The bones rattle in their new boxes

“Hay muertos que no hacen ruido y son mayores sus penas”

Refrán popular guardado hasta el presente en el pensamiento de Antonio Esquivel, Mora, New Mexico

The bones rattle in their new boxes,Tibias clacking against pelvis bone,Cuadriles dancing cuadrilesThe only sounds you have made in hundred yearsYour spirits hover above in our thinkingas your bones journey belowOur songs are older than these bones,As old as purgatory and as clear as Saint Paul’s lettersMirrors open up in the gray, chrome skyBetween the road to Bernalilloand the fields of Lauro Aragón,Dry, dry, dry now in climate change.

You were lost to us in a flood,Floating in earthmud till the waters recededYou went downstream, we thought,To turn into silt near the Gulf of Mexico,Only now do we understand how you never meant to leave to us.Rose García points us to Ezekiel,“The hand of the Lord came upon me,and led me out in the spirit of the Lordand set me in the center of the plain,which was now filled with bones.”And so you let the water rush over you,Wrapped your sinewy parts around theDriftwood and cizaña until you wereDeposited again, again and again deep in The arteries and ditch banks of your once lush fields.Where you came to rest patiently next to Domino’s Pizza.

—¿Santiago Gurulé, no oyes el crujir de mis huesos?--Pero tan quieta que te has quedado, Amelia,tan cambiada mujer.—¿Será que mis oidos están tapados de tierra?—¿O te quedaste arrumbada como chancla vieja detrás de algún tabique?—Santi soñé no sé qué noche entre tantas y tan oscuras,que Inés Tafoya iba agarrada de la mano de Vidal, el herrero,ilícitos huyendo rumbo a la sierra.—Amelia, la muerte no te ha quita’o lo chismosa.—Santi ¿qué pesadilla sin fin es éstade esperar sin esperanza el bien de Dios?—¿Te pasa como a mi que la boca me sabe a ventoretes de tierra? ¡ay de nosotros!—Ayúdame a pasar el rato platicando.

Qué curioso cuando los difuntos se dejan oir,Odd too, that you have let yourselves be seen,At San Carlos camposanto, spirits come to see bones,Mostly out of curiosity.They join our singing as a late winter squall sweeps the high bluffThe snowflakes swirl and kiss our foreheads,Anoint rock, dirt, plastic roses, headstones, stoles, the new dead and old deadAnd those left standing in the commandment to live together.

The workmen drop each box of quaking bones.Passing through the earthdoor,you press on with your bone journey just ahead of us;Remembering your houses, your fields, the horses you rode,The love you left in the loins of your descendentsA hundred years rush by in whispers and your bones say,“De la tierra fui formado,La tierra me da de comer,La tierra me ha sostenido,Y al fin yo tierra he de ser.”and the call goes out from one brother to another:“por las ánimas de los difuntos de la plazade Alameda todos debemos rogar”the mountain swells, inhales the expansive horizon,and the grey sky responds:by the grace of God I am what I am.

“Segundo entierro” foto/photo by Miguel Gandert