You are on page 1of 50

Chapter 2.

The Poetics of Ritual and Witness in Lorna Dee Cervantess Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger One decade after the publication of Emplumada, Lorna Dee Cervantes published From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger. Since the earlier book focused on formative early life experiences, it follows that the second book would move stylistically and thematically in new directions, following the arc of the poets development. While there is obvious change and this is to be expected, Cervantes also returns to the fundamental themes of survival and death introduced in Emplumada. As in the previous book, the poet depicts herself as both the parchment and the medium of historical inscription. In both Emplumada and From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger, Cervantes serves as the instrument of her work. In Emplumada she is her own creative mechanism, as her personal identity is intrinsically tied to literary agencyshe is the feather with which she composes. This book is about the poets discovery of herself as a world in and of itself; one possessing a kind of self-sufficiency that allows her to function as both the source and subject of her poetry. Since the poet of Cables of Genocide already knows this, the book becomes a depiction of encounters between the individual and other surrounding worlds and particularly her rapprochement with Mexican and Native American inheritances. The poems in Cables of Genocide are very different from those of Emplumada in terms of form, and this posits a fascinating point of departure for a more ample study of Cervantess work. Many of the newer poems are longer, denser, and visually,

164

conceptually, and verbally more complex. In fact, the complexity of the Cables of Genocide poems contrasts markedly with the signature economy and epigrammatic quality of the Emplumada poems. Whereas the poems in the previous book build upon the young womans response to predetermined, familial, and historical events, the poems of the second book work as a series of invocations of historical, literary, and social discourses. These discourses constitute an encompassing web that contains the poets private sphere as well as her interactions with the surrounding world. The main difference between the two books can be found in Cervantess approach to the depicted environments. In Emplumada she confronts violence and the brutality of poverty and sexual assault; her subjectivity arises despite the threats to her survival. In Cables of Genocide, she views her survival as an obligation to witness and report the history of others who could not endure. Importantly, Cervantes recognizes that while there are differences between the young woman of Emplumada and the mature woman of Cables of Genocide, historical forces continue to circumscribe personal fulfillment and freedom. The unrelenting and undiminished gravity of history is addressed in the title word, genocide. While the young daughter no longer faces the threat of domestic or sexual violence in the family home or the urban barrio, the independent adult woman continues to endure the quandary of the hard-won survival she poeticizes. Love and hunger--two other titular registers--represent the basic components of Cervantess survival. Hindrance from the satisfaction of these appetites becomes a form of degradation, and degradation takes on an absolute form in Cables of Genocide.

165

Genocide is the exercise of massive murder based upon the repudiation of some form of established distinctiveness (religious, ethnic, racial, or other). In Cervantess title, the parameters of identity are consistent with the parameters of genocidal death, and death is coterminous with the eradication of the fulfillment of human needs. Whereas love and hunger belong within the personal realm, the death brought on by genocide happens on a massive scale. By tying individual experience to genocide, Cervantes describes the ways in which historical discord reemerges in the sphere of intimate knowledge and representation. The apparent asymmetry between personally experienced suffering (hunger and loss of love) and mass death provides a constant source of poetic tension in Cables of Genocide. In order to secure a nexus between the personal and the historic, Cervantes constructs love and hunger as global yet individually embodied themes. The metaphoric approximation of the individual and the global evoked in the three nouns of the title genocide, love, and hungergenerates unequal layers of meaning at the same time that variegated representational values are assembled and arrayed through the figure of the cables. The cables operate in multiple ways: they string together disparate poetic values and events, enable communication among people, and convey historical, cultural, and personal information. The cables, then, are a communicative and poetic device serving metaphoric and linguistic purposes. They also bring forth a traceable history, and indict perpetrators of violence and genocide. Cables are a conduit of meaning in this book. Like the veins that supply and transport blood through the body, Cervantess cables transfer the poets personal visions

166

onto the medium of poetry. This personal creative world plays a vital role in the authors poetics, extending itself over all perceptions, emotions, and historical and political struggles in the poems. Cervantess individual visionary universe is indivisible from the everyday world; the commonplace and the spectral intermingle to produce fantastic juxtapositions and associations. At times, the poems seem to exist straight out from a dream, while at others times they appear to not have been edited at all. So far, I have attempted to provide an explanation of Cables of Genocides title as an operative source of poetic content and structure. The book is divided into four parts, each one opening with an epigraph and each one dedicated to the overarching themes of love and hunger within various contexts. Parts I and II introduce and explore major themes including: divorce, marriage, poetry, matrilineal lineage, and genocide. Interestingly, in Part III, Cervantes poses Neruda in the role of paramour and adversary. By making Neruda, a known philanderer and love poet, the addressee of the Part III poems, Cervantes critiques male dominance and places a female speaker in the dominant sexual role. Part IV focuses exclusively on, and enacts a poetic mourning of, divorce. As I argue below, poetry may take the form of a ritual ceremony. Several of the poems operate as ceremonial enactments of major themes. Thus Cervantes lifts the poem and its contents off the page and places them in a performative and sacred realm. The epigraph of Part I, entitled From the Cables of Genocide, introduces the notion that past events structure the present and the future: If you have had enough bad things happen to you as a child you may as well kiss off the rest of your life.

167

an anonymous mental health worker A relationship between childhood trauma and adult life is conspicuously introduced, and the progressive nature of a harmed past intrudes into the poetic sphere from the beginning. Since the harms of the past purportedly structure the future, life can then appear as a series of reoccurring evils, and dreams or visions become the primary venues for the transferal of the past into present. Whereas early life experiences present inexorable and damaging scenarios, divorce is one means of securing individual freedom and wellbeing upon the demise of marital love. Indeed, Cables of Genocide is structured around another life event, that of divorce. The poets marriage is coming to an end, the relationship between the spouses is increasingly tenuous, and this separation generates emotional hunger. In the opening poem, Drawings: For John Who Said to Write about True Love, the woman comes to know of her mothers violent death. The reader comes to know that the poets mother has been murdered and this issue, along with the impending divorce, becomes a defining moment in a difficult life history which the poet continues to examine, transform, and redeem. Drawing: For John Who Said to Write about True Love, is an epic-like piece. It includes references to national politics, poetry and aesthetics, the abating of romantic love, death, and murder. The use of the word drawing introduces the notion that the emotional content of the poem may be so overwhelming as to resist linguistic representation. The poem indeed deals with some unspeakable horrors, but the poet does not hesitate to verbalize what she must. The titles suggested levity works as an ironic

168

understatement. True love seems fanciful and even implausible among the brutal specters of reality. But, along with the doom of reproduced violence, Cervantes nevertheless injects the poem with humor and comedic spectacle. This is an Indian poem in many ways and Cervantes acknowledges this through a self-portrait in this poem: my erased face, Indian head of my stick birth (15). As such, it makes use of black humor and popular culture, represents the profaned American landscape bereft now of sacred divinity, and testifies to the brutal killing of a Native American/Mexican woman. Love within this realm is going to be cultural rather than idealized or romantic. The dry irony or, alternately, the comedic fancifulness of Johns suggestion in the title, initiates a discursive treatment of life and love. The narrative of the poem shifts from the present to the past as Cervantes provides an inventory of the marriage and its effects, revisiting important shared events in the couples life. The opening scene refers to their present estrangement. In this move, the poets spouse is said to have gassed seven cats: That first time I found you, blue marble lying still in the trench, you, staked in waiting for something, anything but the cell of your small apartment with the fixtures never scrubbed, the seven great named cats you gassed in the move. I couldnt keep them. You explained so I understood. (13) The fantastic and strange death of the cats provides a key to the way Cervantes uses hyperbole in order conjure her oeneiric world of visions and bring it into daily reality. Whether or not the cats were gassed is besides the point; the real importance of this image-scene lies in its set of implications: the demise of living subjects becomes a 169

benchmark of broken relations. In free association manner, the poem then moves on to the recollection of a childhood rhyme: My favorite tale was of the owl and the pussycat in love in a china cup cast at sea, or in a flute more brittle, more lifelike and riddled with flair, the exquisite polish of its gaudy glaze now puzzled with heat cracks, now foamed opalescent as the single espresso dish you bought from Goodwill. (13) Significantly, the owl and the pussycat belong within a lyrical narrative (a nursery rhyme song) that becomes a reminder of the marriage in its hopeful, younger times. The heat cracks portend confusion and the impending rupture of love. Overall, this passage contains fragmentary references to a shared life. Poetic recollection represents both a repository and a dispersal of history. The poet ponders the ebbing of youthful love: What ever becomes of the heart our common child fashioned, red silk and golden satin, the gay glitter fallen from moves, our names with Love written in black felt pen? Who gets what? (13) This is followed by a commingled portrayal of romantic fantasy and the grief of abortion: Who knows what becomes of the rose you carried home from Spanish Harlem that morning I sat waiting for the surgeons suction. What ever becomes of waiting and wanting, when the princess isnt ready and the queen has missed the boat, again? (13) Another reference to abortion is made towards the end of the poem: My moon waits at the edge of an eagles aerie, almost extinct and the eggs are fragile 170

from poisoned ignitions. (15) This theme is taken up again in the poem Abortion, which more fully reveals the poets lingering pain: Who is that keeps knocking on the body? she doesnt use the telephone of dreams. He doesnt drive into town on the freeway writ of passage. The mail leaves no forwarding address, kicks around in the dust like a fish who insists on swimming into no one. Who is this heavy hitcher who keeps riding the bed of my flat-handed hunger? Doesnt she know, theres no one at home? Doesnt he believe this exits not the last? (36) Besides providing a thematic link to one of the opening concerns of the book, this short, interrogating poem reveals Cervantess reliance on oneiric language for poetic content and structure. The telephone of dreams states this quite explicitly, situated, as it is, at the beginning of this perpetual and disquieting rumination. Before returning to Drawings: For John Who Said To Write About True Love, it is worth noting how the poet emphasizes the repetitive aspects of life, for which poetry becomes a form of ritual reckoning and deliverance. As in Emplumada, Cervantes appeases her death wish through artistic creation. In Colorado Blvd., for example, she moves from a suicidal impulse to alleviation brought about by poetry.

171

I wanted to die so I walked the streets. Dead night What season is this? Why is the wind stuttering in its stall of nightmares? Why courage? Bats fell about me like fire or dead bark from my brow beaten autumn. A kind of passing through and when it called, the startled bird of my birth, I left it, singing, or fallen from its nest What good was this? Is it my own will that stalks me? (40) Poetry, like Native American ceremonial practices, renews Cervantess life. She acknowledges these cultural and aesthetics traditions in the poem Shooting the Wren: I fashion these feathers into the fragile art of my tribe. I will wear them when the black of white never dies, this gift of intent woven in a silent bead. Ill let it blow through my matted locks, the weight of a kiss. What you kill I will pray for. (68) Shooting The Wren, also discloses other Native American cultural dimensions. It is important to note the liberating impact of the ritual signaled by the presence of an unnamed force that blows through the matted locks in this passage. In Drawings: For John Who Said to Write about True Love, Cervantes depicts grease in my hair: Im never coming out from my cup of tea, never working loose the grease in my hair, the monkey grease from my dancing elbows (15) 172

The poet depicts her hair in quite a different condition than that of Shooting The Wren. Here it is oily and unmoving. The condition of the poets hair is important in other pieces. In fact, it is one of the elements that are submitted to a careful poetic organization in both Cables of Genocide and Emplumada. Given Cervantes careful assemblage of life as part of a ritualistic representation, it is fitting that the condition of the hair in Drawings: For John Who Said to Write about True Love is such. The book opens with her hair clotted with grease, but as the ceremonial text progresses it becomes increasingly loose and free. Actually, Drawings: For John Who Said to Write about True Love contains such a repertoire of unmitigated and damning life events that an entire book of expiating poems is required to dispel it (assuming that this is Cervantess aim). In this context we might interpret the marriage as a sacrificial offering. Memories return as the poet questions the fate of love, and remembers the couples shared love of art and their political like-mindedness: Do you still write those old remarks etched on a page of Kandinskys ace letting go? Like: Lorna meets Oliver North and she kicks his butt? (13) But these musings must be eventually renounced: The dates are immaterial to me as salvation or a freer light bending through stallions in an air gone heavy with underground tunnels. Do you read me? Is there some library where youll find me, smashed on the page of some paper? Let it go is my morning mantra. (13) The poet invokes the notion of a mantra in an attempt to govern her scattered mental landscape. While these lines still belong within the conscious level of her thoughts, the 173

poem suddenly changes as the narration moves into a rich poetic montage of engines, animals, and dream images: Engines out the window remind me of breathing apparatus at the breaking of new worlds, the crash and perpetual maligning of the sand bar where sea lions sawed up logs for a winter cabin. I dream wood smoke in the morning. I dream the rank and file of used up chimneys, what that night must have smelled like, her mussed and toweled positioning, my ambulance of heart through stopped traffic where you picked the right corner to tell me: They think someone murdered her. (13-14) The italicized phrase just above contains what I propose is an oblique reference to the murder of the poets mother.1 While there is no corroborating evidence in the poem that this is the woman whose murder is discussed in the poem, I suggest that this is the case for the following reasons: the husband carefully plans when to inform his wife of the murder which means that he expects her to react very strongly to this information; the mention of the murder leads the speaker to ponder her own death; and the poet sympathizes with the murder victim and carefully visualizes the murder in a very intimate way. Once mention is made of the murder, oneiric elements are put into play. The smoke tended by animals gives way to the nebulous quality of dreams, and the relative certainty of the smoke is contrasted with the poets desire to penetrate the blurry scene of her mothers death, or at least get an inkling of it through the sense of smell. Here, the husband gives her news of her mothers death and provides an important source of support for her. He is whole and statuesque while she is fishlike: You were there, all right, you were 174

a statue carved from the stone of your birth. You were patient as a sparrow under leaf and as calm as the bay those light evenings when I envisioned you with the fishwife you loved. (14) Even though the marriage is ending and romantic illusions have been dashed, spousal love is still shown as a stable and calming source of support. Cervantess poetry does not seek to obliterate but reconstruct and redeem. Further on, in a reference to the opening epigram that calls for the relinquishment of a life made irremediable by traumas, the writer constructs the poem as a ritual and allows it to intercede in the otherwise cataclysmic chain of events: And yes, I could have done it then, kissed it off, when the scalpel of single star brightened and my world blazed, a dying bulb for the finger of a socket, like our sunsets on the Cape, fallen fish blood in snow; the hearts and diamonds we found and left and left alone on a New England grave. (14) But she will not succumb to her mothers fate. Though the historical agents of genocide would entrap her along with her mother, the poet escapes the forces of death through her husbands support and a growing awareness and acceptance of the flux of poetic and life events. Several passages reveal that health and life will prevail: a golden season, a steady mile, and a solid gold band appear as harbingers of wellbeing. Rather than become another statistic, the poet again secures her survival against all odds and escapes the genocidal script: What was my role? Or did I leave it undelivered when they handed me the gun of my triggered smiles and taught me to cock it? (14) But being a survivor is troubling too: 175

My skill is losing. Its what we do best, us ducks, us lessons on what not to do. (14) In this passage, the survivor speaks of the residue of morbidity she is left with after the death of a family member. I suggest that it is in these moments that the pervasive power of socio-cultural genocide is most palpable. Cervantes creates a divide at this point in the poem. After an ample succession of lengthy lines, she introduces a stanza break by playing upon an earlier usage of the word crack and creating a formal and visual break signaling that the word crack refers to a private meaning shared between spouses: Thanks for the crack, you wrote in my O.E.D. that 30 renewal when the summer snapped and hissed suddenly like a bullet of coal flung from a fire place or a dumb swallow who dove into the pit for pay. (14)
th

The dictionary, the poets 30th birthday, and the husbands inscription on the dictionary belong to a rite of passage that calls for some reflection. The marriage is ending, but the poet continues to be a poet even if her writing appears to be artistically and/or financially unsatisfactory at this juncture: I palm this lucky trade but the soot never sells and I never sailed away on a gulf stream that divides continents from ourselves . . . My messages wring from the line, unanswered, pressed sheets from an old wash or the impression of a holy thing. (15) Though poetry is experienced as a rite of passage and survival, the intended message seems to go unheeded. The use of the image of continents serves as an example of 176

Cervantess mystical understanding of herself as a complete world. And the holy thing of this passage is part of a spiritual practice more clearly announced in subsequent poems. Guarding her mystical power, the poet wards off scientific inquiry: But dont pull no science on this shroud, the date will only lie. Shell tell you its sacred, even sell you a piece of the fray. (14) Cervantess apparent denouement of sacred pretensions importantly works to undermine the sacred/profane dichotomy or the misappropriation of culture through what may be the othering and objectification of, for example, anthropologya discipline customarily critiqued in Native American literature. By appearing to undermine the sacred portent of the text through economic exchangethe sell(ing) a piece of the frayCervantes preempts the potential scrutiny of her authenticity as a Native American spokesperson or bard. Here dont pull no science on this shroud is condemning of the scientific scrutiny of religious or holy objects to determine their validity as such. The poet argues that should science be utilized to scrutinize her poetic text, it will be met with a strategic turning-of-tables in which the poet sells something to the scientist. The sacred realm then is carefully constructed through complex poetic processes; it is enclosed within a newly introduced narrative structure in the following example where a change from first to third person occurs: She appears on the cracked ravines of this country like a ghost on the windshield of an oncoming train. She refuses to die, but just look at her nation without a spare penny to change. (14-15) 177

Third person permits the poet a distancing of her own personal identity and, in turn, a foregrounding of a Native American mystical identityshe is a ghost. The phrase her nation refers to the loss of Native American/Mexican sovereignty and to material loss. Through the switch from first to third person and back again, the writer establishes an important change in the representation of her self. The grammatical switch is followed by the appearance of an image of a clarifying glass through which the poets identity is wholly disclosed: My wear is a glass made clean through misuse, the mishandling of my age as revealing as my erased face, Indian head of my stick birth. (15) Cervantess depiction of her person as Indian and infantile corresponds with a ceremonial restructuring of life events. Furthermore, the misuse and mishandling of the poets life and age appear to be a consequence of faulty life beginnings: What could I do with this neighborhood of avenues scattered with empty shells of mailboxes, their feet caked with cement like pulled up pilings? (15) The association of personal hardship with urban infrastructurethe avenues and the cementclearly exemplifies the consistency of Cervantess poetic perspective. In Emplumada, as I argue in Chapter 2, the freeway and other urban structures impinge on the poets life and her community. Here again, the citys menacing hardness and striated society are seen as obstructions to individual agency and freedom.

178

Acknowledging the hampered environment in which she struggles for meaning and survival, Cervantes hopes to write her way out of negative conditions: Someday, I said, I can write us both from this mess (15). Whereas at one time she was certain that literature would provide a means of escape from repressive locales, the poet now realizes that time and history are unremitting forces. The inability to undo a harsh reality is largely linked to the pain associated with the damaged daughter/mother bond: I was never a clear thing, never felt the way a daughter feels (15). I detailed the difficult relationship between Cervantes and her mother in my discussion of Emplumada. In Cables of Genocide, however, there is a deeper realization of the severity and perpetuity of damning events that goes beyond the maternal lapse and emerges in poetry and visions. So, while she realizes she will not ultimately salvage her marriage or social inequities by dint of her poetry, Cervantes nevertheless affirms her creative powers. While the poem itself still fails to produce a salve against pain, suffering and loss of love (hence the grease in her hair), the poet confronts her self and life through dreams and poetry: I write and wait for the book to sell, for I know nothing comes of it but the past with its widening teeth, with its meat breath baited at my neck, persistent as the smell of a drunk. (15) Poetrys power to conjure potent visions also insinuates the possibility of prophetic revelations. The personification of the past as possessing teeth, breath, and drunkenness refers back to the early childhood sexual trauma. All in all, these widening teeth form part of a dream structure deployed throughout Cables of Genocide. The appearance of 179

teeth, mouths, noses and other body parts signify an envisioned realm of experience. The persistent smell of alcohol takes us back to instances of childhood of sexual abuse with harrowing effectiveness, and the poem does not hint at any transformation of the personal or historical specters. In The Poet Is Served Her Papers, Cervantes makes a direct reference to dreams and their structuring power: So tell me about fever dreams, about the bad checks we scrawl with our mouths, about destiny missing the last bus to oblivion. (19) The oneiric world is portrayed as feverish while the mouth, operating as the writing instrument, invalidates closurethe bad checks bounce backand forgetfulness. In contrast to this dire spectacle of the pasts spectral haunting, Politeness Takes Her Turn (22) offers a humorous contest between two women rivals who turn out to be the mother and the poet-daughter. Here, as in the poem Litost, Cervantes invokes the figure of Latina actress Rita Hayworth in an oneiric setup that carries the possibility of reconciliation with the maternal figure. While the relationship has been marked by the inequality of the child-parent affiliation, this poem provides an instance in which the two rivals can contest as equals and the daughter can retort to her mothers authority. Overall, the piece is exemplary in its creative rendering of an important fantasy in which the daughter commands the power of dream and is able to confront her mothers influence.

180

The poem begins with confidence and stalwart agency. This is not the first rehearsal of the dream, but its fifth repetition. The element of surprise has lessened and the poet knows what to expect. Rather than succumb to the specter of a recurring nightmare she directs the dramatic action and is no longer subject to a menagerie of foreboding or disorienting dreamscapes: At the fifth reconciliation I have my primal scene, I act the dream: in walks the bitch pristine as Rita Hayworths rival, luminescent teeth and nails, hair her wind has never bit, the skinny state of her single grace. How do you stand it? (22) Cervantes introduces her mother as a pristine bitch, casts herself as Rita Hayworth and declares that this will be a primal scene. When her mother affronts her with the challenging questionHow do you stand it?her response is to upset the furniture in the room. Furniture is first to go, camp chair to barren fridge, the desk, the lamp the china cup (22) All of these items are knocked over by the daughter, who takes particular pleasure in smashing the china cupa symbol of the mothers self-involvement or parasoled decadence. (22) The broken cup releases a network of past events and responses. It is shattered in this passage:

181

shatters in the kitchen where I steady paced my web of midnights, drilled my path of cauldron recipes and moored in the shadow of their receipts. I smile at her. I answer: You call this standing? (22) The cauldron, being larger and markedly less ladylike than the decadent china cup, vanquishes the smaller receptacle. The daughter defeats the mother, and her active retort to the maternal question brings about an ultimate closure to both the poem and the dream. Interestingly, Cervantes must envision herself in the guise of the legendary Hayworth in order to undo her mothers symbolic hold on her through this new process of identification. This new process of identification creates a new affiliation; substituting the maternal figurewhich oppressed the immature girlfor a womanly, self-assured female archetype. This process eventually leads to a full female blooming of the woman-daughter, which effectively overcomes the mother. While Cervantes establishes a symbolic distancing between herself and the maternal figure, she again seeks to affirm her connection to other significant family members. In Valentine (24), a concrete poem that forms half a hearts shape on the page, the writer returns to the topics of divorce and the years seasons as intertwining subjects. The piece incorporates the two most important persons with whom she shared loving relationshipsher Chumash grandmother and her husband. The poem opens with a set of natural images reminiscent of marriage: pink flowers, hummingbirds, and coupling butterflies introduce an ecosystem of love and natural desire. It is clear that the 182

animals, like the divorcees, belong to a much larger ordering of relationships and resources. After a depiction of butterflies nourished by flowers comes a revelation of life after divorce: They sip from the pistils for seven generations that bear them through another tongue as the first year of our punishing mathematic begins clicking the calendar forward. (24) The beliefs of the poets grandmother, referenced here in the image of the seven generations, encompass the divorcees within a larger, natural order. Thus a compassionate representation of the divorcees is permitted. Furthermore, the butterflies flight, landing, and mating is seen in correlation to natural cycles that encompass the event of the divorce: They take another turn on the spiral of life where the blossoms blush & pale in a day of dirty dawn where the ghost of you webs your limbs through branches of cherry plum. (24) In the closing lines of the poem, the writer claims that the memory of the husband presently pervades her poetry, which she depicts as a for ever/empty/art (24). But, in contrast to this temporary artistic vacuity, the poet retains the beliefinherited from the Chumash grandmotherthat life is dependent on a history extending back in time through seven generations. Within this scope, the poetic void at the close of the writers marriage weighs less heavily. Thus, Valentine fittingly closes Part I of Cables of Genocide.

183

* Poems in Part II extend a discussion of personal experience, Native American history, marriage, and the poets role as historical witness and survivor of violence and cultural genocide. Part II begins with the following epigram: People tell me I sing the words love and hunger like no one else. Well, everything I know is wrapped up in those two words. Youve got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for anybodys damned sermon. Billy Holiday Like the singer Billy Holiday, Cervantes acts as an interpreter and spokesperson of history and social oppression, and she is intent on demonstrating the ever-present bodily needs of all people. My Dinner with Your Memory (27), Raisins, (28) Nightstand, (30) and On Love and Hunger (32) contain various food items and appetite related issues woven into the books sustained portrayal of divorce. Fruits and vegetables are often used to represent the poet as a sexual being with strong female archetype qualities. In My Dinner with Your Memory, Cervantes builds an erotic connection between herself and bread, meat, cheese, and butter. She addresses her ex-husband and employs these foods as a retinue of substances consumed by bodies and shared by lovers. The poem begins with an evocative opening statement: A womans scent is nothing like bread, although sometimes I steam when the moon slivers my heart into povertys portions. (27)

184

Poverty refers us back to the titular Love and Hunger. Whereas food is normally a form of sustenance, here it is related to deprivation and spiritual or emotional consumption. It even forms a barrier between the lovers: On the table between us: a slab of meat that once tasted cud the size of my breast, a cunning wire to slip off some cheese, a plum brandy that dissolves into nothing, silver on the tongue as that talk we devour. (27) In Raisins, Cervantes depicts her body as a form of food: Raisins are my currency to dateslightly seedy, prickled as my nipples, black as pubis, colored as my opened eyelids. (28) And in My Dinner with Your Memory, she compares the dissolution of her marriage to the husbands lack of appetite: Who would hunger at the brink of this feast? Who would go, uninvited, but you and your ghost of a dog? (27) Overall, hunger is a mnemonic of the status of love and companionship. In Raisins, the poet establishes the paradoxical relationship between love and hunger, depicting the husband simultaneously as a form of active sustenance and an absence: Youre my only food today, the day I left you, paper husband. (27)

185

The paper husband no longer shares in the appetites of the ex-wife. And paper may refer both to the contractual and legalistic aspects of divorce as well as to the literary nature of the poets marriage. Finally, since they are no longer married, the poets only grasp on the husband is through poetic representation and perhaps photos or other mementos of him. Instead of sharing food and bodily contact, the divorcees share in the pain of permanent separation. Indeed, in nearly one third of the poems of Part II, food is an index of the loss of love. Cervantes makes use of these food/love formulations to verbalize the ultimate paradox of appetites, both emotional and physical, which are heightened and ultimately disappointed within the course of the marriage. If, as I have argued, the poetic text encompasses a ceremonial rite of passage, then it follows that the crisis of divorce will also be pacified through poetry. In Hotel, the poet diffuses what has been the lingering torment of divorce and asserts the longevity of her life and literature. The poem begins with the following stanza: I couldnt see in this light even if I wished. The black grillwork over black, cool upon coal, kisses me back in any icy press. not wantinganythingbut to fall as the empty trash cans mingle below with the smell of feral cats. (38) Here, as elsewhere, Cervantes employs images related to the loss of sight. It could be said that her imagism always relies on a felt eye since vision catalyzes the other senses as well as the imaginative output of the other senses. When the poet says, I couldnt see in this light/even if I wished, she reveals a complicated connection between 186

desire and sight, casting doubt upon the sense of ocular vision. The vistas of her poetry complicate paradigmatic notions of sight, and there is a felt sense that she perceives herself as a subject who is not only seen but also unmercifully cross-examined by the world. In fact, many of Cervantess images arise from her impetus to shield herself from the menacing glare of the visual economy in which she is an exotic. In stanza six of this poem, she writes of her physical appearance in connection with the absent paternal figure and maligned nation-state: Jealous as an abandoned child, I had no word for father. It floated in heaven like friend or famine. It rose like a muscle and punctuated my dream, the ones of ruined houses, of countries like this one where the faces of whore and the working poor are my own. (39) Sight, particularly the gaze of others when directed at her, gives rise to a profusion of image-making. It is as if, in a sense, the poet had to create an abundance of poetic images to counteract a mundane visual economy. In Hotel, after negating the desire and accuracy of sight, Cervantes pinpoints what the proper fulfillment of her longing smells like. The line, again, reads: Not wantinganythingbut to fall as the empty trash cans mingle below with the smell of feral cats. (38) Her sight obscured, she prefers an association with animals such as cats, dogs, and horses. The animal world permits aesthetic experiences and poetic spaces ungoverned by the gaze, which is referred to as that factory of artifice in the second stanza of the

187

poem. Identification with fauna also establishes a connection to Native American animistic practices, and associations with animals may indicate yet another departure from the evaluative human gaze that so upbraids the poet. Sight is hampered, even discredited, by the time we arrive at the third stanza of Hotel. The poet is lost, a state that carries a varied set of meanings and prompts important experiential connections in the second half of the poem. The third stanza delivers the cataclysm in the hotel, which is ultimately resolved, in the final stanza, by departure: I had to leave. (39) Once more, a certain cataclysm ignites the poets journey through time, feeling, and language. In this poem, the romantic union with John is nearing an end, signaling two of the most important lyrical events in the book as a whole: the end of a passing cycle, and the culmination of the analogy between love and hunger as sources of sustenance, imagery, and structural meaning. As long as the poet is able to discern the passing cycles of seasons and act in accordance with them, shedding relations, perceptions, and identities at the proper time, and processing events through a finely wrought lyrical progression, she will have accomplished her aesthetic goal. The third stanza of Hotel is critical to the Cervantess understanding of time and agency: Lost now in this anonymity of barely knowing you, my body would go unsearched for in the rubble. Who could remember my odor, my perfect strangeness at a glance? Life leaves through the gate of an ache, where you are, a vanishing landscape. Do I dare it back? (38) 188

The previously signaled loss of sight translates into lack of knowledge and anonymity. The blindness is caused by outside powers: even if she wished she could not see. Thus, knowledge is beyond her means and she can no longer accomplish her artistic task of mutual understanding. Her husbands knowledge and perception of her person, which to an extent defined her, must be revised so she can grow and change. Still, the separation does not fulfill unanswered questions. She queries who will search for her in the rubble. She cannot rely on anyone to remember her odor. Also, the sustaining male figure has become a vanishing landscape and seems unable to comprehend her perfect strangeness. To the end, the poem retains its ambiguity, and the reader is left to decide whether the double failure of recognitionthrough the senses of smell and sightwas something that contributed to the separation, or if the poet instead fears a potential loss of recognition after the separation. What is certain is that there is a palpable anxiety over the loss of intimacy that once mutually nurtured the personal identities of the lovers. The male figure in Hotel increasingly inspires the poets scrutiny, and this is an important issue. In stanza five, he appears to be indifferent to the divorce: you take things as/ a letting go, like a beacon that opens/ a lens cap to our past. (38) Later on, she cites his loss of words: What you lost was first love and a word for forever, like evergreen, oceanic, fossil. (39) As I previously pointed out, stanza three signals an important series of recognitions that ultimately empower the now single female figure. However, this cannot happen until the poet, creator of words and images, has settled things lyrically. She transforms 189

misrecognitions and the lack of verbal and general knowledge on the part of the male figure and the relationship itself into an act of closure and departure that has its most intense lyrical moment in the final stanza. The substantive sense of this exit is determined, again, by scent in the third stanza: Lost now in this anonymity of barely knowing you, my body would go unsearched for in the rubble. Who could remember my odor, my perfect strangeness at a glance? Life leaves through the gate of an ache, where you are, a vanishing landscape. Do I dare it back? (38) The alliteration in the first two lines brings the experience of being lost into proximity with lack of knowledge: the sound of the words lost now on the first line, and knowing on the second, echo each other and belong within the same phrase. The third line presents us with the rhythmic unsearched for in the rubble. Who could. The poetic voice, then, speaks out from the rubble, which occurs in the middle of the line, providing a caesura corresponding with the end of this phrase and marked by the period. Cervantes turns the line after Who could, emphasizing the anonymity of the first line, and the sense of abandonment mentioned earlier. Another rupture occurs in the subsequent line, and we begin to sense the emotional implications of her invisibility. When she asks, who could/ remember my odor, it is apparent that this question will either fall on deaf ears or instigate self-sufficiency. In fact, personal odor appears to be uniquely capable of guaranteeing individuation from the rubble and ruins of the love affair. This rhetorical question already implies that the former partner will not rise to the

190

occasion. The poet may remain unrecognized by others, but she will come to know things about herself and her relationship with menincluding her former husband and her absent father. Cervantes progresses towards a self-recognition couched in vibrant, forceful images at the beginning of stanza five: The galloping horses I hear are not hooves but my heart kicking in its swollen stall. (38) After mingling with feral cats and likening herself to a dog/struck by a diesel in the rubble of misrecognition, an abrupt recovery occurs within the writer. Spurred by internal forces, she is propelled onto a series of evaluations and, at last, departure. Although it becomes the substitute for sight in the poem, scent does not ultimately verify an essential identity. Divorce proceeds because of a previous and compounding series of misrecognitions that are highlighted, in their last tragic register, by scent. However, in this sense, odor fundamentally contributes to the lyrical question Who could/remember my odor, my perfect strangeness/ at a glance? This is not a lovers test, but a lovers remonstrance of the significant lack of mutual knowledge that preceded the poem and the end of the relationship itself. The poetic voice realizes that this man will no longer appreciate her perfect strangeness and resolves to go rather than dare it back. The terse use of it confirms the view that this is no longer a rich engagement. Finally, the poet moves past marriage and returns to herself to address personal needs and accomplish personal autonomy.

191

In Abortion, (36) Colorado, (37) Colorado Blvd., (40) and On Touring Her Hometown, (41) Cervantes returns to her own identity as the primary venue for asking questions on life and history. On her own once more, the poet examines her life, her past, and her responses. Abortion, as I formerly mentioned, is a study in lingering grief. It contains a significant dialogue between the woman and the phantom child, an example of the otherworldly communication evoked and embodied in the previously discussed figure of the titular Cables. In this case, the communicating cables have their source in a particular and singular death, and it may be that abortion takes on aspects of ceremonial sacrifice. Ritualistic aspects also characterize Colorado and On Touring Her Hometown, where the references to brujera could mean either witchcraft or shamanism. The former poem actualizes a ceremonial ritual; the latter retraces the path of the poets migration back to her early home in order to renew her bond with it. The rite of Colorado begins at the outset of the poem: She asks the man who is absent if he might send her a photo she can light before the candle that keeps holding its breath and wont stay lit for a prayer. (37) The photo and the unlighted candle belong to a group of ceremonial items. Along with them, Cervantes introduces a glass of water, a jar, an owl, a feather, and a strand of hair to confirm the existence of brujas. As in other poems, she depicts herself in third person as she proceeds to narrate a mystic, either Mexican or Native American cultural practice that becomes an act of mourning for the now absent husband.

192

In another poem, On Touring Her Hometown, the poem makes an important journey to her primary home, thereby replacing the memories of it with an actual visitation. She writes: Im going away to where Im from. Im fleeing from visions, fences grinning from the post. Give me a hole with a past to it. Fill up this mess with your wicked engines. (41) Instead of appealing to a spiritual or emotional abstraction, Cervantes calls upon the land as a remedy for haunting visions. The invocation reverses the conventional yearning to escape from earth-bound limitations, and locates metaphysical fulfillment on embodiment as a relief from psychic strain, both conscious and subconscious. Here, earth is psychically substantive and contains all memory and history within its recesses. Marigolds are among the earths attributes, and the mention of the flowers is an important reference to Emplumada, where the poet likens them to her nurturing grandmother. Cervantes, in fact, makes a direct allusion to her first book in these lines: Disarray on the avenues unending as the streets of my vast memory. There are marigolds six feet under. They eat the names of the dead. (41) The marigolds that accompany the writers memory and visit to her primary home are, in some Latino and North American Native cultures, the traditional flower for memorializing the dead: they serve to invoke the ancestors, and honor their spirit and

193

ongoing contributions to life. The ritualistic undertones of the poem prompt the ekphrastic image of the subsequent lines: There are hovels under these caverns where liquids marry and paint themselves a mauve display. (41) The mauve display that arises from the combination of elementsmemory, earth, and flowerscould signify the emergence of a divine, earthly energy. Alternatively, it may reflect atonement or a manifested subjectivity achieved through the embodiment of memory. In other words, the poet roots memory in the landscape of her early life and formative experiences in a pilgrimage of sorts. Aspects of bodily adornment begin to emerge in the poem in addition to the neutralization of haunting memories achieved through the invocation of the lands receptive qualities. The earths painting of itself points to ceremonial practices of adorning the body, after which the poet introduces another catalogue of cultural meaning by turning towards a ghostly, materially evacuated realm: Theres a place in the mists of this city where a silence, lean as ghosts, beckons, is archaic in the workclothes of my otherness. (41) By juxtaposing the antecedent emphasis on materiality and territory with the sound and ghosts of this passage, the writer generates a poetic circuitry that lyrically converts the emotional crisis of the poem into a spiritual condition, thus ultimately achieving equilibrium.

194

Moreover, mystical processes strike an equilibrium between memory and incarnation: There is cedar, ash sage, an owl/on the grave of this town. (41) The cedar and sage emit redolent ceremonial fragrances. The owl is a nocturnal bird often associated with the supernatural, and the grave is a hallowed site. The spiritual act enclosed in this poem is dependant on locationCervantess hometown. The poetic rite of the previously discussed Colorado Blvd. (40) culminates in an assuaging of suicidal feelings and incorporates a savior figure in the guise of a male who stands in a parking lot lighting/his crack pipe (40). This crack-smoking redeemer may be a doppelganger for the writer, who refers to herself as cracked in For John Who Said to Write about True Love, a poem where the word crack appears on several occasions. It is echoed again in Politeness Takes Her Turn. Overall, cracks hold special significance for Cervantes. The word may variously refer to non-rational perspectives, liminal points of view, and female anatomy. As a noun and a verb, it is grammatically fluid. It is also rich in sound, with a plosive beginning and ending. Moreover, it always connotes embodiment since it entails a rupture of a corporeal object or entity. Cervantes is fascinated by etymologiesthus her metaliterary allusion to the Oxford English Dictionary in the first poem of Cables of Genocide, where it stands as a formally recognized aspect of her poetics. Crack like cables becomes a rich linguistic figure. In fact, the two words function as linguistic doubles, since one denotes an absence and the other presence of a definite substance or connection between entities.

195

Interestingly, the crack and the cable are also strong transitional words, transporting the point of view across space. It is through these two pivotal linguistic and imagistic structures that Cervantes redirects perspective from the earthly and visual to the aural and mystical. Such a melding together of what may conventionally be opposing aspects of nature (earth and sky, spirit and matter) are formally important to other changes in the poems. Since Cervantes is dealing with genocide, a subject that almost entirely resists transitions--and all transitions would perhaps come off as facile--the direct transmission of information via cracks or cables conveys the unmitigated horror of genocide. The poet writes explicitly about genocide in Night Stand, (30) On Speaking to the Dead (33) Flatirons, (34) Death Song, (35) To We Who Were Saved by the Stars (42) and Pleiades from the Cables of Genocide (43). In these pieces, genocide is more than an egregious historical wound. It intrudes upon the everyday world, the collective unconscious, and even moments of sexual intimacy. Night Stand, for example, describes a single sexual encounter with a poor agricultural worker. It begins with a two line catalogue of agricultural products: Onion, lettuce, leeks, broccoli,/garlic, cantaloupe, peaches, plums (30) The male subject is then introduced: The man whose work is hard/slides onto me glistening. His physical appearance is rendered along with the economic structures that impact his life and body: He wears the patch the sun has x-rayed to his chest. Hes the color of work. Im the color of reading. (30)

196

Although these lines focus on the social, educational and skin tone differences between the man and the woman, commonality appears in the second stanza of the poem: We are gouged by the machinery, we fill the holes with fire. We pull the pails another sloshing day up through the cracks in our overdue finality. (30) Here, the word crack is used to portray what Cervantes perceives as the barbarism of modern machines, technology, and urbanization, all of which exploit the underprivileged and their labor. It is the concrete avalanche of progress which displaces the poet from her native home and forces her to age prematurely: if the concrete avalanche of progress hadnt filled my love and the rivers of my youth hadnt iced me into middle age, I might have stayed. But no one stays. (31) While people are forced from their homes due to modernization and globalization (the male character is a migrant worker from Mexico or Central America), the knowledge shared by the poor and the displaced is a distinct mental and physical experience. Unlike the formally educated intellectual who is knowledgeable of the history of genocide, the agricultural worker may not know beyond the suicide of soul the poor possess, the threshing race machines, the names of Goerring Himmler, Buchenwald, Farben And all that written fables 197

spell for usthis he knows (31) But while he does not know the names, he beholds another truth: this he knows/ Esta gente no entiende nada. The code switch indicates the man is primarily a Spanish speaker. The translation of this phraseThese people dont understand anything suggests that, in contrast to the embodied historical knowledge of the worker, U.S. society is founded on ignorance. By associating the names of Nazi genocidal perpetrators to U.S. societys lack of awareness and understanding, Cervantes creates a comparative history of mass extermination focusing on the American continent. Flatirons deals with the genocide of Native American populations. The poem refers to the Flatirons, a geological site containing echoing rock formation, located near Boulder, Colorado, and it is dedicated to the Ute and the Arapaho, and contains references to the poets indigenous ancestry: The mountains are there like ghosts of slaughtered mules, the whites of my ancestors rest on the glaciers, veiled and haloed with the desire of electrical storms. (34) In this opening, the history of indigenous cultures and nations is superimposed on the landscape. The remains of the ancestors are holy, illumined (white, veiled, haloed) and electrically charged. This electrical energy becomes another source product that is transferred, or rather cabled, onto the poetic text. Just as modern technology derives resources from the land, Cervantes converts natural scenes into historical memory. Rather than producing a utilitarian commodity, her words carry out a historical

198

confrontation with modern reigning economies. Another ekphrastic passage emerges from such transmission: Marginal feasts corral the young to the cave walls, purple smoke wafts up a chimney of shedding sundown. Statuesque and exquisitely barren, my seed shines in the dying rays. (34) But the ekphrasis works in a complex fashion. Rather than reproduce cave pictographs as an object, the light, color, and smoke of the first two lines evoke them. The seed in the last two lines is exquisitely barren. The poetic conversion of color and light does not accrue an object value but conjures a future of dampened light, or dying rays. Subsequently, the life of the wealthy intrudes ironically and violently on the collective memory of the dispossessed: The rich earth of the wealthy/splays the legs of heaven in my view (34). Historical memory constitutes an irremediable and evocative rhythm in the succeeding lines: My harmony of blood and ash, fire on the mound, I feel them shuffling in the aspen, their vague ahems marry the sucking fish in a derelict river. (34) The voices of the ancestors mingle with the natural sounds of the land. Thus, the derelict river appears to be so due to the cessation of indigenous sovereignty on the United States. The discontinuation of Native American autonomy, and indeed the mass deaths, following territorial expansionism and the Indian wars are depicted in the proceeding passage: 199

The winter of their genocide still Ghost Dances with a dream where the bison and mammoth unite, were the story of their streams is as long as the sabers of northern ice. (34) A dream of reunification where the bison and mammoth unite survives against all odds, referring us to a temporal reconnection of the ancient past and the present day. The preexistence of indigenous history is, after all, long/as the sabers of northern ice. Sorting through the temporal, historical, and geographical structures perceived and described in Flatirons, Cervantes introduces herself as a witness of genocide and engages in a contestation of history: She is there in the silent baying, in the memory of a native and the dripping pursuance of thawing babies specters in a sunset on the Heightsafter massacre. (34) The poets role and artistic goal are anchored in the need to incessantly depict, invoke, mourn and indict the genocide of her ancestors, as well as that of other indigenous tribes, nations, and people. Her status as a survivor entails a whole score of internal questions, along with longing and guilt. It demands a recount of the history of social oppression and mass murder. Cervantes verbally transfers history to the present moment as if she, her dreams, visions, and poems, were communicative apparatuses. Her gender, her body, and the panorama of visions that assail her are all important aspects of her reportage, which seeks to infuse the past into the present without demurring of the horrors or the intents of genocide. The extent to which the poet details her body, its hungers and desires, is 200

important insofar as it grants a corporeal extension across temporal expanses. She, in effect, is both messenger and living legacy, an essential link to the past. Hence, her hungers and appetites are indicative of her incorporation of historical voices and events. In a way, Cervantes reinvents the present by instilling it with the past. But her conception of the past is multiple; in other words, she quilts the various pasts of multiple Native American societies onto the present. As a survivor, she inhabits and must make sense of a mysterious temporal disjunction. She must weave a poetic language and structure from this surplus. For example, the Seven Sisters constellation provides an explanation of multiple pasts and becomes a source of understanding. In the final two poems of Part II, We Who Were Saved by the Stars, (42) and Pleiades from the Cables of Genocide, (43) Cervantes represents herself as an undifferentiated survivor. We Who Were Saved by the Stars begins with the assertion that survival is as arbitrary as luck: Nothing has to be ugly. Luck of the dumb is a casual thing. It gathers its beauty in plain regard. (43) Basic biological existence, not inspiration, drives human movement. Freedom, too, is perhaps a casual endowment. Animus, not inspiration, lets us go among the flock and crows crowded around the railroad ties. (43) And, whereas life is principled on an unfaltering natural rhythm, social existence lapses into awkwardness and inequity, all the way to racial discourse. Native Americans are

201

faced with the quandary of preexistence and non-existence. Additionally, racial circumscription imposes stigmas: Interchanges of far away places, tokens of our deep faux pas, our interface of neither/nor, when we mutter moist goodbye and ice among the silent stars, it frosts our hearts on the skids and corners, piles the dust upon our grids as grimaces pardon us, our indecision, our monuments to presidents, dead, or drafted boys who might have married us, Mexican poor, or worse. (43) Persons, objects, and details are subject to dislocation and vicissitude, submitted to eclipsed destinies and mismatched temporalities. The next passage depicts the arbitrariness ofand barriers tocertainty and self-determination: Our lives could be a casual thing, a reed among the charlatan drones, a rooted blade, a compass that wields a clubfoot round and round, drawing fairy circles in clumps of sand. (43) Even if it lacks a fortuitous aspect, life nevertheless flowers through a mistaken or wobbly conception: Irritate a simply sky and stars fill up the hemispheres. One by one, the procession of their birth is a surer song than change jingling in a rich mans pocket. (43) In this continuum of capricious existence and biological fortitude, gender emerges as one divisional category. Cervantes references the opening epigraph by Robert Frost Education lifts mans sorrow to a higher plane of regard./ A mans whole life can be a metaphor.and replies in her closing lines: 202

A mans whole life may be a metaphorbut a womans lot is symbol. (42) In a fascinating juxtaposition of metaphor and symbol, the poet again emphasizes the embodiment of history, race, and knowledge. Whereas learning may be a transcendental process for some, Cervantes asserts that this is not the case for women, American indigenous populations, and those who endure and survive genocide. Generally speaking, To We Who Were Saved by the Stars (42) portrays survival as an ironic quandary. This irony bespeaks the responsibility of the living: to endure knowledge of genocide and continue living without all of those who were not saved. While there appears to be little consolation for the survivor, who is at times mystified by survival itself, Pleiades from the Cables of Genocide(43) depicts endurance as predestined by cosmic and cultural forces. Pleiades from the Cables of Genocide is structured around a contemporary vision of Native American cosmography. The epigram, for my grandmother and against the budgets of 89, introduces a rhetorical connection between contemporary political discourses and Cervantess Chumash grandmother. In this poem, the writer relates Ronald Reagans 1989 pursuit of welfare reform and other fiscally conservative economic policies, with the colonization of indigenous lands. Both past and present economic ventures are seen as heralds of race and class oppression. Whereas the cause of survival is questionable in To We Who Were Saved by the Stars, the poet supplies an explanation of The Seven Sisters cosmography at the end of this piece: The Chumash who inhabited the Santa Barbara 203

coast may have believed that they descended to earth from the Pleiades, also known as The Seven Sisters. The Seven Sisters also refers to the seven big oil companies. (42) Here again, the global and the personal intertwine, affirming the poets role as a singular speaker of multiple past and present events. The evocative opening section of Pleiades from the Cables of Genocide reveals the presence of various female figures, most notably the stars referred to as the Seven Sisters and Cervantess own mother, whose voice is italicized. Amidst the multiplicity of female personas, bodies, and voices, the writer is able to see through a singular telescope. Tonight I view seven sisters As Ive never seen them before, brilliant In their dumb beauty, pockmarked In the vacant lot of no end winter Blight. Seven sisters, as they were before, Naked in a shroud of white linen, scented angels Of the barrio, hanging around for another smoke, A breath of what comes next, the aborted nest. Ill drink to that, says my mother within. Her mother Scattered tales of legendary ways when earth Was a child and satellites were a thing of the Heart. Maybe I could tell her this. I saw them Tonight, seven Hail Marys, unstringing; viewed Saturn Through a singular telescope. (43) The poets self-possession does not dwindle within the immensity of the experience. The sky, the internalized mothers voice and the cosmography, while ominous, do not obscure this rare and unprecedented view of the stars. Neither do the numerous temporalities,

204

expressed in the various past, present and future tenses of this stanza, blur the poets presence or her senses. Rather, these contrary states constitute her and her environment; the global and the personal, the astral and the earthly, the spiritual and mortal all converge. Cervantes depicts herself in the blighted barrio within a grand cosmography occupied by female deities and ethereal women figures. The poet herself emerges as a singular corporeal witness; now she is more than a survivor, for her predecessors and her dead accompany her. Moreover, she comes to regard the inclusiveness of this scene as preordained by her beloved grandmother, who endows her with a deep sense of her belonging. The poem does allude to the dispossession of the Chumash and, by extension, other indigenous tribes and nations. But, from the very outset, there is an abiding and awesome sense of belonging that leads to an ecstatic passage at the beginning of the second section: Oh wonder Of pillaged swans! Oh breathless geometry Of setting! (43) The pillaged swans serve as symbol of colonization, conquest, and rape. Still, they are wondrous rather than defeated. The breathless geometry/ Of setting refers both to a providential landscape and astronomy. While the swans and the geometry inhabit worlds that are ostensibly alien to the human figure, the poem incorporates them all into a single, magnanimous presence. This is a paean to Cervantess grandmother, who represents a plenitude that extends beyond the human species, and encompasses the attributes of animals and cosmic beings. Her person is clearly referenced in the proceeding lines: 205

You are radiant in your black light Height, humming as you are in my memory. Nights as inked as these, breathless From something that comes from nothing. (43) The speaker memorializes and exalts her grandmother as a representative of cosmic mystical and mythic knowledge, as well as of purposeful self-understanding. Her figure is inextricably related to the issue of the poets craft: the nights, dark as her radiant . . . black light, are propitious occasions from which to draw poetic material. They are heavy with the ink needed to write the words down. Under such fortuitous conditions, the poem is something that comes from nothing. The poet simply draws it forth, responding to what amounts to an artistic resource. This manifest poetic fecundity prompts social meaning. As the poet makes use of the artistic resources drawn from her ancestral history, a profusion of other female figures suddenly enters the poem. In the delightful and humane portrayal of the muses, or stars, the writer understands more about herself: Cold hearts, warm hands in your scuffed Up pockets. I know the shoes those ladies wear, Only one pair, and pointedly out of fashion. (43) The depiction of the stars as iconoclastic women leads to another discovery of the poets singular self within the social and cosmic panorama, for it eventually leads to a selfportrait. Like the women/stars, who do not enjoy privilege or power, the poet examines letdown as a mode of establishing identity. Failure as process of self-definition weighs importantly on her, for she must choose among various capacities and ultimately embrace

206

a poetic purpose. The shabby condition attributed to the female stars develops a careful irony. In the lack of success there is also luck: an incandescence giving out, giving up On their tests, on their grades, on their sky Blue books, on the good of whats right. A star, A lucky number that fails all, fails math, fails Street smarts, dumb gym class, fails to jump Through the broken hoop, and the ring Of their lives. (43) Failures are providential in their own way, for through trial and error processes, they reveal strengths. The successive failures Cervantes ascribes to herselfa star/a lucky number that fails allwill ultimately lead her toward cultural knowledge and artistic achievement. For Cervantes, cultural knowledge precedes poetry, and poetry must work toward the clarification of racial and historical discourses. This is why the grandmothers messages concerning the past and, specifically, indigenous history in North America, form a refrain throughout the poem. While there are no stanza breaks in this work, the grandmothers messages repeatedly give closure to poetic fragments that are thus structured around her words. Cervantes structures the piece around the resolutions to the quandaries of the cultural and historical discourses. These resolutions are best described as a kind of enchantment produced by the speakers deeper and deeper assimilation of her grandmothers cultural history and knowledge. The answers can always be found in the older womans instruction, and all of the poems motifs culminate in the poets return to her grandmothers voice.

207

To illustrate this point, I return to the beginning of the piece. At the outset, the entire cosmos falls within the domain of the grandmothers stories. The Seven Sisters constellation represents a traditional cosmography learned from the grandmother. Subsequent portions of the text are dedicated to the rendering of the Seven Sisters and the self-portrait of the poet within this cosmological sphere. Cervantess kinship to a communal female cosmography takes the form of a social association: Seven sisters, I knew them Well. I remember the only constellation My grandmother could point out with the punch Of a heart. (44) Here, the entire progression of motifs becomes resolved in a direct reference to the grandmother as a source of abiding truth and sacred knowledge. The sequence takes on a distinct pattern. First, the poet observes the meaningful connection between the constellation and her grandmother, whose stories serve as a map of cosmic events within which the poets confirmation of her artistic role makes immediate sense. Secondly, she understands her individuality in connection to larger presencesthe female stars, the history of genocide, and the grandmother, who orients her among all of these considerations. Then comes a recognition of female social bonds. Lastly, the poet regains her individual sense of purpose through the retelling of these events. Artistic identity arrives through the grandmothers song. The last section reveals the ultimate attainment of poetic purpose and identity as related to the encompassing indigenous cosmology. She knows the words To the song now, what her grandmother sang 208

Of how they lit to this earth from the fire Of fusion, on the touchstones of love tribes. Mira, She said, This is where you come from. The power peace Of worthless sky that unfolds menowin its greedy Reading: Weeder of Wreckage, Historian of the Native Who says: It happened. Thats all. It just happened. And runs on. (45) As before, the grandmothers voice provides vital and definitive orientation. The line that reads, Mira,/She said, This is where you come from, leads to power and peace. Because the poem is now complete, the sky, which has functioned throughout as a kind of poetic correlative for an amalgam of female, cultural, and cosmological motifs, becomes worthless. An important exchange of energy, knowledge, and power occurs; the skys emptiness translates into the speakers empowerment, as if she had taken in the cosmic upsurge that was initially the object of her gaze. She becomes a Weeder of Wreckage and Historian of the Native. Ultimately, this exchange contains aspects of ritual ceremony. Certainly, the two new titles now attached to the speaker entail an important self-realization and an accompanying renaming within a Native American cultural context. Two other important events, which can be understood as catalysts to the final consolidation of identity and purpose, occur earlier in the poem. The first one is the depiction of an eagle whose mate is dead or near death. The second is the delineation of the Chumash land dispossession. Both are derived from stories the grandmother once shared with the granddaughter and are remembered under the light of the constellation, a kind of mnemonic diagram that provides both recollection and reconnection. The death

209

of the eagle as a symbol for indigenous cultures which, like the widowed, continue to watch their kinds death, as well as an embodiment of rites signaling the natural cycle and the end of the poets marriage. The eagles ongoing food offerings to his fallen mate bespeak hunger, love, and the perennial attachment between living beings: It is true When she surrenders he will linger by her leaving, Bringing bits of food in switchable talons, mice For the Constitution, fresh squirrel for her wings The length of a mortal. He will die there, beside Her, belonging, nudging the body into the snowed Eternal tide of his hunger. (45) The story of the eagles belongs to a narrative embedded in the constellation: you can find them/In the stars. The retelling of the story, which is part of a legacy dating back to the speakers foremothers, becomes a transmission of cultural power and sacred knowledge within a matriarchal heritage: it was all/She knew to recite to her daughter of daughters. The natural environment is central to the transmission of cultural practices, and in this case it is important to note that Cervantes accesses cultural narratives by observing the sky. The land itself no longer belongs to its original occupants; ancestral lands are allotted to the Reagan Ranch. The poet relates the dispossession of the Chumash people through a depiction of her grandmother returning to her ancestral land in spirit form: She rides Now through the Reagan Ranch her mothers owned. I know thiswe go back to what we have loved And lost She lingers, riding in her pied pinto gauchos, In her hat of many colors and her spurs, her silver Spurs. 210

(44-45) As the grandmother returns on horseback to her ancestral home, privation, and dispossession permeate the landscape: She does not kick the horse. She goes Wherever it wants. It guides her to places where The angry never eat, where birds are spirits Of dead returned for another plot or the crumb Of knowledge, that haven of the never to get. And she is forever looking to the bare innocence Of sky, remembering, dead now, hammered as she is Into her grave of stolen home. (45) Furthermore, the inhabitants of the spirit world continue to experience the dispossession: She is singing The stories of Calafia ways and means, of the nacre Of extinct oysters and the abalone I engrave With her leftover files. (45) But despite the loss of land which in itself is an irremediable trauma, the grandmother still sings the ancient songs. The granddaughter-poet converts her grandmothers singing into material history as is emphasized here in the verb engrave. Again, the poet enunciates that poetry is not simply a written text, but it is a corporal media. To bring closure to what I have discussed in this chapter, I reiterate that, for Cervantes, poetry is an enactment of life, history, and dreams; it is an assertion against the forces of history and domination. Poetry is a forum through which history is not necessarily redressed since restitution for genocide is never really possible. Yet poetry has the power to express the haunting voices of history and to derive knowledge from them. For Cervantes, this means accessing her Native American culture. The voice of 211

her grandmother is a major source of sacred power for Cervantes. Finally, I hope that this study will initiate a new understanding of the Native American cultural dimensions of Cervantess poetry and poetics.

212

Gonzalez, Ray, I Trust Only What I Have Built With My Own Hands: An Interview with Lorna Dee Cervantes, The Bloomsbury Review, Sept-Oct; 17 (5), 1997: 3, 8.
1

You might also like