after a surgical operation
with acupuncture.
The mind
is a golden eagle. An arctic tern
is flying in the desert: and
the desert incarnadined, the sun
incarnadined.
The photograph
of a poster of Chang Ch’ing is
two removes from reality. Lin Piao,
Liu Shao-chi, and Chang Ch’ing
are either dead or disgraced.
The poster shows her in a loose
dress drinking a martini; the
issues of the Cultural Revolution
are confounded.
And, in perusing
the photographs in the mind’s eye,
we discern bamboo, factories,
pearls; and consider African wars,
the Russian Revolution, the
Tierra Amarilla Courthouse Raid.
And instead of insisting that
the world have an essence, we
juxtapose, as in a collage,
facts, ideas, images:
the arctic
tern, the pearl farm, considerations
of the two World Wars, Peruvian
horses, executions, concentration
camps; and find, as in a sapphire,
a clear light, a clear emerging
view of the world.
The Moon Is a Diamond
Flavio Gonzales, seventy-two, made jackhammer
heads during the War; and tells me
about digging ditches in the Depression
for a dollar a day. We are busy plastering
the portal, and stop for a moment
in the April sun. His wife, sick for
years, died last January and left a
legacy—a $5,000 hospital bill.
I see the house he built at fifteen:
the ristras of red chile hanging
in the October sun. He sings “Paloma
Blanca” as he works, then stops,
turns: “I saw the TV photos of the
landing on the moon. But it’s all
lies. The government just went out
in the desert and found a crater.
Believe me, I know, I know the moon
is a diamond.”
Listening to a Broken Radio
1
The night is
a black diamond.
I get up at 5:30 to drive to Jemez Pueblo,
and pass the sign at the bank
at 6:04, temperature 37.
And brood: a canyon wren, awake, in its nest in the black pines,
and in the snow.
2
America likes
the TV news that shows you the
great winning catch in a football game.
I turn left
at the Kiska store.
And think of the peripatetic woman
who lives with all her possessions in a shopping cart,
who lives on Sixth Avenue at Eighth Street,
and who prizes and listens to her
broken radio.
Moenkopi
Your father had gangrene and
had his right leg amputated, and now has diabetes
and lives in a house overlooking the
uranium mines.
The wife of the clown at Moenkopi
smashes in the windows of a car with an ax,
and threatens to shoot her husband
for running around with another woman.
A child with broken bones
is in the oxygen tent for the second time;
and the parents are concerned he
has not yet learned how to walk.
People mention these incidents
as if they were points on a chart depicting
uranium disintegration. It is all
accepted, all disclaimed.
We fly a kite over the electrical
lines as the streetlights go on:
the night is silver, and the night
desert is a sea. We walk back
to
