Lorna Dee Cervantes - Visions of Mexico While at a Writing Symposium in Port Townsend, Washington lyrics

Mexico When I'm that far south, the old words molt off my skin, the feathers of all my nervousness. My own words somersault naturally as my name, joyous among all those meadows: Michoacan, Vera Cruz, Tenochtitlan, Oaxaca... Pueblos green on the low hills where men slap handballs below acres of maiz. I watch and understand. My frail body has never packed mud or gathered in the full weight of the harvest. Alone with the women in the adobe, I watch men, their taut faces holding in all their youth. This far south we are governed by the law of the next whole meal. We work and watch seabirds elbow their wings in migratory ways, those mispronouncing gulls coming south to refuge or gameland. I dont want to pretend I know more and can speak all the names. I cant. My sense of this land can only ripple through my veins like the chant of an epic corrido.. I come from a long line of eloquent illiterates whose history reveals what words dont say. Our anger is our way of speaking, the gesture is an utterance more pure than word. We are not animals but our senses are keen and our reflexes, accurate punctuation. All the knifings in a single night, low-voiced scufflings, sirens, gunnings... We hear them and the poet within us bays. Washington I dont belong this far north. The uncomfortable birds gawk at me. They hem and haw from their borders in the sky. I heard them say: Mexico is a stumbling comedy. A loose-legged Cantinflas woman acting with Pancho Villa drunkenness. Last night at the tavern this was all confirmed in a painting of a woman: her glowing silk skin, a halo extending from her golden coiffure while around her, dark-skinned men with Jap slant eyes were drooling in a caricature of machismo. Below it, at the bar, two Chicanas hung at their beers. They had painted black birds that dipped beneath their eyelids. They were still as foam while the men fiddled with their a**es, absently; the bubbles of their teased hair snapped open in the forced wind of the beating fan. there are songs in my head i could sing you songs that could drone away all the Mariachi bands you thought you ever heard songs that could tell you what I know or have learned from my people but for that I need words simple black nymphs between white sheets of paper obedient words obligatory words words I steal in the dark when no one can hear me as pain sends seabirds south from the cold I come north to gather my feathers for quills