Chimera

I will take your stony heart and give you one of flesh.

The wake sewing shut those white lips

and after when leagues and all behind to salt

fell the grateful Spaniards prayed

It became their habit to turn eyes sore away

from surfeit Rashes and abrasions of spring

leaf stem vine blossom aphid & berry stridulant

intricate and promiscuous without the rose

or borage or pomegranate embowered

in flaunting silks on gauntlet cuffs No

none of that repose their soldier-love required to root

20,000 had died in Ravenna He survived

without mark to show what he knew

how fear cramped each man solitary

inside himself until the spark that leapt stinging

them on to violence the grass-fire battle-frenzy

the grass that kneels to its burning

Then aftermath’s

vegetable melee limbs and bodies

But what is not threat in this contagion and panic

of green Whores wives saints sovereigns

this beach that thick-leaved mustardy shrub Names

he thinks the names keep slipping

Swift intent armored obdurate as beetles no one man

felt the wound of where like Adam too late he walked

* * *

The air flexing began to bruise green around them

the fresh human injury of them Like flies

trapped in a bottle they didn’t know what to do

and carried on doing it

while bird by bird invisible rescinded its song

while the sun a drop of vinegar in milk curdled the sky

Quiet sumptuous as pain eased by what hand

abrupt as that held in the breath

exhausted just before the witch confesses

Like an executioner who ropes hair over hand

to bend and lengthen the neck for his ax

the wind brutalized palm trees spun men

before it loosely as leaves in a stream

He linked arms with another

Broken wing Splintering oar Chainless anchor

dragging through darkness thick with sand and water and noise

whistles braying drums timbrels & ululations

Pressed all night to the porch of the storm his ear

mistook the self’s own alienated music called it sorcery

That the fury never ended he would learn

walking the eye of its silence

After the hurricane the stunned brilliance like a spell

or question he woke into waking by himself to himself

and naked as a saint to discover his ship

with its ropes tools weapons salves Spain

was the anchored ship

now hoisted on planks of sunlight over the palm-trees

sailing out of sight The boat sick

for such mirth

made by root sap riverbank & squirrel

it would return to that green oak it once had been

* * *

In what hour of what night did he know his soul

to turn a stranger to him

Pilgrim he will venture forth across uncertain fields

Explorer he will cry out

He may be nothing more

than a hide rigid with gore & soil to be

scoured pounded abused by caustics and by iron

and in watered pigeon-shit kneaded until supple

for the hand—

but whose and must

the hand continue to wear or it will toughen again

* * *

Daily he marched his men into corrugations of

blue distances dissolving one to another like promises

of gold & corn made by guides snatched from villages

As the Spanish found new ways to die natives

loomed naked on the horizon they looked

splendid & violent as idols Their women & children

restored for ransoms of melons or fish

Often some chief would repeat his good friend

possessed more of each thing they desired His noble gestures

spread like balm his speech intoxicating

but so militant their hunger his words came entire

& legible to their sense as the amber & musk that steamed

from these his fine furs

* * *

His dwindling force

through swamps & ambush labored circuitous stalled

like mayflies in their brevity & towarding and never

fable riches youth nor rest to take

Only the body

with its anxious extremeties eccentric naked

not natural from which a vein of fascinated shame

opened darkly glittering smoldering

like sea-coal Every eye interrogated

Each inquisitor humiliated

by these echoes of himself his body violating

the silence

* * *

Now alone and exposed approaching

he amassed his ocherous archive of blister

and of bruise the old fabulous

atlas of faith in blood & smoke redrawn

Still even the most exacting map dreams

omits & lies brindled

with sums & suppositions

Every step makes him more wilderness

He goes interiorly

to trade conches sea-snails & screw-beans

for red-dyed deer-tail tassels and the arrow-makers’

sinew & flint between ragged bands

surrounded by enemies enthralled by visions

that command them to bury their sons alive

Girls whose marriages would multiply their foes

become meat for their dogs

Where were the jades turquoises zinzibar Where

the sacred monsters cannibals or kings fielding legions

of dog-headed warriors

Husbands groaned

bucked by pain onto the dirt when wives gave birth

& both sexes wept

strenuously after any absence overjoyed to see each other

again in no essential changed

Had any man traveled farther than he

* * *

Whether time is the ripening of fruit the dying of fish

& the position of stars or all

the king’s clocks ringing his will upon the quarter-hour

hunger is the self’s severe eternal god

From desert skies could be harvested evanescing

bounties dove rabbit wild boar mountain lion

when for two months the natives drank bad water

and ate only oysters

Or salamanders ants dirt

deer dung but also many days without

To suffer only this much

demands devotion or the ingenuity of the wasp

which deposits eggs in the walking nursery of a spider

A single brief season happy to know enough

everyone was summoned by neat cornet-shaped fruits

the prickly pear migrating north as it sweetened

from parrot through orchid

What use ambition in the desert or will

The pangs can shrink but never close

* * *

He came late to healing Even a stone

they said possessed its virtue and how could he

as well so different from themselves solicit less

Left within his heart sealed it might sour

Farther they starved him

The power grew Passed along from tribe to tribe

intangible economy of magic

increased by use

Fright filled some with a lassitude they withered on

others suffered cramps headaches or had been struck

by a sorrow a terror a surfeit

Blessing each joint with a cross and that something

of him might be spent on the hurt

he breathed over it Just a little game he played to eat

before his mind emptied stroking down & up the air

like a kingfisher

under the shadow of the vaulting falcon that played it

When he lifted his hands his fingers

glowed like ten lamps of fire Why not be all

fire

* * *

How much can I change before I am changed

It has been years so long

without abradings of any other to recall him

Dilation digression by these ways he will return

Natives said he could not be

Christian whose eyes they felt crawl over them

as if where women & men had stood was

desolating space His own people turned

away warding off this apparition of a new fault

in themselves This man

neither their stone houses

nor the need that stirs the fox’s miles nor the moon

following which laid down his bones

to scry the distances in him but as though

pierced by some small passive wingless insect

whose gall blighting him

would concealed suckle & multiply its question

down a thousand generations

he was that

which they’d feared most to find

now abject now famous

Twice a year his skin like muslin pulled from his body

Without armor or felted wool or hide afterward

he was now discovered

small pricked loose & unpleated opening

to manifold injury & errand

A channel for pain and a channel for hearing

Notes:

With some liberties, the poem is based on Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (ca. 1490–ca. 1557) and the six years he spent in the Americas. The exact route he walked is disputed, but the record of his travels (La Relación) is one of the earliest written accounts of south Texas and northern Mexico, including his observations of the native peoples he encountered, first as their slave, then as a merchant and a spiritual healer.—AC

Source: Poetry (June 2010)