbers. The honest man does not absolve himself of debts of honor with money, at so much a slap. We can no longer be a people of leaves, living in the air, our foliage heavy with blooms and crackling or humming at the whim of the sun's caress, or buffeted and tossed by the storms. The trees must form ranks to keep the giant with seven-league boots from passing! It is the time of mobilization, of marching together, and we must go forward in close ranks, like silver in the veins of the Andes.

Only those born prematurely are lacking in courage. Those without faith in their country are seven-month weaklings. Because they have not courage, they deny it to the others. Their puny arms-arms with bracelets and hands with painted nails, arms of Paris or Madrid-can hardly reach the bottom limb, and they claim the tall tree to be unclimbable. The ships should be loaded with those harmful insects that gnaw at the bone of the country that nourishes them. If they Parisians or from Madrid, let them go to the Prado, to boast around, or to Tortoni´s , in high hats. Those carpenter's sons who ashamed that their fathers are carpenters! Those born in America who are ashamed of the mother that reared them, because she wears an Indian apron, and, who disown their sick mothers, the scoundrels, abandoning her on her sickbed! Then who is a real man? He who stays with his mother and nurses her in her illness, or he who puts her to work out of sight, and lives at her expense on decadent lands, sporting fancy neckties, cursing the womb that carried him, displaying the sign of the traitor on the back of his paper frockcoat? These sons of our America, which will be saved by its Indians in blood and is growing better; these deserters who take up arms in the army of a North America that drowns its Indians in blood and is growing worse! These delicate creatures who are men but are unwilling to do men's work! The Washington who made this land for them, did he not go to live with the English, at a time when he saw them fighting against his own country. These unbelievable of honor who drag the honor over foreign soil like their counterparts in the French Revolution with their dancing, their affections, their drawling speech!

For in what lands can men take more pride that in our long-suffering American republics, raised up among the silent Indian masses by the bleeding arms of a hundred apostles, to the sound of battle between the book and processional candle? Never in history have such advanced and united nations been forged in so short a time from such disorganized elements. The presumptuous man feels that the earth was made to serve as his pedestal, because he happens to have a facile pen or colourful speech, and he accuses his native land of being worthless and beyond redemption because its virgin jungles fail to provide him with a constant means of travelling over the world, driving Persian ponies and lavishing champagne like a tycoon. The incapacity does not lie with the emerging country in quest of suitable forms and utilitarian greatness; it lies rather with those who attempt to rule nations of a unique and violent character by means of laws inherited from four centuries of freedom in the United States and nineteen centuries of monarchy in France. A decree by Hamilton does not halt the charge of the plainsman's horse. A phrase by Sieyes does nothing to quicken the stagnant blood of the Indian race. To govern well, one must see things as they are. And the able governor in America is not the one who knows how to govern the Germans or the French; he must know the elements that make up his own country, and how to bring them together, using methods and institutions originating within the country, to reach that desirable state where each man can attain self-realization and all may enjoy the abundance that Nature has bestowed in everyone in the nation to enrich with their toil and defend with their lives. Government must originate in the country. The spirit of government must be that of the country Its structure must conform to rules appropriate to the country. Good government is nothing more than the balance of the country's natural elements.

That is why in America the imported book has been conquered by the natural man. Natural men have conquered learned and artificial men. The native half-breed has conquered the exotic Creole. The struggle is not between civilization and barbarity, but between false erudition and Nature. The natural man is good, and he respects and rewards superior intelligence as long as his humility is not turned against him, or he is not offended by being disregarded-something the natural man never forgives, prepared as he is to forcibly regain the respect of whoever has wounded his pride or threatened his interests. It is by conforming with this disdained native elements that the tyrants of America have climbed to power, and have fallen as soon as they betrayed them. Republics have paid with oppression for their inability to recognize the true elements of their countries, to derive from them the right kind of government, and to govern accordingly. In a new nation a government means a creator.

In nations composed of both cultured and uncultured elements, the uncultured will govern because it is their habit to attack and resolve doubts with their fists in cases where the cultured have failed in the art of governing. The uncultured masses are lazy and timid in the realm of intelligence, and they want to be governed well. But if the government hurts them, they shake it off and govern themselves. How can the universities produce governors if not a single university in America teaches the rudiments of the art of government, the analysis of elements peculiar to the peoples of America? The young go out into the world wearing Yankee or French spectacles, hoping to govern a people they do not know. In the political race entrance should not go for the best ode, but for the best study of the political factors of one's country. Newspapers, universities and schools should encourage the study of the country's pertinent components. To know them is sufficient, without mincing words; for whoever brushes aside even a part of the truth, whether through intention or oversight, is doomed to fall. The truth is built without it. It is easy to resolve our problem knowing its components than resolve them without knowing them. Along comes the natural man, strong and indignant, and he topples all the justice accumulated from books because he has not been governed in accordance with the obvious needs of the country. Knowing is what counts. To know one's country and govern it with that knowledge is the only way to free it from tyranny. The European university must bow to the American university. The history of America, from the Incas to the present, must be taught in clear detail and to the letter, even if the archons of Greece are overlooked. Our Greece must take priority over the Greece which is not ours. We need it more. Nationalist statement must replace foreign statement. Let the world be grafted onto our republics, but the trunk must be our own. And let the vanquished pedant hold his tongue, for there are no lands in which a man may take greater pride than in our long-suffering American republics.

With the rosary as our guide, our heads white and our bodies mottled, both Indians and Creoles, we fearlessly entered the world of nations. We set out to conquer freedom under the banner of the virgin. A priest, a few lieutenants, and a woman raised the Republic of Mexico onto the shoulders of the Indians. A few heroic students, instructed in French liberty by a Spanish cleric, made Central America rise in revolt against Spain under a Spanish general. In monarchic garb emblazoned with the sun, the Venezuelans to the north and the Argentineans to the south began building nations. When the heroes clashed and the continent was about to rock, one of them, and not the lesser, handed the reins to the other. And since heroism in times of peace is rare because it is not a glorious as in times of war, it is easier to govern when feelings are exalted and united than after a battle, when divisive, arrogant, exotic, or ambitious thinking emerges. The forces routed in the epic struggle-with the feline cunning of the species, and using the weight of realities-were undermining the new structure which comprised both the rough-and-ready, unique regions of our half-breed America and the silk-stockinged and frockcoated people of Paris beneath the flag of freedom and reason borrowed from nations skilled in the arts of government. The hierarchical constitution of the colonies resisted the democratic organization of the republics. The cravatted capitals left their country boots in the vestibule. The bookworm redeemers failed to realize that the revolution succeeded because it came from the soul of the nation; they had to govern with that soul and not without or against it. America began to suffer, and still suffers, from the tiresome task of reconciling the hostile and discordant elements it inherited from the despotic and perverse colonizer, and the imported methods and ideas which have been retarding logical government because they are lacking in local realities. Thrown out of gear for three centuries by a power which denied men the right to use their reason, the continent disregarded or closed its ears to the unlettered throngs that helped bring it to redemption, and embarked on a government based on reason-a reason belonging to all for the common good, not the university brand of reason over the peasant brand. The problem if independence did not lie in a change of forms but in change of spirit.

It was imperative to make common cause with the oppressed , in order to secure a new system opposed to the ambitions and governing habits of the oppressors. The tiger, frightened by gunfire, returns at night to his prey. He dies with his ayes shooting flames and his claws unsheathed. He cannot be heard coming because he approaches with velvet tread. When the prey awakens, the tiger is already upon it. The colony lives on the republic, and our America is saving itself from its enormous mistakes-the pride of its capital cities, the blind triumph of a scorned peasantry, the excessive influx of foreign ideas and formulas, the wicked and unpolitical disdain for the aboriginal race-because of the higher virtue, enriched with necessary blood, or a republic struggling against a colony. The tiger lurks again every tree, lying in wait at every turn. He will die with his claws unsheathed and his eyes shooting flames.

But "these countries will be saved", as was announced by the Argentinean Rivadavia, whose only sin was being a gentleman in these rough-and-ready times. A man does not sheathe a machete in a silken scabbard, nor can he lay aside the short lance merely because he is angered and stands at the door of Iturbide´s Congress, "demanding that the fair-haired one be named emperor". These countries will be saved because a genius for moderation, found in the serene harmony of Nature, seems to prevail in the continent of light, where there emerges a new real man schooled for these real times in the critical philosophy of guesswork and phalanstery that saturated the previous generation.

We were a phenomenon wit ha chest of an athlete, the hands of a dandy, and the brain of a child. We were a masquerader in English breeches, Parisian vest, North America jacket, and Spanish cap. The Indian hovered near us in silence, and went off to hills to baptize his children. The Negro was seeing pouring out the songs of his heart at night, alone and unrecognised among the rivers and wild animals. The peasant, the creator, turned in blind indignation against the disdainful city, against his own child. As for us, we were nothing but epaulets and professors´ gown in countries that came into the world wearing hemp sandals and headbands. It would have been the mark of genius to couple the headband and the professors´ gown with the founding fathers´ generosity and courage, to rescue the Indian, to make a place for the competent Negro, to fit liberty to the body of those who rebelled and conquered for it. We were left wit the hearer, the general, the scholar, and the sinecured. The angelic young, as if caught in the tentacles of an octopus, lunged heavenward, only to fall back, crowned with clouds in sterile glory. The native, driven by instinct, swept away the golden staffs of office in blind triumph. Neither the Europeans nor the Yankee could provide the key to the Spanish American riddle. Hate was attempted, and every year the countries amounted to less. Exhausted by the senseless struggle between the book and the lance, between reason and the processional candle, between the city and the country, weary of the impossible rule by rival urban cliques over the natural nation tempestuous or inert by turns, we being almost unconsciously to try love. Nations stand up and greet one another. "What are we?" is the mutual question, and little by little they furnish answers. When a problem arises in Cojímar, they do not seek its solution in Danzig. The frockcoat are still French , but thought begins to be American. The youth of America are rolling up their sleeves, digging their hands in the dough, and making it rise with the sweat of their brows. They realize that there is too much imitation, and that creation holds the key to salvation. "Create" is the password of this generation. The wine is made from plantain, but even if it turns sour, it is our own wine! That a country's form of government must be in keeping with its natural elements is a foregone conclusion. Absolute ideas must take relative forms if they are not to fail because of an error in form. Freedom, to be viable, has to be sincere and complete. If a republic refuses to open its arms to all, and move ahead wit hall, it dies. The tiger within sneaks in through the crack; so does the tiger from without. The general holds back his cavalry to a pace that suits his infantry, for if its infantry is left behind, the cavalry will be surrounded by the enemy. Politics and strategy are one. Nations should live in an atmosphere of self-criticism because it is healthy, but always with one heart and one mind. Stoop to the unhappy, and lift them up in your arms! Thaw out frozen America with the fire of your hearts! Make the natural blood of the nations´ course vigorously through their veins! The new American are on their feet, saluting each other from nation to nation, the eyes of the laborers shining with joy. The natural statesman arises, schooled in the direct study of Nature. He reads to apply his knowledge, not to imitate. Economists study the problems at their point of origin. Speakers begin a policy of moderation. Playwrights bring native characters to the stage. Academies discuss practical subjects. Poetry shears off its Zorrilla-like locks and hangs its red vest on the glorious tree. Selective and sparkling prose is filled with ideas. In the Indian republics, the governors are learning Indian.

American is escaping all its dangers. Some of the republics are still beneath the sleeping octopus, but others, under the law of averages, are draining their land with sublime and furious haste, as if to make up for centuries lost. Still others, forgetting that Juarez went about in a carriage drawn by mules, hitch their carriages to the wind, their coachmen soap bubbles. Poisonous luxury, the enemy of freedom, corrupts the frivolous and opens the door to the foreigner. In others, where independence is threatened, an epic spirit heightens their manhood. Still others spawn an army capable of devouring them in voracious wars. But perhaps our America is running another risk that does not come from itself but from the difference in origins, methods, and interests between the two halves of the continent, and the time is near at hand when an enterprising and vigorous people who scorn and ignore our America will even so approach it and demand a close relationship. And since strong nations, self- made by law and shotgun, love strong nations and them along; since the time since the time of madness and ambition-from which North America may be freed by the predominance of the purest elements in its blood, or on which it may be launched by its vindictive and sordid masses, its tradition of expansion, or the ambition of some powerful leader-is not so near at hand, even to the most timorous eye, that there is no time for the test of discreet and unwavering pride that could confront and dissuade it; since its good name as a republic in the eyes of the world's perceptive nations puts upon North America a restrain that can not be taken away by childish provocations or pompous arrogance or parricidal discords among our American nations-the pressing need of our America is to show itself as it is, one in spirit and intent, swift conquerors of a suffocating past, stained only by the enriching blood drawn from the scarfs left upon us by our masters. The scorn of our formidable neighbor who does not know us is our America's greatest danger. And since the day of the visit is near, it is imperative that our neighbor know us, and soon, so that it will not scorn us. Through ignorance it might even come the lay hands on us. Once it does know us, it will remove its hands out of respect. One must have faith in the best in men and distrust the worst. One must allow the best to be shown so that it reveals and prevails over the worst. Nations should have a pillory for whoever stirs up useless hate, and another for whoever fails to tell them the truth in time.

There can be no racial animosity, because there are no races. The theorist and feeble thinkers string together and warm over the bookshelf races which the well-disposed observer and the fair-minded traveller vainly seek in the justice of Nature where man's universal identity springs forth from triumphant love and the turbulent huger for life. The soul, equal and eternal, emanates from bodies of different shapes and colors. Whoever foments and spreads antagonism and hate between the races, sins against humanity. But as nations take shape among other different nations, there is condensation of vital and individual characteristics of thought habit, expansion and conquest, vanity and greed which could-from the latent state of national concern, and in the period of internal disorder, or the rapidity with which the country's character has been accumulating-be turned into a serious threat for the weak and isolated neighbouring countries, declared by the strong country to be inferior and perishable. The thought is father to the deed. And one must not attribute, through a provincial antipathy, a fatal and inborn wickedness to the continents´ fair skinned nation simply because it does not speak our language, nor see the world as we see it, nor resemble us in its political defects, so different from ours, nor favourably regard the excitable, darkskinned people, or look charitably, from its still uncertain eminence, upon those less favored by history, who climb the road of republicanism by heroic stages. The self-evidence facts of the problem should not be obscured, because the problem can be resolved, for peace of centuries to come, by appropriate study, and by tacit and immediate union in the continental spirit. With a single voice the hymn is already being sung; the present generation is carrying industrious America along the road enriched by their sublime fathers; from Rio Grande to the strains of Magellan, the Great Semi, astride its condor, spread the seed of the new America over the romantic nations of the continent and the sorrowful islands of the sea!

Los Jaivas, "Los Sueños de América"

Edward Dorn, "El Peru/Cheyenne Milkplane"

Prolag

Th'acetyline sun hung over the Ocean of Oceans
Flooding the quick afternoon of El Peru,
Casting the World shade on the gasaer jungle of Amazonas
Putting to bed the gene meat of the protein chains
Fueling the epidemia of cheap labor,
Cooking the slummy stews of cholera, cooling
The constrictors with its withdraw', slowly deepening
The tone of the washed out neon, mocking
The fitful tungsten strung along in the shadows where
The Luminosa don their Chinese hardware.

Across the tierra helada the temperature
Plummets and cracks, beyond the altiplano
And the Eastern Cordillera and the Plains
The stranglers take another hitch, and the Lianas
One last jack and hoist as they reach for the fleeing light.
Everything trends toward gigantism, giant spiders
[Theraphosidae] "the bird eaters," 
Roam the forest gloom, centipedes a metre long
Who feed on native children drop from the canopy
Onto the sanguinolent commerce of the jungle floor.
Dynastes beetles the size of a fist, Water Boa
With the girths of court eunuchs haunt the galleries.
Butterflies, like the spectacular blue morphos 
With a span of 50 centimetres, whose flash
Can be seen from more than a kilometre away
Send errant heliographs in the twilight shade
While within it swim fishes too terrible to class.
The Nazca Plate subducts this neozoic mess
Scorching the continental basement with frictional stress
As out of this tectonic scene magmatic froth
Erupts with showers of 'candescent trash
And the expulsion mixing with an assualt of basalt
Spoils the thin wake of the El Peru/Cheyenne flight,
And the passengers crowd the windows of our craft 
To ponder and growl and hail this mighty sight. 

Donald Wellman, "Hands"

When he reached out to receive me, I recognized 

his hands as mine. Short fingers and square palms.

I had seen similar hands in a photo of a mestiza mother by Tina Modotti.

The woman cradled her brown skinned child’s bottom,

chunky quadrilaterals

as if elements

of a Mayan glyph.

Oblong breasts pillowed his face.

I’ve slept on the lawn at Tulum

and heard the drone of Ah Muzen Cab.

Fermented honey inspired the poets of Heorot

and the poets of the Talamanca and Penobscot.

In a crevice within a garden wall

in Liberia, Melipone costarricense produce

treasured miel de jicote.

Beekeeper gods sing to a honey pot, held like a bass drum, Mol Ko Chi’.

Of bearded jaguars, it is said, many ancestors display

a pencil thin mustache. Of native American square hands, she wrote

in her ethnography of California Mission Indians:

bad Indians who beat their children,

tender Indians who cried from fear,

seeking a source in caves and mountain tops.

They fled to survive, as I have, inwardly, across the river bottom.

A cloud, melanin pigmentation on the retina is also common.


(written in response to Bad Indians by Deborah A. Miranda, Heyday, 2013)

Santiago Álvarez, "L.B.J." (1968)

Lynette Roberts, "Xaquixaguana"

In the lake of pools
Where icebergs stand firm on the ground,
And refrain to move for beauty of their image,
Five Temples lie wounded on their sides
Each plundered and more progressive than the last.
I speak of the one with the grey-crusted sleepers
Sitting in the splint-blue cave.
Especially he, of the up-side-down burial
With arrows set like buhls in the rib of the wreck:
Who was this white man of Peru?
And what flat burial did he deserve
To stir their sandstone agave? To face emerald sky
And snarling rocks where the sun's tied up:
Lying stiff among gold filaments and animate clay
Snouting Azrael forms and intricate beads:
Those Huacas spread and exposed under cacti waterbeds
Green as tunas, weathered with poisoned alizarin darts
Who was this man who stole their store of gold?
Who found down here down Pilcomayo way,
Near lion grass and glass birds sailing the lake,
Who was he, that lies buried at the Haravec's feet
Aggrieved by this ice and basaltic sheet?

José Lezama Lima, "Thoughts in Havana," trans. James Irby

Because I dwell in a whisper like a set of sails,
a land where ice is a reminiscence,
fire cannot hoist a bird
and burn it in a conversation calm in style.
Though that style doesn't dictate to me a sob
and a tenuous hop lets me live in bad humor,
I will not recognize the useless movement
of a mask floating where I cannot,
where I cannot transport the stonecutter or the door latch
to the museums where murders are papered 
while the judges point out the squirrel
that straightens its stockings with its tail.
If a previous style shakes the tree,
it decides the sob of two hairs and exclaims:
mi alma no está en un cenicero.

Any memory that is transported,
received like a galantine from the obese ambassadors of old,
will not make us live like the broken chair
of the lonesome existence that notes the tide
and sneezes in autumn.
And the size of a loud laugh,
broken by saying that its memories are remembered,
and its styles the fragments of a serpent
that we want to solder together
without worrying about the intensity of its eyes.
If someone reminds us that our styles
are already remembered;
that through our nostrils no subtle air thinks forth
but rather that the Aeolus of the sources elaborated
by those who decided that being
should dwell in man,
without any of us
dropping the saliva of a danceable decision,
though we presume like other men
that our nostrils expel a subtle air.
Since they dream of humiliating us,
repeating day and night with the rhythm of the tortoise
that conceals time on its back: 
you didn't decide that being should dwell in man; 
your God is the moon
watching like a banister
the entrance of being into man. 
Since they want to humiliate us we say to them:
el jefe de la tribu descendió la escalinata.

They have some show windows and wear some shoes.
In those show windows they alternate the mannequin with the stuffed ossifrage,
and everything that has passed through the forehead
of the lonesome buffalo's boredom.
If we don't look at the show window, they chat
about our insufficient nakedness that isn't worth a figurine from Naples.
If we go through it and don't break the glass,
they don't stress amusingly that our boredom can break the fire 
and they talk to us about the living model and the parable of the ossifrage.
They who carry their mannequins to all the ports
and who push down into their trunks a screeching
of stuffed vultures. 
They don't want to know that we climb up along the damp roots of the fern
--where there are two men in front of a table; to the right, the jug
and the bread that has been caressed--,
and that though we may chew their style,
no escogemos nuestros zapatos en una vitrina. 

The horse neighs when there's a shape
that comes in between like a toy ox,
that keeps the river from hitting it on the side
and kissing the spurs that were a present
from a rosy-cheeked adulteress from New York.
The horse doesn't neigh at night;
the crystals it exhales through its nose,
a warm frost, of paper;
the digestion of the spurs
after going through its muscles now glassy
with the sweat of a frying pan.
The toy ox and the horse 
hear the violin, but the fruit doesn't fall
squashed on their backs that are rubbed
with a syrup that is never tar.
The horse slides over the moss
where there is a table exhibiting the spurs,
but the perked-up ear of the beast doesn't decipher.

The calm with stumble music
and drunken circus horses in a tangle,
where the needle bites because there's no leopard
and the surge of the accordion
elaborates some tights of worn taffeta.
Though the man doesn't leap, there's a sound
of divided shapes in each indivisible season,
because the violin leaps like an eye.
The motionless jugs stir up a cartilaginous echo:
the shepherd's blue belly
is displayed on a tray of oysters.
In that echo of the bone and the flesh, some snorts
come out covered with a spiderweb disguise,
for the delight to which a mouth is opened,
like the bamboo flute elaborated
by the boys always asking for something.
They ask for a hollow darkness
to sleep in, splitting open, with no sensitivity,
the style of their mother's bellies.
But while they sharpen a spiderweb sigh
inside a jug passing from hand to hand,
the scratch on the lute doesn't decipher.
The indicated some moldings
that my flesh preferred to almonds.
Some delicious moldings riddled with holes 
by the hand that wraps them
and sprinkles them with the insects that will accompany it.
And that waiting, waited for in the wood
by its absorption that doesn't stop the horseman,
while not some masks, the ax cuts
that do not reach the moldings,
which do not wait like an ax or a mask,
but like the man who waits in a house of leaves.
But in tracing the cracks in the molding
and making a glory of the parsley and the canary,
l'etranger nous demande le garçon maudit. 

The musk ox itself knew the entrance,
the thread of three secrets
continued till it reached the terrace
without seeing the burning of the grotesque palace.
Does a door collapse because the drunken man
with no boots on yields to it his dream?
A muddy sweat fell from the shafts
and the columns crumbled in a sigh
that scattered their stones as far as the brook.
The roofs and the barges
safeguard the calm liquid and the chosen air;
the roofs that are friends of the toy tops
and the barges that anchor in a truncated backland,
scatter in confusion caused by a stuffed gallantry that catches unawares
the weaving and the obverse of the eye shivering together in masks.

To think that some crossbowmen
shoot at a funeral urn
and that from the urn leap
some pale people singing,
because our memories are already remembered
and we ruminate with a very bewildered dignity
some moldings that came out of the hunter's pecked siesta.
To know whether the song is ours or the night's,
they want to give us an ax elaborated in the sources of Aeolus. 
They want us to leap from that urn
and they also want to see us naked.
They want that death they have given us as a gift
to be the source of our birth,
and our obscure weaving and undoing
to be remembered by the thread of the woman beset by suitors.
We know that the canary and the parsley make a glory
and that the first flute was made from a stolen branch.

We go through ourselves
and having stopped point out the urn and the doves
engraved in the chosen air.
We go through ourselves
and the new surprise gives us our friends
and the birth of a dialectic: 
while two dihedrals spin and nibble each other,
the water strolling through the canals of our bones
carries our body toward the calm flow
of the unnavigated land,
where a walking alga tirelessly digests a sleeping bird.
It gives us friends that a light rediscovers
and the square where they converse without being awakened.
From that urn maliciously donated,
there come leaping couples, contrasts and the fever
grafted into the magnet horns
of the crazy page boy making a slick torture even more subtle.
My shame, the magnet horns smeared with a cold moon,
but the scorn gave birth to a cipher
and now unconsciously swung on a branch.
But after offering his respects,
when two-headed people, crafty, correct,
strike with algal hammers the tenor-voiced android,
the chief of the tribe descended the staircase.
The beads they have given us as gifts
have fortified our own poverty,
but since we know we are naked
being will come to rest upon our crossed steps.
And while they were daubing us in wild colors
so we would leap out of the funeral urn,
we knew that as always the wind was rippling the waters
and some steps were following with delight our own poverty.
The steps fled with the first questions of sleep.
But the dog bitten by light and by shadow,
by tail and head; 
the dog of dark light that cannot engrave it
and of stinking shadow; the light doesn't refine it
nor does the shadow nurture it: and so it bites
the light and the fruit, the wood and the shadow,
the mansion and the son, breaking the buzz
when the steps go away and he knocks at the portico.
Poor silly river that finds no way out
nor the doors and leaves swelling their music.
It chose, double against single, the cursed clods,
but I don't choose my shoes in a show window.

As it lost its shape on the leaf
the worm sniffed and inspected its old home; 
as it bit the waters that had come to the defined river,
the hummingbird touched the old moldings.
The violin of ice shrouded in reminiscence.
The colibri unbraids a music and ties a music. 
Our forests don't force man to become lost,
the forest is for us a harmonium in reminiscence.
Every naked man that comes along the river,
in the current or in the glassy egg,
swims in the air if he suspends his breath
and stretches out indefinitely his legs.
The mouth of the flesh of our wood
burns the rippled drops.
The chosen air is like an ax
for the flesh of our wood,
and the hummingbird pierces it.

My back is irritated and furrowed by the caterpillars
that chew some wicker changed into centurion fish,
but I go on working that wood,
like a sleepless fingernail,
like a harmonium that ties and unbraids in reminiscence.
The forest, breathed upon,
releases the hummingbird of the instant
and the old moldings.
Our wood is a toy ox; 
the city state is today the state and a small forest.
The guest breathes upon the horse and the rains, too.
The horse rubs its muzzle and its tail over the harmonium of the forest; 
the naked man intones his own poverty,
the colibri stains and pierces him. 
My soul is not in an ashtray.