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The Desert Music
—the dance begins: to end about a form
propped motionless—on the bridge
between Juarez and El Paso—unrecognizable
in the semi-dark
Wait!
The others waited while you inspected it,
on the very walk itself
Is it alive?
—neither a head,
Legs nor arms!
It isn’t a sack of rags someone
has abandoned here ∙ torpid against
the flange of the supporting girder ∙ ?
An inhuman shapelessness,
knees hugged tight up into the belly
Egg-shaped!
What a place to sleep!
on the International Boundary. Where else,
interjurisdictional, not to be disturbed?
How shall we get said what must be said?
Only the poem.
Only the counted poem, to an exact measure:
to imitate, not to copy nature, not
to copy nature
NOT, prostrate, to copy nature
but a dance! to dance
two and two with him—
sequestered there a sleep,
right end up!
A music
supersedes his composure, hallooing to us
across a great distance ∙ ∙
wakens the dance
who blows upon his benumbed fingers!
Only the poem
only the made poem, to get said what must
be said, not to copy nature, sticks
in our throats
The law? The law gives us nothing
but a corpse, wrapped in a dirty mantle.
The law is based on murder and confinement,
long delayed,
but this, following the insensate music,
is based on the dance:
an agony of self realization
bound into a whole
by that which surrounds us
I cannot escape
I cannot vomit it up
Only the poem!
Only the made poem, the verb calls it
into being.
—to place myself (in
my nature) beside nature
—to imitate
nature (for to copy nature would be a
shameful thing)
I lay myself down:
The Old market’s a good place to begin:
Let’s cut through here—
techilla’s only
a nickel a slug in these side streets.
Keep out though. Oh, it’s all right at
this time of day but I saw H.terribly
beaten up in one of those joints. He
asked for it. I thought he was going to
be killed. I do
my drinking on the main drag ∙
That’s the bull-ring
Oh, said Floss, after she got used to the
change of light ∙
What color! Isn’t it
wonderful!
—paper flowers (para los santos)
baked red-clay utensils, daubed
with blue, silverware,
dried peppers, onions, print goods, children’s
clothing ∙ the place deserted all but
for a few Indians squatted in the
booths, unnoticing (don’t you think it)
as though they slept there ∙
There’s a second tier. Do you
want to go up?
What makes Texans so tall?
We saw a woman this morning in a mink cape
six feet if she was an inch. What a woman!
Probably a Broadway figure.
—tell you what else we saw; about a million
sparrows screamingtheir heads off
in the trees of that small park where
the buses stop, sanctuary,
I suppose,
from the wind driving the sand in that way
about the city ∙
Texas rain they call it
—and those two alligators in the fountain ∙
There were four
I saw only two
They were looking
right at you all the time ∙
Penny please! Give me penny please, mister.
Don’t give them anything.
∙ instinctively
one has already drawn one’s naked
wrist away from those obscene fingers
as in the mind a vague apprehension speaks
and the music rouses ∙
Let’s get in here.
a music! cut off as
the bar door closes behind us.
We’ve got
another half hour.
—returned to the street,
the pressure moves from booth to booth along
the curb. Opposite, no less insistent
the better stores are wide open. Come in
and look around. You don’t have to buy: hats,
riding boots, blankets ∙
Look at the way,
slung from her neck with a shawl, that young
Indian woman carries her baby!
—a stream of Spanish,
as she brushes by, intense, wide-
eyed in eager talk with her boy husband
—three half-grown girls, one of them eating a
pomegranate. Laughing.
and the serious tourist,
man and wife, middle aged, middle western,
their arms loaded with loot, whispering
together — still looking for bargains ∙
and the aniline
red and green candy at the little booth
tended by the old Indian woman.
Do you suppose anyone actually
buys—and eats the stuff?
My feet are beginning to ache me.
We still got a few minutes.
Let’s try here. They had the mayor
up last month for taking $3000 a week from
the whore houses of the city. Not much left
for the girls. There’s a show on.
Only a few tables
occupied. a conventional orchestra—this
place livens up later—playing the usual local
jing-a-jing— —a boy and girl team, she
confidential with someone
off stage. Laughing: just finishing the act.
So we drink until the next turn—a strip tease.
Do you mean it? Wow! Look at her.
You’d have to be
pretty drunk to get any kick out of that.
She’s no Mexican. Some worn out trouper from
the states. Look at those breasts ∙
There is a fascination
seeing her shake
the beaded sequins from
a string about her hips
She gyrates but it’s
not what you think,
one does not laugh
to watch her belly.
One is moved but not
at the dull show. The
guitarist yawns. She
cannot even sing. She
has about her painted
hardihood a screen
of pretty doves which
flutter their wings.
he cold eyes perfunct-
orily moan but do not
smile. yet they bill
and coo by grace of
a certain candor. She
is heavy on her feet.
That’s good. She
bends forward leaning
on the table of the balding man sitting
upright, alone, so that
everything hangs for-
ward.
What the hell
are you grinning
to yourself about? Not
at her?
The music!
I like her. She fits
the music ∙
Why don’t these Indians get over this nauseating prattle
about their souls and their loves and sing us something
else for a change?
this place is rank
with it. she
at least knows she’s
part of another tune,
knows her customers,
has the same
opinion of them as I
have. That gives her
one up ∙ one up
following the lying
music ∙
there is another music. The bright colored candy
of her nakedness lifts her unexpectedly
to partake of its tune ∙
Andromeda of those rocks,
the virgin of her mind ∙ those unearthly
in her mockery of virtue
she becomes unaccountably virtuous ∙
though she in no
way pretends it ∙
Let’s get out of this.
In the street it hit
me in the face as we started to walk again. Or
am I merely playing the poet? Do I merely invent
it out of whole cloth? I thought ∙
What in the form of an old whore in
a cheap Mexican joint in Juarez, her bare
can waggling crazily can be
so refreshing to me, raise to my ear
so sweet a tune, built of such slime?
Here we are. They’ll be along any minute.
the bar is at the right of the entrance,
a few tables opposite which you have to pass
to get to the dining room, beyond,
A foursome, two oversize Americans, no
longer young, got up ascow-boys
hats and all, are drunk and carrying on
with their gals, drunk also,
especially on inciting her man, the
biggest, Yip ee! to dance in
the narrow space, oblivious to everything
—she is insatiable and he is trying
stumblingly to keep up with her.
Give it the gun, pardner! Yip ee! We
pushed by them to our table, seven
of us. Seated about the room
were quiet family groups, some with
children, eating. Rather a better
class than you notice
on the streets. so here we are. You
can see through into the kitchen
where one of the cooks, his shirt sleeves
rolled up, an apron over
the well pressed pants of a street
suit, black hair neatly parted,
a tall
good looking man, is working
absorbed, before a chopping block
Old fashioneds all around?
So this is William
Carlos Williams, the poet ∙
Floss and I had half consumed
our quartered hearts of lettuce before
we noticed the others hadn’t touched theirs ∙
You seem quite normal. Can you tell me? Why
does one want to write a poem?
Because it’s there to be written.
Oh. A matter of inspiration then?
Of necessity.
Oh. But what sets it off?
I am that he whose brains
are scattered
aimlessly
—and so,
the hour done, the quail eaten, we were on
our way back to El Paso.
good night. good
night and thank you ∙ No. Thank you. We’re
going to walk ∙
—and so, on the naked wrist, we feel again
those insistent fingers ∙
Penny please, mister.
Penny please. Give me penny.
here! now go away.
—but the music, the music has reawakened
as we leave the busier parts of the street
and come again to the bridge in the semi-dark,
pay our fee and begin again to cross ∙
seeing the lights along the mountain back of El
Paso and pause to watch the boys calling out
to us to throw more coins to them standing
in the shallow water ∙ so that’s
where the incentive lay, with the annoyance
of those surprising fingers.
So you’re a poet?
a good thing to be got rid of—half drunk,
a free dinner under your belt, even though you
get typhoid—and to have met people you
can at least talk to ∙
relief from that changeless, endless
inescapable and insistent music ∙
what else, latins, do you yourselves
seek but relief!
with the expressionless ding dong you dish up
to us of your souls and our loves, which
we swallow. Spaniards! (though these are mostly
Indians who chase the white bastards
through the streets on their Independence Day
and try to kill them) ∙
What’s that?
Oh, come on.
But what’s THAT?
the music! the
music! as when Casals struck
and held a deep cello tone
and I am speechless ∙
There it sat
in the projecting angle of the bridge flange
as I stood aghast and looked at it—
in the half light: shapeless or rather returned
to its original shape, armless, legless,
headless, packed like the pit of a fruit into
that obscure corner—or
a child in the womb prepared to imitate life,
warding its life against
a birth of awful promise. The music
guards it, a mucus, a film that surrounds it,
a benumbing ink that stains the
sea of our minds—to hold us off—shed
of a shape close as it an get to no shape,
a music! a protecting music ∙
I am a poet! I
am. I am. I am a poet, I reaffirmed, ashamed ∙
Now the music volleys through as in
a lonely moment I hear it. Now it is all
about me. The dance! The verb detaches itself
seeking to become articulate ∙
And I could not help thinking
of the wonders of the brain that
hears that music and of our
skill sometimes to record it.