Natural Takeover of Small Things

II. San Joaquin Sutra

II San Joaquin Sutra 29 Valley of Saints; where holy preachers and Night Train drunk vagrants hobble their limbs in Oval Park, where once Lincoln’s beard got served the wasted pulpo of seven seas and the people lit up dazzling lights on Christmas Eve, where in mud ditches bathe the nude brown children & broken whites who together learned to speak crawdad in irrigation pipes, barefoot on busted wine bottles, and when days extend their radiant arms they follow the river into the mouth and there again learn to become mountain-child bulked like trunks of redwood trees, where campesino grandfathers bait little ones with raw serrano peppers teaching them early to memorize flavors of pain how the eyes flood, and the tongue is left to burn in silence, where tractor stoned youth chuck dirt clots at the testicles of bovines just to watch them giddyup their asses in frightening masks, toppling the massive beasts from their heavy hooves, guzzling gunpowder in bulge tight denims and ostrich-hide roach killers 30 laughing at the cosmos lyric in the radio box beaming satellite signals across Scorpio’s crab hands, out among the celestial expansion of the widest brim yet, where stands a jail cell for every son, two for paroled transients who sleep along drought stricken streams beneath totemic overpasses xylophone of ribs ballad for bread kneeling in shadows of Dairyland factories and packing sheds that reek of bruised fruit, mutiny bourgeoning among the cashews. I was there in the vicious freeze of ’98 wearing eggplant colognes & indestructible trousers, stationed beneath burning oil heaters, fanning the night with my holy hands when salt rock bullets entered the flesh and I experienced the first death— Sacred valley of Kawhean rivers, crooked horse legs creeked in crimson, valley of thigh and crotch, sacred lake of tule foliage fossiled in conch shells and holy stalagmite, —everything here sacred, you see the ditch banks and mass choirs alike, pious families and albino-eyed field mice snarling at the sky, 31 the foxtails and abandoned dogs of the countryside wagging tongues in dead air, sacred mariachi girth and carp scales lost in teeth, finger plucking catgut, smooth river rock and fungal gutters and neon waters trickling in the chasm, sacred theyoungmothers andfathers—thatneverwere the black moon of a mechanic’s fingernail, the silos and chicken factories, thick-boned and deplumed, sacred plumes of gagging monoxides eclipsing azure, Elephant Heart Plums, sacred, compost, compote, cotton gnats, sacred too, guns plunged through car windows, the windows, shards of color, streetlamps in all directions, sacred, Impalas dragging tail in metallic flake saffron airbrush burn Popocaptepetl rebozo flowing lava sacred, trailer parks and horseshoes, spent condoms, the blood on the carpet, bottlecaps hammered on trunks of trees, abandoned carousels, stereos pulsing in the throat, sacred. 32 The second death: Came from a tower of papier-mâché amid the sneering eyes of the projects and frigid TV dinners, barren bus stops and unemployment lines, a phalanx of reapers armed with golden shields issued by the public in ballot boxes and rigged elections, a nickel-plated bullet piercing drab doorways into half-dead hearts of men —only considered men on tax returns and obituary columns, and by the women who swill beer at their expense, and then a wristwatch heirloom from an old man to his grandson, desert turquoise in the eyes of molded silver, South Texas gypsy campesino, a halo of breath escaping the body, and then a chair weaver from the mountains of Nuevo Léon, painter of strange lotteries, a devil’s tender spear, stairwells leading nowhere— who I once saw suck the god end of a cactus spike and hallucinate Yeshua rainbows above the highway where deadly manures stir in the pearl center of table grapes tucked in a cove along the bountiful foot of the Sierra Nevadas— 33 Erasmo! I say your name and hear the clarion wails of a thousand egrets lofted in the willows like upturned tears waiting to drop Erasmo, where are your chairs now? In what cave do you find yourself, sulking acrylic abstractions in the dark? Erasmo—who sleeps in the melancholic sag of a hammock and waits for the company of an abandoned accordion smashing Mexican pulp in the blinding guajillo seed of sunrise...