Art and Energy Mix in Many Ways in Wyoming

Mexico Stories: Part II

5.

 

The sun was born of a dry landscape. Today, perhaps because the Wirikuta reserve in San Luis de Potosi is its birthplace, the sun illuminates Wirikuta’s matte hillsides with the most tender glow and sets upon the desert floor in a most slow surrender. 

Wirikuta’s nooks and crannies and shrub-covered undulations give refuge to towns – they are carved into hillsides, or superimposed upon them, or else houses appear like scattered matchsticks without ever gathering into something that could be called ‘town.’ Underneath the carpet of the ground is another city, that of old mine shafts and galleries big as ballrooms carved into the rock below: silver. 

There are churches above and below the low shrubbery, and both catered to the miner. In the one above, the floors are made of what looks like the sidewalls of cedar chests; the patron saint is San Francis de Assisi. The one below is dark, the little altar illuminated only when headlamps fall upon the stone in spots. Doesn’t that make prayer somehow more personal? 

 

In an abandoned mine site below Real de Catorce, the altar was the only thing with any visible upkeep. The wooden portals and massive stone walls of the wearing buildings were not attended to. Water flowed out of the mine mouth; we ventured into its velvet throat to cool off from the heat, then napped on logs. The resident cat led us to a man that used to mine here. I mined all over, he told us, but came back here, because this is where I am from. Cats leave home to die, men come home. 

Mexico Stories: Part I

1. 

The Center of Mexico City, C. says, is magical. The buildings lean heavily, as if on diabetic swollen legs, as if they might straighten out, but just now are needing to catch their breath. At night, the tunnels of sidewalks seem furbished with funny mirrors, walls jut out here and there at unexpected angles and the burdened bellies of structures expand voluptuously into sidewalk space. Much trash on the dark streets, the residue of day-time markets. Alleys lead to yellow bulbs illuminating crowded courtyards with plastic saints, which many families share amongst themselves; tenements. Unexpectedly, there are ruins, too, inserting themselves into the modern city with a stubbornness that, though worn, is indefatigable. And the Mexicans, they know, they fly kites by the thousands in the Zocalo, push the bright plastic into the sky and tether themselves to reality only by the thinnest strings.

2.

Commerce is segregated and specialized by product. Perhaps it is because Mexico City is so large, its offerings so vast, that stores and markets and shopping streets are grouped by product; Flower Market, Party Decorations Street, Shoe Street, Witches’ Supply Market, Cake Store. As if to make it easier. The effect is overwhelming. Store after store, market-stand after market-stand, offering the same product or various iterations of it. The shoes did not impress much. But a warehouse full of flowers, truck beds loaded up with rosemary ten feet high, gladiolus blooms by the thousands, may have. Outside of the flower market, dozens of men and women sat around in the courtyard weaving crosses out of palm fronds and laughing at each other’s’ jokes.

 

3. 

Something about C. makes me feel Mom-ish, makes me want to dole out warnings, admonitions, safety advice. Though I rarely feel danger imminent to my own self, the danger I feel for others – metaphysical, physical – hovers inside me like a cloud of insects, buzzing, incessantly on the move, the cloud growing and contracting, but mostly expanding outward steadily into a panic attack. C. intensifies this somehow. I said the highway was no way to ride, but I didn’t mind, other than on her behalf.                

4. 

A famous movie producer’s – from Mexico golden age of cinema – house in Cuernavaca. That name sounds cavernous, but the town is on crowded hills. The house is frozen in a remote time; torn tarps hang over the floor-to-ceiling windows that look out to the pool and into a jungle of palms, furniture sits in small semi-circles, arranged for multiple parties at once, photos of the patriarch. S. lives there now, one of the producer’s daughters. She’s had four loves, she told us over dinner. The first abandoned her for Canada during Mexico’s student strikes of 1968 and called collect to tell her he got another girl pregnant. The second was a man who died twice. Third was an archaeologist that left her to die in a small hut after she contracted Hepatitis C. The day she met the fourth she told him she wanted to have his baby. That baby’s paintings now hang in the producer’s house, but the baby-daddy was dismissed soon after her birth. If you’re anything like the first three, she told the fourth, I want nothing to do with you. S. did not let us do the dishes after dinner. After an operation on a brain tumor, she does dishes to strengthen her body and recover.         

Out West Photos

Kizoa slideshow: WY, MT - Slideshow

Letter to Wyoming

We are friends now, Wyoming, so I feel I can be honest. I thought you were a loser when we first met. You were lonely and vengeful with your wind, your plains like cold, empty bed sheets tucked into snow covered mountains, polka-dotted with ungulates and dead towns.

But then on that coldest day – do you remember? - we boiled water and threw it in the crisp air and it turned to snowflakes and I started to fall for you.

In the dead towns, I met cowboys with their throats wrapped in silk wild rags and on roads where you can drive fast I found steely skies that stretched out into impossible horizons. At the Hobo hot springs I met a man that looked like a Viking, and in the forest I prospected for gold in the glacial streams, and on a ranch I fished snakes out of a canal, and in the mountains I traced petroglyphs with my finger, and everywhere I watched trains trudge across landscapes in endless caravans, and I met people with faces open as the land, soft-spoken as the ready snow, with belt buckles big as the sky.

I ran my hands against your thick seems of coal in the Basin, too, and I have not forgotten your white outs that made it seem like the world was made of cold cotton candy. Also, I’m still not sure about these loud souped-up trucks, dear, and I remember Matthew Shepard and my landlord, who thought I had an attitude problem because she couldn’t pronounce my name. Sometimes, too, the loneliness and the starkness still reign.

This isn’t goodbye, Wyoming. This isn’t a proposition of any sort. I sunned yesterday on granite slabs in a field of blue columbines and now it is September, which means snow, and I feel alright about that. I thought I would let you know just that. That you’re alright, dear.

Caceres, Spain

Though the birds and their shrill song is present always here, they come out most fully when the sky starts to pinken and the heat gives in to a slight breeze, around 10. They emerge from the holes in the castles and walls, which at this hour are already glowing, and they circle in the sky madly, their sharp little wings like daggers and their vast numbers in the pale sky making it look like a fine fishing net is dancing in the wind above the plaza.

A man with a cane walks across the plaza and looks up at them. A lone crane flies from one roof to another and looks like a massive white airplane striking through the blackness of rapidly circling little swallows. Couples make out all over the place. A man packs a cigarette before lighting it on the steps below the clock. When it gets a little darker, the sky a deeper blue like the blue of tissue paper, and the birds fly close to the buildings, their shadows swoop along the walls as if on mirrors and it looks like there are even more of them than there are.

Uzbekistan: recent archives

I went to Uzbekistan, but Uzbekistan failed at the internet. I share:

The Motherland tests you in many ways. At the airport , the line to check in is hella long, moving real slow, and it seems like they'll never get through all of us in time. I seek out a security gaurd and he laughs. The plane is delayed nine hours, he says. It takes three to check in my bag and the man checking me in can't answer any of my questions. He writes a number on the back of my ticket and says to call with any inquiries. My dad comes back to pick me up. We drink vodka at a friend's house and eat shashlik. When I call the number a bit later to see if the flight has been further delayed, the message informs me that their office hours are Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm. It is Sunday. Sunday is for relaxing and so I do.

I return to the airport when it starts to obumbrate. I like the swarthy clientele of this airline, the ladies in sparkling head scarves, the plump women and the men in pointy shoes. The blondes will get off in Latvia, the brunettes keep going East. There are a couple of outliers. An American blonde, older, animal print cardigan, shaking head, bobble-like, that makes me think that she is going to Uzbekistan to find herself a husband. Something attitudinal. A young Korean girl with a laptop. And me. I wore my gold necklace but I didn't bring my gold teeth.