Drag Racing in Antarctica

Why whiskey should be classified a vegetable.

Felix Catt flew through aether
as television's first image.
We all knew it was conspiricy.
We are so hard to foolhard to fool,
so geologically fresh.
As Americans,
we can stare anyone down.

I think I've lived here forever,
dancing on Charon's raft
where everyone deserves an Oscar
despite papal edicts
for the baptized and blessed.

I shall opt for Excursion du Lethe,
watch the sharks
as they wiggle the water fat-finned
earning frequent swimmer miles
while Vienna's bakers
listen for larksong
and tunneling Turks,
shape croisants as scimitars.

What relief to know
we are all aristocrats
spurning Procrustus' spare palette.
We are, with biblical pedigree,
symbols of power.
Captains quite capable
of disdaining lesser mammals
and starvation's Mozarts
no matter that from here on the raft,
reflected in this quantum pool,
we see through
our edifice of anthems.

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Two Horses

Bob Evans Photograph

Lunkers

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Betting rich flesh
agianst times of drought,
deep ice,
the big ones hold
to dark water where
amber light goes gray,
cools and slows.
Moving from pool to pool,
they wait with needle teeth
for weary, broken, or careless
to quit swift current.

Rising from shadows
at 17th and Broadway,
silver Rolls glides
into the flow,
angles upstream,
cross-current.
Returns to shadows.

Malinche

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In a land where your children
spit the name La Malinche,
your bones lie unmarked,
unflowered in a secret place,
perhaps the foot of Popocatepetl,
or Iztacihuatl.
Names that flowed from your tongue
in liquid Nahuatl song.

Maybe in a must earth
shallow under El Zocalo
where you bore the hairy,
fetid weight of Cortés
and gave birth to a people
whose faces pucker about their eyes
as they expectorate:
Eve, of Culua-Mexica,
Helen, of Tenochtitlan,
La Chingada.

Perhaps they leach
in the heat of Potonchan
where you spoke another tongue
like breath through a flute,
like water falling.
Can you wince
ten-thousand times a day
and still forgive your children
as you forgave your royal mother
for selling you to el puerco,
who gave you and gave you
to other pigs.

Can your ghost find sleep
in the cool breezes off Texcoco
where you stood between two empires,
conquered both and wed the words
traitor and translator in dialects
you did not live to hear?
Does knowing you gave birth
to Paz, Neruda, Vasconcelos
give you some small quiet?
Did Diaz ever say he loved you?
Would he sometimes call you
Doña Marina to your face?

Now, only the Vulcan lovers
Smoking Mountain and White Lady
know who you really are,
woman of this place,
where the dust of your bones
is trod by donkey hooves
and the callused soles
of your Mestizo children
who slaver your name.
Where only the Jaltipan
Iguana eaters hear you
weeping for them.