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Veracruz Codex
Two days before the beginning of Carnival
she and I, travelers on a voyage of rediscovery,
arrived in Veracruz naked from the neck up.
Having lived three centuries, maybe more,
in worlds known better to Creation,
having sat at the foot of glaciers and volcanoes
listening to the torrents of magma and black water,
we came as babies come,
weaned in the lap of Jehovah
during a tempest from which we never could return.
All day we stood in a rapture of memory
watching the instant tropic revolution,
quickly sprouting fins and gills
for another life in a semi-aquatic realm.
That night we shed our scales and sang,
we gave away our promised revelations,
all our combs and socks and pictures of the dead,
we cut loose our anchors and our prayers
and tossed them in the street, where they remained
unnoticed by the tired and sated cathedral.
Divested of all upbringing, habits and books,
the music alone churned in our hearts, and said
that we had entered the gates of another kingdom
ruled by the jaguar, the myth of man and woman
"becoming reality in the long run." The blood
became sap and coconut milk, a fountain
circled by a silver disc, our laugh,
the crazed and dreamy symbol of lost and found,
taken from the earth, whacked on the ass,
watered, hammered into shape, and transplanted.
One day after the Carnival at Veracruz
we discovered the sea of luminous creatures
where all true lovers and dreamers reside,
tending to the early morning light upon the palms,
gently cultivating the body's exotic clockwork,
listening for the bells of long-sunk holy places,
bowing to the all-effacing wind, the storm
that curls upon itself and makes a nest of drama,
seeking our applause our presence
our proper wonder,
asking if we have bathed
in the ocean of plenitude.
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