“Next time, if there is a next time, ‘I want to go north to look for
“the source of the chill in my bones.’”
(Jack Spicer)
If we’re headed south,
Let’s steer clear of Chiapas.
I don’t want to be a tourist
in the middle of a third world revolution,
or point video cameras into brown faces,
or buy a week of someone’s life
for “shave and a hair cut two bits” and a Hershey bar
to wear around my neck for good luck and ethnic color.
I don’t want somebody else’s medicine bag.
I need to pack my own Ju Ju.
I can’t bargain for pesos with people
whose kids are sucking on stones, then marvel
at the green moon rising over Monte Alban,
or imagine the ritual ballgames at Palenque
through somebody else’s allotropic mushrooms.
I don’t want folks selling me magic, hand-woven carpets
when San Cristobal de las Casas is filled with Indians
in tiger-striped camouflage and automatic weapons.
Rusty knights, and conquistadors came through these parts once,
dragging their stinking armor,
bright-eyed, lean, unbidden men,
looking for lost cities to name for their king,
hairless savages to parade through the halls of a frozen castle,
or initiate into some ritual auto da fe.
They stuffed gold and jewels into their mouths,
until their stomachs swelled and bloated,
and they fell where they stood,
gorged and stupored, next to their horses.
Rusty knights and conquistadors dragging their stinking armor.
Lord Elgin took half the Acropolis to London
to protect it from Turkish cannon, he said.
Two bits for the Elgin Marble.
Chief Joseph’s eagle headdress could be in a museum,
with his Winchester repeater, in its deerskin beaded scabbard.
Everyone wants to bring home a souvenir,
a pre-Colombian fragment, a splinter from the true cross,
a heart in a jar of olive oil,
a ring of ears or a shriveled finger,
a video tape of a vacation to Sea World,
Graceland, or Big Rock Candy Mountain.
But we all carry stones under our tongues,
a grain of sand under the hard shells of our lives.
Even birds of no color don’t fly without shadows.
I want to travel as light as I can, collecting
what fits in my pocket or rocks in the lap of memory,
with tears I can cry without regret,
laughter without sharp edges that doesn’t leave
a bad taste in my mouth or stick to someone else’s face.
I want to suck the stones I carry under my tongue
smooth and polished into mementos that I can toss,
with all the muted lullabies into the lap of evening.