Showing posts with label heart. Show all posts
Showing posts with label heart. Show all posts

Friday, October 31, 2008

What Came Before Me


What came before me
Is still present
It still swirls around me like the wind
It still weighs me down like giant ocean rocks
It still whispers at my ear like an inflamed lover
Eager to be touched once again.

I speak of the me that is today
The me that can only be today
in this moment
sweating in the old living room
that still swarms
with the old ghosts of other lives.
The memories of those lives
Are now like liquid tendrils
that pull and splash
at the edges of my vision
calling for my fire
chewing on my bones.

Long slithering tendrils
That reach out from places far away
That try to insinuate themselves
Into locked chambers
And open doors.
Tendrils of sight and sound
Of midnight moonlight
And dusty sun that seeps
Through open windows
Of haunting songs
In unknown languages
That fall like marbles
Over white sheets that blow in the wind
And slide down their soft surface
To come to rest on my hungry ears.

I stand today in the dry fountains
The dry husks of music that has long fallen silent
Empty receptacles of ancient memories
That have already been consumed,
Digested and left behind to rot.
And I remember walking here
Once so long ago,
With Dilcia at my side
Dilcia when she was the one
The one that I had found
At the end of a quest for death
That started with great gusts of fire
In the middle of desert highway,
And ended with desperate kisses
And another silent fire that burned from the inside
Where the source could not be reached
Where the flame could not be touched.

I had found her, the one
But she was also
The one that had found me
The only one that mattered
The dream that pushed all other dreams away,
The horn that sang so loudly
That all other instruments had to fall away quietly
Defeated and finally at rest.

And I remember that my heart was pounding
As we walked together
Crashing against my ribcage like
A giant ball of heavy stone
Against fragile pillars of thin wood
And as my heart pounded
Harder and harder
I remember that suddenly it opened
Completely
Painfully
Irrevocably
Finally breaking down the walls
That took so long to build
And letting the storm come through
Fierce, powerful and unrepentant.
It opened
To her
To her sliding voice
To her words of silver
And her silences of gold
To her childlike wonder
And her womanly lust.
To her laughter tinged with sadness
And her honest tears of joy.
My hard and heavy heart
Opened
To her
It opened for her
And it opened with her
With her little heart that was so fragile
That at any moment,
It threatened to simply slide off her chest
And burst on the ground
Like a giant teardrop
Made of shiny golden dust.

As we walked down the dirt path
The dirt path of the fountains
The same that I had walked to dream
The same that I had walked to escape
The same that I had walked to return
The same that I had walked to continue
Our arms were interleaved
And we moved forward
In a solid careless march
And as we marched, she sang:
"The one who doesn’t stand aside,
we will knock down!"
And she laughed
In great golden goblets of ecstatic abandon
And I laughed as well
In sympathy and in wonder
At this crystalline creature
Who gave herself to me
More with every word that left her lips
More with every time that her eyes closed
More with every smile that I invoked
More with every flutter of her eyes
More with every time she said goodbye
More with every time she said hello.

In her innocent beauty
And her beautiful innocence
She made me more loving,
She showed me how to weaken the defenses
How to stare at the simple building blocks
Of stone and cement and skin and nail
And let the Other come through,
Sliding and gnashing and howling,
Present and dripping with life,
In all its fearsome glory.

In my hunger for darkness
And my fleeting moments of light
I made her stronger,
I gave her the need and the way
To stand above her hesitations
And walk onto a world
That had pushed her and battered her
Right from the very start,
And stand solid and precise
To rest her weight on what others set aside
And find a new way forward
Into a strange new realm
Of endless questions
And unspeakable thoughts.

I love her still,
As much as my heart will allow
And my heart grows stronger by the hour
But she has turned her strength against me
And her newborn anger and hate
Digs into me ever more deeply
Because of the love that still burns
In the deepest caverns of my Being,
For her,
Through her
With her.

Now I walk by the dry fountains
Alone
Taking pictures
Letting thoughts and visions
Slide through my consciousness
Like rapid fire movies
That end before they start.
I see the dust like I never saw it,
And the grass, and the faded paint,
And the dirty shirts and the shaking buses
And the thin little men with their thick machetes
and the forgotten stairways made of stone
And the palm trees that sway gently in the wind
and the cars that swarm down the main street,
like hell hounds on the run.
Just then
two girls call for me
To take their picture.
They stop their car in the middle of chaos
And they eagerly call for my attention.
My heart opens
Spontaneously and without hesitation
The pain is there as always
But I don’t run from it
Not like before.
Now I know that I don’t need them
Not them, not the dust, not the grass, not the leaves,
I no longer need
any of the liquid tendrils
That reach out from the past
Still pulling
Still splashing
At the edges of my vision.
I don’t need them
The bright eyes
The moist lips
The soft skin
Or the memory of their presence
I don’t need them
To keep on pushing
The bloody gates apart
The gates that let the oceans out
And bring me up from the world of shadows.
My heart will open for them
But it will not close when they go away.
I am not attracted
I am not repelled
For now, today,
My heart just opens,
Like it did so long ago
And the world is fresh and new
Once again.

The tendrils will keep on pulling
Always
Splashing and pulling
Pulling and splashing
But their need recedes into nothing
And their calls resemble nothing
And their touch, is the touch of nothing.
And as I feel the nothing against me
Under me and around me
I have come to see
Naked, open and alone,
What truly came before me.

Palm trees swinging gently in the wind,
above the silence of the fountains.
Dilcia as she was when her mask had fallen
and her heart had exploded in a rainbow of color.
A ghost of stone that still sings the dreams of glory
of a long forgotten past.

Sweet golden star opening to the
endless mystery of the darkness.

Four more Dilcias travel down
the long road of accidents,
open to possibilities,
unbelieving of defeat.

Lustful innocence that beckons
a Voyager into a world of mystery.

A shaking bus that will take you to unknown regions,
eating raw flesh and spitting black smoke
as it speeds into the deep well of desire.

Innocent lust that stands guard
at the door of real knowledge.

Two girls that called for my attention
in a moment of childlike playfulness
and flashing recognition.

A stranger that beckons
across the unbreachable wall of time.
How I would want to talk to him.
But what would I say if I could?

Years later, after she had disappeared
into the void once again.

Thursday, October 2, 2008

A Couple At The Heart

I remembered a gentle space of tall trees and deep tranquility, a rarity in the constant noise of San Salvador, where cars honk at red lights and buses roar in angry bursts of black smoke with every acceleration and every turn and teenagers hang from the bus doors screaming to get people to step inside and fat women with wide heavy baskets on their heads call loudly to offer their goods to anyone within earshot and men drive around with bullhorns on their cars, talking in seductive deep voices, carefully describing the beautiful fish that they just caught that morning. But I remembered that there was quiet here, somewhere in the past, somewhere in the heights of San Benito, so we had to look for it and find it.
We drove around for a few minutes and then my Dad recognized something in the large silent houses and turned right with confidence. Ahead was a long stretch of quiet street and empty sidewalk and my Dad said: "This is it." We parked along the edge, which was carefully protected by a long metal fence, and we stepped out of the car. A man in gray overalls was walking towards us. I stopped him to take his picture and ask him if the park was open. "Yes, of course. Come right in. The warehouse is over that way." I thanked him and wondered why we would want to see the warehouse. Maybe he confused us with supervisors. Maybe there was something in the warehouse that people came to see or buy. He walked through the gate ahead of us and we followed, but he turned to the left and we immediately turned to the right.
We walked into the silent park and immediately there was a sense of deep sanctuary, a sense that this was a secret place for secret meetings to happen, a place where the rules of the city were relaxed slightly, and the few that came would try to keep the knowledge among themselves so that the hungry noise would not enter, at least not for a while. There were long tall narrow trees called "maquilishuats" and their trunks were the color of camouflage and they stood straight up without curves or accident and their branches were thin and interlaced with each other, forming a thick canopy of dark green leaves over the whole silent maze. We walked along narrow dirt paths that were flanked by trees and bushes on both sides. The paths were clean and carefully kept, yet again something that I found very unique in a city of decay and negligence and purposeful carelessness. I took pictures of the trees and the flowers and the bushes while my Dad walked behind me patiently, holding onto my video camera. Ahead of us there was a little metal play structure. There were no kids there today. I got the impression that it was rare for kids to be there at all. Continuing in that direction, the park ended with a tall yellow wall covered in whirls of shiny spiked metal, a way to protect the house next door from any unsavory guests of the park.
As we walked around the edge of the little hill that dropped off into the kid play structure, I saw a skinny brown schoolgirl in a long dark skirt and a white shirt. She was calmly walking away from the heart of the little maze. I had the impression that she was leaving some friends behind. She walked towards us without looking directly at us. I took her picture in between the trees and she looked towards me as I did. She continued to walk and, as she passed by me, her eyes betrayed wonder and distrust. The quiet remained unbroken and we continued to walk as she disappeared in the direction of the outer gate.
We followed one of the paths which curved inward. There were several small concrete circular benches, surrounded by little concrete stools, all painted in different colors which were slowly fading away. I looked up at the branches and I tried to take a picture of a bright red bird but it managed to fly away. I then turned to the path again which continued to curve towards the center, while a secondary path trailed off in a tangent towards the edge. I followed the tangent and we came to a moss covered stairway that led to a lower level of the maze. The green and gray stone stairway followed the edge of the wall that gave to the street, down to a narrow pathway where more tall trees were standing, extending their skinny arms out towards the parked cars beyond the fence.
We came back up and once again followed the original path towards the center. As we approached the heart, I saw that there was another circular bench there which was occupied. In my mind I assumed that these were the friends of the skinny girl I had seen. There, at the heart of this green labyrinth, there was a couple enmeshed in each other so deeply that I could feel a bubble of intensity around them that rippled out towards me as I stood many steps away. He was an older teenager with strong dark arms and a thick head like a small bowling ball. He was leaning back on the circular cement bench and his head sometimes leaned forward to look at the girl in front of him and his head sometimes leaned back to look at the green sky above, the roof of maquilishuat branches that cradled his silent gasps of pleasure. She was a thick brown girl in a light brown skirt and a blue shirt. She had a sweater tied around her neck and she was on her knees in between his open legs. Her thick strong upper body was leaning into him and her hand was at his crotch and she was pulling and pushing in a rhythm I instantly recognized, a rhythm which had seemed the greatest mystery once not too long ago, a beat that never fell quiet but curved upwards at its depth and twirled in the air for an instant, suspended in aching flowering need, before coming back down to a floor of quicksand and wet leaves, ready to repeat the endless cycle all over again. I looked directly at them and his head was leaning back at an extreme angle and his mouth was open and her face was a picture of intense devotion and attention as her hand worked up and down and her mouth was half open in a squeezed mask of desire. Maybe they had met waiting for a bus after school, maybe she had seduced him with a sarcastic smile and the light wink of her right eye, maybe this was the place where they held their quiet encounters day to day, every afternoon after school, "don’t be late", "I will see you tomorrow", "I can’t wait", maybe it had been weeks or months that they lived together in a secret story of their own making, away from the judgement of their parents, away from the questions of their friends, maybe the labyrinth welcomed them into its heart and was quietly nourished by their innocent warm love as it vibrated softly around them, green leaves shifting back and forth in the wind.
As I looked directly at them, she looked up and saw me looking. There were then whispers that traveled through the green maze and curved around the tall skinny trees and , when I looked again, she had turned around to sit backwards on his lap so that the boy was now grinding at her from behind, his hands around her thick waist, and so the rhythm continued, again curved in a negation of straight lines and rough edges, a rhythm that signified the place where constancy and shapelessness combined and produced a fresh wet hurricane of new possibilities.
I turned away from them and continued to follow the path and I saw from the edge that the lower level opened up further below into a secondary little forest where the tall trees grew just enough that I could almost imagine walking over their branches and peeking over the final edge. We followed the curving path all the way to the corner where it turned inwards again and I saw that the couple at the heart of the labyrinth were gone, and I couldn’t help feeling that the maze was little less alive, a bit less bright, a bit more sad.
We walked past a dark building and there was the noise of men talking inside, joking and laughing. Maybe this was the warehouse that the worker had pointed out to us, maybe some men inside had followed his advice. Then we walked through a small basketball court where there were two men sitting quietly. They had black backpacks and they were wearing dark pants and white shirts. I looked at them and nodded in silent greeting and they nodded back suspiciously.
As we came back to the gate where we had entered, behind a mountain of sand and a wall of loose bricks and some abandoned tools and sacks of cement, I saw another couple walking into the park. He was dressed in the sharp clean clothes of an executive, including a bright tie and a small black attaché. She was wearing stylish black pants and a black shirt. As we slowly walked around the park again, I saw them sitting in one of the cement structures. Their voices traveled through the silence and I could make out that they were discussing the latest events at the office, what she said to him and then what he said to her and how can they think that and isn’t it terrible? I could see that he was also edging his way closer to her, inch by aching inch, and that she was not retreating, while the whispered conversation continued. Maybe they were on a break for lunch, maybe he had told her that there was a beautiful park not too far from the office, maybe he thought she didn’t know what he wanted, maybe she let him think that she didn’t know but she knew perfectly well, maybe she wanted the same thing and she was leaning back on the cement stool waiting for him to touch her and kiss her, maybe today he would break past the invisible barrier of his doubt, maybe the labyrinth knew more than either of them and maybe it felt them coming to replace the ones that had left just moments ago so that these new ones could bring it back to deep vibrant life.
We followed the narrow path one more time and this final time, when we came to the gate, we walked out into the blue sky and the moist white sidewalk and the wide lonely street. I looked out towards the opposite corner and I saw them walking up the sidewalk hand in hand. The thick girl and her strong dark boy. They were playfully strolling away like little kids after a long day of innocent heartfelt fun and that is just what they were that day and maybe not for too much longer. I felt happy with them and for them and I smiled as I took one more picture. They looked back at me just then and they whispered once again and laughed as they turned and walked away.
The tall thin maquilishuats reaching up into the sky. The camouflaged flesh of the maquilishuats. The skinny schoolgirl walking towards us among the trees. The path that curved inwards towards the heart.The pile of loose bricks and the mountain of sand
to the right of the gate. The second couple that came to replace the first.The first couple as they happily walked away.

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Innocence At The Fountains

I got out of the car by the twin fountains which were now dry, the Beethoven fountains that were now known by some other name, the fountains that were marginal fixtures in so many of my old memories but which featured prominently in none. I remembered walking up the fountains as a little boy escaping from school, angry, scared and sullen. I remembered being a teenager and sitting here with Rodney for a brief moment on our way to the movies, talking about girls and sex and more girls and more sex and sometimes about our friends and sometimes about the many journeys that we would someday take together. I remembered being older and sadder and walking here with Dilcia, on the rough dirt path that runs parallel to the main street, on our way to my grandmother’s apartment which was mine for a brief moment, enough of a moment to let me taste Dilcia’s flesh and enough to make her say "my love" as she pressed her chest against me.
The fountains were twins cut apart at birth by the Paseo Escalon, one of the main boulevards of the city, connecting the edges of the dirty downtown with the heights of the Escalon. When I was very young, I thought that there must be a further mystery to their existence, something that happened here when I wasn’t looking, some ritual that I had missed or some arcane significance hidden in the circular shapes and the mirror images. Some of that perception still lingered with me this afternoon, as I walked across the little round park, looking at the women and kids selling little cheap plastic Salvadorean flags so that drivers could stick them on the side of their cars and then give the appearance of being patriotic. Some cars had one of these hanging from every window and still the old women insisted that the drivers needed more.
I walked through the grass that surrounded the fountains and I took pictures of the trees, the statues, the fountains themselves, the electrical poles, the concrete stairs, the street kids resting against the main pedestals and the edges of the circles where the colors were fading under the blazing sun. Then I asked a woman, an older woman with a dirty red T-shirt, a dark blue faded skirt and a white cloth draped over her head, if I could take her picture, and she said yes and smiled and I took her picture carefully and she said thank you as her cheeks pushed up to squeeze her eyes. I walked over the main street, El Paseo, which flowed with cars like an angry river in a rain storm and I took pictures of the fountain on the other side, which was just as dry as this one, just as forgotten.
Two men, sitting inside the bed of a pickup truck as it rolled by me, whistled loudly and asked to have their picture taken and I took it quickly as they posed smiling, hugging each other and raising their hands in a sign of success. I lifted my own hand in approval and gave them a thumbs up. They laughed and nodded with excitement. Then two pretty girls in a car called to me and said: "Us! Us! You should take us!" and I took their picture and raised my thumb again and they raised theirs and said "thank you!" and drove on. It was then that I realized that in their mind they weren’t doing me a favor by allowing me to take their picture, instead I was the one that was helping them, I was the one that was giving them the gift of my attention, the gift that said that there was something in them that was worth seeing, worth keeping forever, and the thought hit me like a sudden negative image of the world that I was accustomed to, a world where the very air is flooded in paranoia and fear of hidden agendas and whispered threats.
So it was the same with the maids who were both so shy of having their picture taken and also so grateful that I had insisted. Lorena, after she finally agreed to pose for me, said "You will take us on a long journey. Who knows where we will end up? Thank you so much," and I thought that what she said was both true and also so innocent that it made my heart shiver with a kind of gentle sympathy, and it made me happy to know that there still were people that were more innocent than I could even imagine.
To take the pictures is to make the moment eternal, and maybe the Being in its deepest simplicity welcomes that opportunity to transcend the bonds of time and flash across the frozen tundra of infinity, and maybe it is only through the process of sophistication, the complex structuring of the time based adult personality, that someone might come to see the camera as a threat, the sudden observer as a predator.
I walked towards the old church by my grandmother’s house and there was a couple sitting on a bench in a tiny park across the street from it: a tough guy in a white shirt and faded blue pants and a dark thick girl in a school uniform. They didn’t want their pictures taken. They shook their heads seriously and he narrowed his eyes and she looked away. They had allowed sophistication to rob them of their trust and of their most simple wish. They were on their way to becoming like the fountains, beautiful structures built for eternity but lacking the flow of fresh water to make them complete.



One of the many palm trees that tower over the twin fountains.


The fountain designs which implied a strange significance to me.

Statue of an ancient hero now turned into forgotten stone.

A boy reads the newspaper
resting his back against the pedestal of the forgotten statue.

The older woman that was happy to have her picture taken.


The guys who demanded to have their picture taken as their pickup truck sped by.


The girls in the next car that said: "No! Us! Take us!"
An older man in the twin fountains
who was very surprised but also very eager to help
when he realized that I wanted to take a picture of him.

A driver waiting outside the mall.
When he understood that I wanted to take a picture
he immediately turned to the left to show his best side.

Lorena when she finally posed for me and then nervously thanked me.

Thursday, September 25, 2008

The Club of the Night

After my parents had separated, and after my mom and me tumbled around various apartments, and lived with my aunt for a while and lived in a little house where the little street boys flowed like pebbles through our doorway and pulled me out to play, and we lived in a long dry apartment where the maid first told me that my parents were getting divorced and I worried for the first time that they might never come together again, after all that and so much more, we came to live in a little one bedroom apartment in the back of our apartment building, in the middle of an unruly garden that offered a thousand promises of discovery and construction. Next to us there was a hotel, where people swam all day and sometimes mariachis played at night and next to that, on the other side, there was a night club, right behind the wall that formed the final boundary to my garden..
My fascination with this place started with its description. A night club. A club of the night. A place where the denizens of the night got together and played. Life there started long after I was in bed and away from the street and safe from any sign of commotion or crowds. Life there started with loud thumping music, a loud bass drum that never ended, the driving disco beat that anticipated the electronic music that I would someday come to embrace. Here the beat was loud and dark and it made the night tremble and, through its power, I could hear violin strings and thick bass and women singing in long melismas and over all that, I could sometimes hear people laughing, and these people were both men and women and I could hear that their laughter was tinged with alcohol and that gave it a sense of insanity, of danger and of lust.
Once I saw a group of women walking towards the club, one night when my Dad was bringing me back home from playing pinball at the arcade. The mysterious women were stumbling slightly through the broken sidewalks in very tall high heels. They had on very short dresses that barely covered the top of their thighs and revealed large expanses of their breasts and their backs. Their hair was shiny and curly and big, like a big black globe covered in silvery strands. They walked with a certain kind of determination and I saw them then as adults and, in knowing that these women were adults, I also knew that they wanted sex. I came to see that, somewhere in the club of the night, men and women met each other, and they laughed drunkenly and they flirted and they danced and as they danced, they touched each other lightly and sometimes they went home with each other and, like a puzzle that is on the verge of being solved but isn’t completely clear yet, I could vaguely postulate that most of the laughing drunken people that I heard at night were there to find another adult to touch and possess, even if only for a single night or even a few hours. This possibility filled me with anxiety and rushes of energy engulfed me from my crotch up into my stomach, and it was all so strong that it made my chest hurt. Sometimes I would sit on the terrace in the middle of the night, watching the bats twirl against the yellow light of the single light bulb and I would listen for the laughter and a loud man’s voice that might call for something and the female response that was more laughter and the music never stopped and I came to hear the loud thump as a raw call to nakedness and lust and I would hear it in my heart and in my stomach and I could almost see the bats dancing to it as they flashed like black lightning before my eyes and my chest was hurting so much that I wanted to run away, but I couldn’t stop listening.
One night, I was woken up from a deep sleep by the sound of gunfire and my mom ran towards me (she slept in the living room and I slept in the single bedroom at that time) and sat with me, running her hand through my hair, and then we heard more gunfire and the music in the club of the night had stopped and there were screams and shouts and then there was one more shot and more screams. I looked at my mom and wondered and she said that something was going on in the "night club" and I asked what it was but she didn’t know. In my imagination I could see the women in their miniskirts running in the dark, away from the guns and the angry men, and I could see the men running after them and maybe there were some men to protect them, but there was no music and no laughter and I was sorry for the little club of the night and I wondered if it would ever come back and serenade me with its strange sounds. To me, this had to mean the end. How could the music and the laughter come back to a place after gunfire and screams and terror had broken its magic apart?
As soon as the sun started to come up I could hear people outside, the distinct chaotic rumbling of a crowd and young men calling out and whistling loudly to each other, which has always been the way for young men to communicate in El Salvador. I ran to my mother and asked her if we could go and see. She didn’t want to but I begged and begged and told her that there were other people there and it should be ok and we would only get to the corner and if it seemed dangerous we would be right back and she still didn’t want to but she had to go out anyway because she needed to walk the dog and I kept on insisting and finally she agreed. So we walked out in the early morning and the air was very thin and cold and the sun had not come out all the way and I was wearing a thin blue jacket but I was still very cold and I didn’t care. I rushed ahead towards the corner while my mom called out for me to slow down and the little mutt that was our pet at that time barked at me to slow down and I said yes but kept on running and I made it to the top of the corner and saw the crowd of people around the stairway that lead down into the club of the night and there were several skinny young men pulling something up and having a lot of trouble. They all had their shirts off, tied around their waists, and they were whistling and the people were muttering among themselves, maids and rich women and a few men and the young men below whistled again and three of them together pulled up harder and then I saw what they were pulling.
It was a big frozen bundle of death, a shirtless man covered in blood that seemed to be as solid as a tree trunk and as dark and as heavy. The man was facing down so I could only see his back, and I wondered why it had no shirt on, and I wondered if it was cold, and then I knew that it was very cold, colder than any skin I had ever felt, cold like a big block of ice in the shape of a brown skinned man, and the young men without shirts pulled the heavy man up, the heavy man that was no longer a man, not the way he had been before that night, and one of the young men laughed and I could see the blood more clearly and it was already drying on his back and some of the women talked louder and my mom said that we should go back, that we shouldn’t be looking at this. I was too startled and confused to argue so I looked once more at the heavy cold body with its blood stained back and the three boys that were struggling to lift it and then we walked back to our apartment in silence.
By the next night, the loud thumping had returned, and again there was laughter and jokes and I wondered if some of these same people had known this man the night before, and maybe they had even laughed at his jokes, and maybe one of these very jokes had lead to his destruction. And the thumping still meant the women in their short dresses and the men with evil eyes and now I knew that the adults got together to drink and laugh and sometimes they got together for a night and sometimes some of them never came back but the music would still go on, loud, powerful, eternal. The pain in my chest was as strong as ever and the drunken laughter was a flashing doorway into the cold adult heart which someday I hoped to touch with my curious little hands, a heart as cold as a huge block of ice in the shape of a dark skinned man being carried up a stairway of dead gray stone.