Binlood the Mix Poetry by
Lawrence Welsh &
John Macker
Š2015 Lawrence Welsh Š2015 John Macker
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the express written permission of the author, except in the case of written reviews. ISBN 978-1-929878-77-2 First edition
PO Box 5301 San Pedro, CA 90733 www.lummoxpress.com
Printed in the United States of America
iv
Binlood the Mix
Introduction
I was first introduced to El Paso poet Lawrence Welsh’s work through Albuquerque poet Todd Moore. I checked out his Skull Highway published by La Alameda Press in 2008. I found a kindred spirit in his words and his concerns. Although he works in a somewhat minimalist style, a short line, his ideas, his breath, the way he loads a line, pack a wallop. Like my own writing, his is concerned with the border, Southwest tribal mysticism, rock ‘n roll, other poets. Scorpions. Rattlesnakes. True, we’re enthusiastic about many of the same things, much of the same imagery, but we don’t sound alike. Like twin sons of different mothers trying to make sense of word magic in the desert. And we’re both Irish. In this collaboration, (for lack of a better term) you’ll find two completely different ways to put words on the page. It was Larry’s idea to join forces, so to speak, to present differing styles right next to each other, up close & personal, to communicate not just a vision, but an assemblage of visions. We realize that part of our job description is to, as Lorca explained, break open the pomegranate (the English language translation for Lorca’s beloved Granada), and discover “the blood of the wounded earth.” Its passions and mysteries. The rest has to do with sharing what we may find. —John Macker
viii
Blood in the Mix
Lawrence Welsh
bl o o d i n t h e mi x
CORONA
roof collapses slowly year in, year out in the midst of black-faced sheep shearing ceremonies one wonders what if or who still lives here? the white-washed window slightly open let us remain, oh lord, collapsed from above. the final breakage with an invite to move or to start the rebuilding again
2
Law rence Welsh
OUTLAW WAITING for todd moore
perhaps a yes perhaps not perhaps a gasoline hand or the drought drafts to still his moves give cold machinations and turnkey privileges on the plain: it’s staked it’s stalked the coolness and no regret around his squinting eyes
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bl o o d i n t h e mi x
EXIT O for danny solis
we crossed out there on the drum on the blood of one for the word that ancient taste the narrow gatherings of now where butterfly dancer of pojoaque or butterfly tattoos dubbed doc ray or el paso butterfly no bitter angel in the west texas sand and dust * during april the wind never stops so the chimes blow and the blue lights blow too all small on the line the fat fireflies of just enough just enough light *
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Law rence Welsh
bleed sanctions of open skull we crack brown and chisel down to chip back bone to word or beyond word to vision that shows in portraiture and then whispers: spirit watches here unsmiling but moved spirit resides here old medicine eyes old gray one we never knew what to call him father ocotillo yucca dancer stone maverick chihuahuan joe she or owl eyes digging‌
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bl o o d i n t h e mi x
if “she” shows for us who denies the harshness to say medicine came back tonight simply call his name “medicine” the one named all our names in this room: my navajo sister chaco brother tales of cardiff wales and glasgow and me bringing in the irish
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Law rence Welsh
for always the irish dance and brawl and tell those nonstop tales and now medicine is a celt medicine is a great irish priest a fairy a druid poet on the high seat talking chihuahua and south albuquerque blues we call him harp medicine rosary medicine eagle medicine or steady eye medicine as he watches us *
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bl o o d i n t h e mi x
o ancient one we thank you for your visit those who see and don’t see we thank you for your blessings let us see you again always on your calendar but please return for we trust and cradle your ways for you’ve shown up for the good
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Law rence Welsh
and the light and a view of the end which will always be the beginning or to teach us that chief seattle was right * now these spirits will never leave will own us and we them will become us and we them and we’re so grateful that they’re here and then gone but bow now as they go and pray for their sweet and safe and lonely return to the start or beyond the start to the beginning of it all again
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bl o o d i n t h e mi x
COYOTE MASK
let sand create free flight for the one: aerial in lodge shadow of flights’ smoked-out confession of seeing the see through eyes where flames take the desert become sotol or plumes of sage‌
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Law rence Welsh
wear outside inside it wore itself and floated until medicine shouted banish it away that thing that thing casts too wide a shadow for a dancer a beginner here
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bl o o d i n t h e mi x
THE FLARE UP
owl wood or eyes popping cedar to still one flame then wind down the chimney or up in sparks
beaver teeth flame of law fire chaser
we all love all become ash on the vine dust on the roofs of rest
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Law rence Welsh
COYOTE CHASER
lemon eyes attach to patch of bones to deming or approaches that way show up backside the border highway old santa teresa crosser who knows only faulty sand or the beginner: eyes forgetting substance or substances his practice all practice his smoking disregard for game for dis respect
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bl o o d i n t h e mi x
DOVE AND BURNING CRUCIFIX
let the hole envision the pit the cold of round the wind of no bottom the blackness of sea create absolute destinies of uncertainty w/ vision and sweat and sweat on to drench through the night this i had to do to get back to the start the original vision of change and remorse
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Law rence Welsh
this vision before the first eye opening but what then of the sun? my soul nameless w/ a name my ember one ash of hand picked cedar wood that becomes only one spirit one praise to send up then retreat on bandaged feet come to everson again and visit me i’m down to a dime my last hit before looking up
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bl o o d i n t h e mi x
BLINDFOLD AND CROSS
let indian ink become a mother a stamp of death a stamp beyond the stars to hold the sand sage or the sand itself a hanging turned to down turned smiles equals fever or the distrust of rising up maybe hobo davidson or vestiges scream the peace plateaus w/ red and white roses intertwine on the highway the wood holding petals until they drop off and get blown away into blue
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Law rence Welsh
WESTERN CROSS
we wanted you graying cottonwood of desert nights where the wood falls on its own where smooth to own never existed where they fired them in a ditch ignoring penitente honor we wanted to scar our backs on range switchbacks to feel the lightning when it comes and become part of the wash all of the wash again instead we found glass o flawed jewels smoothed too by sand and the elixir on throats to remain priceless or $8.99 for all you can drink for the shades your eyes can’t meet for the loving but insidious touch for the golden and rusted nails for the touch the touch
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bl o o d i n t h e mi x
OF LOYOLA
hath blue serpentine mask of the row: rosemary lavender and second mesa corn usher the steps to ringing bells:
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Law rence Welsh
bronze and silver’s melody foretells arrivals and departures for the hungry of bread the thirsty parched for prayers and end up waiting with fire in their mouths a peace on their tongues
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bl o o d i n t h e mi x
THE MYSTERIES OF LIGHT
masked bone replenishes masked bone on spray-painted walls -
punched through
or old tooth & nail retrospectives * dangerhouse and above a rattling for a door’s remorse *
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Law rence Welsh
if the others leave us w/out leaving i become spell bound or road bound or one final kick out the door into the burning ways of altars -stone or stoned
or lit up in sand and yucca the whole spiked deal of blooming until the shut-eye vision is dream or more into the pure sound or ringing of faulty bells
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Blood in the Mix
John Macker
bl o o d i n t h e mi x
While the Symbolists Stormed Paris
Mescalero Apache sat on a rock. The most fragile rain of Sonora doused the campfire, pocked the hard ground with scattered pin-headed splashes, its cool analgesic relieved temporarily the solitary volcano of his fate. This morning, I had a cup of coffee while the Symbolists stormed Paris. They learned there was much to learn from the dead, how the desert deranges the senses up close, makes you believe you see pre-historic bones of ancient birdsong in the vast blue empty silence, or the distinctive pedigree of a rattlesnake’s memory.
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John Macker
This morning, I’m drinking coffee and reading Verlaine while the sun soaks the page in warm yellow light. The summer was hotter than Janis Joplin singing Summertime, the campfire smoke will cleanse you if you let it wash over you with all the theatrics of the wind— and Verlaine left his flamboyant drunken mark on every bar he entered, half-finished scraps of absinthe-soaked poems erupted out of his pockets and, separated from his lover, let the river’s edge smells of Paris wash over him like cheap perfume. He scrawled Rimbaud’s phone number on every latrine wall he found from Montparnasse to Clichy.
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bl o o d i n t h e mi x
Angels Broken Down in Denver
I. I once worked Larimer Street, it sliced north and south through town to the South Platte river, serrated-edged winds blew wild and grisly down from Wyoming, blew newspaper shards and ghost flesh down the alleys. Sundays, the trees exploded with birdsong. Instead of church I’d read Robin Blaser, who wrote part of a poet’s spiritual discipline is to be touched by the dark. The angels laid them away: freezing, debris field faces occupied the street, traded electric razors for wine, free to be devoured by the wind, boxcar woman sprawled by the railroad tracks, I could see her head wound from a block away, her hair a ghost crow frenzy of black feathers, downwind from Wind River, out of the cold, in and out of Indian time, her blood flowed into the DNA of Larimer Street.
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John Macker
Front page from yesterday’s newspaper in some other language, still blows against her body; an election year, the headlines endorsed the apocalypse but misspelled grief. Nothing would ever heal me if not for these unraveling threads of our common spirit. The railroad bars, and the red brick walls, with faded graffiti scrawls of desolation, moaned with neglect. Neon signs over bereft sidewalks, over the El Chapultepec: Tonight! Thomas Tilton on drums, D Minor on bass! had the temerity to flicker on and off and finally Out, because Jesus didn’t save that night, because the souls were untouchable and blew down the street that night, because the night was stubbornly American, because the mariposa, lily of the barrio, bloomed, sang out loud and then died an angel’s death, because it’s not hard to give the city your blessing because it’s a mother, a jewel, a place of worship, a jazz trio, living proof Jesus loves dead places, a sentient being.
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bl o o d i n t h e mi x
II. After Creeley Whenever I return the echoes breathe deep, leave their own music behind on the way out. I don’t know how to say these things, if I should, how long I might stay here, thinking about you, that day 28 years ago, you gave off so little heat, your grey hair more wisps of smoke than hair, in a room nobody should belong to, even facing the pale light of the window was a kind of scourge, a few labored breaths away from a summer butterfly’s tranquility, her music just above the ground.
I still feel “tender, semiarticulate flickers of your presence . . .” I didn’t know how far my vocabulary would get me or how far you’d drift away from us when the summer sky didn’t care where the mariposa lily ended and eternity began, all the earth’s butterfly’s that survived the chemicals and killing fields, flickered with unforgettable fire. 28
John Macker
Artaud in Mexico
He tells the dubious Tarahumara Rimbaud never met a French poet he didn’t disdain. Eats peyote by the handful from a painted gourd, has a vision of the nativity of Hieronymus Bosch, dances the night away with peyote sorcerers, intuits the last words Sam Peckinpah spoke to god, reads A Season in Hell by firelight next to a graveyard with its lyrical colored metal crosses and plastic flowers; chants, one must be absolutely modern as the incantatory clouds climb like smoking gun blossoms high over the Sierra Madre. The Indians have mercy on this tattered schizoid soul, install his junkie ass upright on a drunken mule for the long road home. They recognize a kindred spirit when they see one, his garish, provocative nature not at all at odds with the fellaheen. They dig his otherworldliness, his seer’s heart. 29
bl o o d i n t h e mi x
(For Ted Berrigan)
Your “code of the west” is not the same as mine. You are all Manhattan via Oklahoma party Pepsi cowboy true rumbling gut on the Apollinaire streets. Codes are like sonnets: the truth is so elusive it takes pills every morning just to be seen. Great seeing you, Ted. You aren’t dead, you’re hibernating while every winter your poems paw through the snow looking for berries. My Code of the West is as follows: • Every saloon girl is fair game unless she’s your sister. • hair shirts are for sissies • guns are to be belittled and then planted every spring • a saddle is as good as a sonnet to a blind horse. • “When you ask death for his credentials, you are dead.” –William S. Burroughs • By 1918, 20,000 British men of military age refused the draft. Hence, more bodies for World War II. • Riding alone across the desert on a blind horse, if you encounter an angel wearing chaps, it’ll be Ted Berrigan • A sonnet is as good as a junior sheriff’s posse badge to a blind cowboy. • Calamity Jane is a sympathetic muse. • Hands up! • “If they move, kill ‘em!”
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John Macker
if the river was whisky
Charlie Musselwhite 23 years dry plays the blues harp like an archangel, as mournful as Delta cemetery weeping with street ghosts or wailing red tailed hawk screech you can hear from the mountains of the moon.
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bl o o d i n t h e mi x
“Say your name to the rocks. The wind will blow your voice away.” -for Kell Robertson
on the cool, kindling morning I got the news, maybe you stared into the fire called desperation for the last time, you once wrote: “I am no coyote. I am a man”. The coyote believed you and you weren’t Pretty Boy Floyd but you got his Choctaw last words down in that last breath cornfield middle America where the earth and the wind chill bless all the pretty bones. You asked the universe, does the blood of that Indian, dead 150 years, dead as Pretty Boy’s last words flow here? In these veins? Poems, like barstool blues in sun-stunned border towns of the mind where all cowboys with words to spare, rhythms and women,
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John Macker
pouring like lava out of their brittle shadows, begin each Juarez whorehouse litany of love with: things drop out of our hearts you could kill a herd of Buffalo with Your later life in New Mexico a hermitage of rumor or legend, scorpions and Maria’s full of grace deified in your verse, the lyricism of empty saddle and barebones motel was your range. You wired your fate to this territory earth, you wore the coyote death mask, you told the world, officer sir, all of my means of support are invisible.
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bl o o d i n t h e mi x
Diego
We buried my old dog Diego on St. Patrick’s Day, next to the arroyo one of the driest of devil winters. He looked like any other dog in New Mexico, like the Santo Domingo pueblo dogs, asleep on the dusty earth in the shade, dreamy respite from the Corn Dance heat. I wanted to write: I wept tears of Irish whisky on his grave but all I kept thinking was the Great Spirit must’ve discovered that placing his soul on earth for a spell during my life, beat having to answer for all the sorrows of the world, if only for a moment, any day.
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John Macker
Degas Woman
My language is as much yours as mine, when you speak, I know which map to find us on, which longitude traverses us, mountain daylight time is what makes us tick. I know your lips, the rapture was the first moment I saw them amidst the old jazz albums and beat paperbacks and you haven’t changed since Degas painted you all those years ago. In your eyes, I can see a motel with a pool, edge of the desert, when we couldn’t drive any farther, after three days in Mexico, trailed by the squalor of a dozen border towns, each one carried its own doomed fragrance on the summer breeze. I see blue oceans roiling with mysteries and transmissions from the deep, once they’re solved. Sleeping in mid-winter, when the sunrise glows rosy on the snow, the animals in our dreams are soul chasers; when you take your morning hike, the incredible blues of the jays follow. 35
bl o o d i n t h e mi x
The Day Winter Hung Around Like a Wounded Heart
My long time friend looked at his palm and said his acupuncturist told him he’d live to be 88, his hair hasn’t changed in all the years. At Zia Diner we tried to explain to each other the months of silence: old friends shredding the cold wind, our shared lives go back to at least the first Reagan administration and Kesey at chataqua in Boulder. Yesterday, his son survived cancer, yesterday, the sun skipped a beat and sent spring spiraling into damp exile. We talked family, how politics is as blindly satirical as it is banal. I asked if he felt like a patriarch, he said “I feel like a rebel.” Our silence was mutual, took up residence in the heart and spoke in complete sentences until all that was left between us was borderline winter.
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John Macker
After the funeral in Denver, driving south into New Mexico
It’s February on the winter betrothed plains. I share an anonymous rest stop with a lady trucker, she cooks something in the parking space on a small grill. I can see her breath as she empties the used grey coals into the snow. I walk to the fence line and not far beyond it, near the Canadian River, they say a trail stop, some structure, a homestead, once raised a family, was a life giving lone prairie light against the darkness and was abandoned unceremoniously, maybe to the last straw of a blizzard, or the coming of the railroad, maybe to the last man standing over Johnny Cash singing, “There Ain’t No Grave”, the night when there was no darkness worth its weight in damnation more remorseless than this prairie dark. The last of the whisky finished with a flourish in the gothic cold rolled empty back into the black space that was once a well-lighted room.
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bl o o d i n t h e mi x
The Royal Road to the Interior*
Out here, old maps grind their teeth in dreams, badlands get encrypted on the soul, the wind loses track of them without compass or interpreter. This featureless mid-winter’s bleak sub-freezing flatness, ice shards on the Rio Grande, I wasn’t there to give any directions or relive any pain, our echoes collected an incorruptible dust, the same trudged through down at the border wire, a mouthful of dawns dripping with rust. An accumulated American symmetry of lines stretched for miles, where “clear into Texas” doesn’t mean unobstructed or clean shaven with winter’s straight razor or some bloody unabashed view into ancient history. Petrified wagon ruts on El Camino Real from San Juan to Mexico City, the footprints are pointed north and livid in the earth. 38
*El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro
The Lummox Press publishes chapbooks, the Little Red Book series, perfect bound books (the Respect series), a poetry anthology (yearly) and e-books. The stated goal of the press is to elevate the bar for poetry, while bringing the “word� to an international audience. We are proud to offer this book as part of that effort. For more information and to see our growing catalog of choices, please go to www. lummoxpress.com/lc/
Lawrence Welsh
John Macker
New Mexico-Arizona Book Award Winner
The highest praise I have for an author is that I keep his books close by in order to inspire me to write. John Macker is such an author. Reading Macker puts one in a different state of mind. You are hypnotized by the language, fascinated by his Southwest landscapes, and thrown into a consciousness that is usually reserved for the works of a jazz musician or bluesman. He changes the way you think. He changes the way you feel.
Southwest Books of the Year Notable Book Award Winner Pen Southwest Book Award Finalist Writers’ League of Texas Book Award Finalist * * * Begging for Vultures is as important a book as Gary Snyder’s legendary Turtle Island. Like Snyder, Welsh has freed his voice to regather stones and paths for coyotes and rattlesnakes. He has whispered and sung to both the real and dreaming elements of the Southwest, which, indeed, answer him. —Ray Gonzalez, The Bloomsbury Review * * * Lawrence Welsh’s collection Begging for Vultures is a muscular, sometimes menacing antidote to the anemic chapbooks by which some poetry is dribbled as tightfistedly as rain on the Southwest borderland. His poems are likewise not niggardly but rather generous and humane, sometimes chiseled as if on a mesa, then rapping with word play, proof of a virtuoso at the top of his game. —Newcity Lit: Chicago
—Tony Moffeit, author of Luminous Animal and Born to be Blue * * * John slams a hole in the head of America letting darkness out. He publishes his books, anthologies, magazines, broadsides, post cards, anything to get the word out. It’s always the word, the craft, it must be done. The wonder of poet-pals is they share & learn from each other without sounding alike at all. Verse & craft. Poet/ responsibility, teach & take one from the other & they will live in yr heart wherever you may be on this earth. Together down the dusty street again, the kid has yr back covered. As I write this, I think “this is for John” & I can hear Doc say: “ok boys, let’s do it!” As we always will. —Tony Scibella, author of The Kid in America and I’m Afraid There Will be No Parade for Us.
This is a sample. To order the complete 92-page book, visit our website at: www.lummoxpress.com/lc/