Ears Full of Thorns
       

The music of silence was composed
when Santa Fe fell in 1619,
Pueblo people cutting off
the heads of the Spaniards.
My mother denied a slap on
her face, turned the other cheek,
like Christ, and asked for
it again.

The angels who guided
the conquistador betrayed him
and left him to die in the canyon.
The wolf believed in rosaries,
chewed a bundle of them
before he was shot in
the season of faults.

My brother never woke from
the umbilical cord around his neck.
The music of loss and defeat
is the beauty composed during
the shattering of the clay ovens.

My streets were lined in brown
when mud was legal and no one
felt they had to put iron bars
in every window.
Waiting for the signal to attack,
Juan Carlos Arrete entered heaven
by welcoming the spear that
inflated his body and set him on
the black horse he rode as a boy.

There is no mercy when
the rat leaves the hole and
a Gila Monster emerges,
its black body dotted in pink,
its ugly head flashing its tongue
to see if the blood of
our waiting has dried.
What binds us is a passageway
to the jars of salt where
my grandmother diminished
our history by chanting to
the coyote mounted on the wall.

The notes of darkness and
headaches are the song of
a passing truck full of
migrant workers on the way
to slow deaths, the fields
of cotton and chile destroyed
by the black fumes that
took over the valley.
The mouth of judgment
is a shoeless foot.

When Cochise erased
the markings on the rocks,
twenty-eight of his warriors
were killed by the Mexicans.
When Emilio Zapata was gunned
down in conspiracy, three white
stallions were set free in
the town square by his enemies.
When Andre Breton found
a plate of blue feathers by
his cot in the Zuni pueblo,
he wrote seven poems and
crossed the desert on foot.
When a tiny lizard was eaten
by the schoolboy on a dare,
his friends stared at him
and walked away for good.

The ear bristles with love,
but no one listens to the choir
because the moment of bowing
down is covered in purple
curtains thrown on the bodies.

My turn consists of taking a twig,
Tying a blade of grass around it,
then holding the twig in the air
for a falcon to take it.

My father had a blue panther
tattooed on his body when
he was in the Navy.
My father cut the panther
off his shoulder, scraping
the skin raw until his past
was erased and he did not
have to share it with anyone.

When smoke was interpreted
as a distant signal,
the dancers arrived.
When smoke slashed
the eyes red, the chosen danced.

When smoke was an alphabet
floating across the desert,
the town was founded.
When smoke took
the panther from my father's
body, I watched in silence.

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Copyright © 2019 Ray Gonzalez All rights reserved
from The Bitter Oleander
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission