Valerie Martínez             

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from Each_and_Her (a book-length poem), University of Arizona Press ©2010

 

1.
in this way
could she

2.
we sit up straight

eyes red-rimmed
after a spanking
in the restroom
of the Shangri-La
Chinese restaurant

Juárez 1966

whenever he tells this
Dad says pitiful

and he felt bad

3.
they pack what they have
travel north
from Durango
Sinaloa
Nuevo León
Coahuila

rivers of dots
on a migratory map

papá
hay muchos
empleos allí

4.
strange how
light snow gleams
out window right

no snow out left

commuters
gape and snore
around me
in this early morning
northern-bound
train

a cloud quilt hovers
above mesas

5.
between

a layer of tangerine

6.
between

the Mexican interior
and U.S. border

three thousand maquiladoras

more than a million workers
at fifty cents an hour

imagine!
bastante para todos nosotros

7.
Rivera’s girl on her knees
sky-blue-bound shoulders

behind

his thick feet

enormous bale of calla lilies
lifted to her back

 

 

Excerpt from This is How It Began, Palace of the Governors Press  ©2010


I.
Today we say Santa Fe, our Santa Fé
in the sierra madre, in the cradle between
the Pecos Mountains, Cerro Piñon,
Tano Point, Caja del Rio, Tetilla Peak.

But there was a time, long ago,
before names, dream before dream.
Aho niishnee, principio, the beginning.

It was a seed, imagine it, smaller
than the eye’s dark pupil, smaller
than the tiniest yellow idea of seed,
and tinier. Inside, the dream
of something blue and unbelievably wide,
something rising to blue, algún encuentro
magnífico de marrón y azul.And the seed there, buried.

Perhaps it was the eye behind the eye
of some great Being, or the eye
of a fantastic explosion, or the spot
on the tail-flick of a lizard
with red and black ridges on his back.

The seed nestled inside what became an orb,
an orb hurtling through indigo space,
then a spinning, whirling mass of blue
become this planet we call Mother Earth.

 

 

Poems from And They Called It Horizon: Santa Fe Poems, Sunstone Press 2010

"Santa Fe Sestina" ©2009
 
Late autumn blows leaves into women’s hair. On the plaza,
Lydia feeds the pigeons—iridescent feathers gone blue
in the tangerine sun. It is afternoon and adobe,
crush of pueblo-style hotel rooms against a sky
that holds them steady. Her skirt is wound in ribbons,
gathered in ruffles, wind-flipped velvet, black and silver.
 
Merrymakers tumble from the doors of La Fonda, blue
windbreakers and cowboy hats. Spun from adobe,
they rush by Lydia like a tornado. A glance at the sky
stuns them, for a moment, then they’re a ribbon
of raucous laughter. Sunlight descends in silver,
travels the metal rain gutters, trimming the plaza
 
in a membrane of liquid light. Like the gold (not adobe)
the Spaniards thought they saw, coffers as wide as sky
over Seven Cities. Lydia pulls on her coat, pushes on ribbon,
remembers there’s jewelry to be sold, turquoise and silver
flashing like eye-lets along the streets of the plaza.
These days, under the shade of the portal, there’s the blue
 
of lapis and sapphire, too. All the colors of sky
remind Lydia of dawn, on the mesa, digging. Ribbons
of pale blue embedded in rock, aching for silver.
Now the stone-cold cuff on her wrist jolts her back to the plaza,
the bracelets for show and sell, cupped in the pale blue
of a tourist’s cashmere gloves. Not unlike adobe
 
cast into bricks and walls, hugging windows ribboned
in Virgin Mary ultramarine. Bells swing and ring the silver-
toned song of the cathedral. It’s a late Mass, the nave a plaza
of bowed heads. Where Lydia prays, the vault is a blue
arc from mountain to mesa, over the endless adobean
earth. Lydia knows it as the one, limitless sky
 
that cradles everyone from above--the caricaturist, silver-
haired, at his booth, the Mexican girls skipping in the plaza,
the santero wrapping up Saint Agnes in crisp blue
tissue paper. It’s October. The day feels old as adobe,
new as the drugstore’s loopy neon sign (sky-
high and glowing), fluid as the clouds’ unruly ribbons.
 
My hair is silver, thinks Lydia, the veins in my hands are large
and blue; my legs are earth-bound adobe. This plaza floats
on time’s swirling ribbons. I’m swaddled; I’m half-swallowed in sky.

 

 

Poems from Absence, Luminescent, Four Way Books 1998 & 2010:

:

"The Little Number" ©1999

 

                            A cell, in Beijing Prison #1, reserved for political prisoners.
                                  Only as large as a cardboard box, its light is never turned off.

How I dream, it opens:
I have the bruised legs of that girl
with baskets, soft peaches
for my mouth. She never sits,
Her hair keeps falling, sticking
to her white teeth.

Awake, with the bulb one and one.
Get one breath out, one in,
before the room closes.
View of my limbs over and over. No thing
comes back, no remember
inside the little number.
It's my own voice, closes, with the light
on and on. I haven't spoken.
Write the walls
with my eyes. Press the walls out.
Logic of wall with their numerics,
angles, borders--

Forest: it's the soul of the girl
feeding me. It's the soul
of the girl in my mouth.
I'm not myself, too close.
It's another man's knees pulled up,
sores on the bones, sitting.
His spine with its islands of dark bruises.
I swallow it.
He confesses anything.


 "And Seeing It" ©1999

Orange, orange. And the hand arching up
to hold it. The women's hand. The arching.
Up. And the star exploding, seeing it
where it wasn't, a telescope on the night sky.
The thermonuclear flash.
The explosion.

She had her hand out; it fell
like an explosion into her fingers.
It wasn't the cope and the eye,
was hand, fruit. It was what I saw.
It was what I imagine I somehow saw.

Out on the horizon of stars beyond the gigantic sun.
Beyond the measure of the sun the star bursting.

And it was autumn. The shadows of oleanders
made colors of bodies on the lawn.
The girls dresses were red on the green lawn.
Smelling of fruit.
Making shapes of fruit in their hands.

With the sky all opaque, and the one star.

There, at the top of the fingers, the orange.
At the tip like God and Adam touching.
Like the ceiling of the Sistine where the stars might be.

And knowing about hydrogen, carbon.
A collapsing in. The water drunk by girls,
the breath given out. Breath, out.

The table of elements served up.
Iron in spinach in the aqua bowl.
Green explosion in the aqua bowl.

Clusters of grape stems without grapes.
Molecular models like grape stems.
To what we address, link.
To what we speak.

Not in our lifetime will we see it.
Not in the sky like this: supernova.
Not ever again, they say.
Drops. The orange.


"Tesoro," ©1999
                                    for Timothy Trujillo, 1951-1991

Just a few years ago, when everything was permanent.
Or on the edge of. Or, yes,perhaps over the edge,
or falling away from--

Was like the façades of the Sagrada Familia
with their delicate foliage, swans and turtles
bearing the weight of. Everything alive
& carved out of stone.

It was my treasure, this permanence,
the architecture of living. Everything
stone-true & buttressed: arc & arc & arc
of an ancient city.

Can you guess what will come next? Can you?
Touching you like the sheerest handkerchief
of silk? When the beloveds fell from the sky
& disappeared? From stone to diaphanous silk.
On the wind. Sudden.

It was a mistake, amiss. It was perception
of what is light as what is heavy & permanent.
Sometimes, one's hand can pass through stone,
& it is not a dream.

One got sick & another, another.
Someone I loved, who loved me,
disappeared. Two, or is it three,
who died. This is honest enough,
enough to say bluntly.
This is for Tim.

In The Visitation it is beautiful:
the handmaid's arms are barely covered,
tender skin beneath transparent silk.
The painter made no mistake,
the maiden is the most present of all.
She could be taken on the wind
with those invisible wings
& she is real, impermanent.
Her weight compares to no universe.

To hear it in my sleep--tesoro--
the hardest gift I'll come to accept.
In the cities of dreams my delicate arms
reach out toward the substantial,
to the place where they've all gone.
Goodbye.
Everything is like thin paper here.
Sometime, I'll see you all there.

 

 

Poems from World to World, University of Arizona Press, 2004:

 "Invocation," ©2004
 

Out of stone
Out of salt-smell
Out of silence and sepulcher
Out of moon-chasing night
Out of dead-of-the-night
Night buoying them up
They come
 
Out of the mind
Out of dream
Out of reminiscence
Out of figments
Out of gladness
Out of grief
They come
 
Girls with their earlobes
Boys with their lower lips
Men ravenous
Women of parched thirst
They come
 
Mothers and eyelashes
Grandfathers and teeth
Fathers with the backs of the neck
Come

Grandmothers and underarms
Daughters and sons aflame
Infants and tongues
They come
 
O Memory
How you want to cradle them
Drink under the syllables of their lips
How you want to offer them
Your regrets
Tender as fingertips
How you want to punish them
To save them from the deep
O Memory
 
 O Second Sight
They are issuing from corner turns
They are disappearing
They are half-sight
And near-sight
Are out of touch
And into touch
 
The dead are watching
(See their pupils growing large)
The dead are sleeping
(How they turn their eyes inside)
The dead are swimming
(For the suns are full of distance)
The dead are humming
(Now they wander in new sounds)
 
Pull them into you
Tether your sighs to their hair
Float among them tonight
O Weary Travelers
So they come
 
Ask them to speak in tongues you cannot know
Listen as if the sounds
Are the bones of prophecy
O Dumbfounded Ones
 
Show them your birthmarks
Your thin lines
Your braille veins
And numb scars
For they have none to trace and lament
Show them
 
They come in ribboned skirts
They come in linen and earth
They come with nothing to see
They come with everything under the skin
 
In nakedness
In cloth unwinding
In absence
So they are lovely
So they come
 
O Cemetery
O Honorary
O Funerary
 Night of the Dead
Help them come
 
The dead are moonstone
The dead are hollow stone
The dead are mist on the bones
in mother-of-pearl
 
So fear them
And hold them
In the shadow of your ribs
With open palms
 
Evening of the crossing
Stars of the passing through
Moon-hole beckoning
 
O Mouth Curve
O Bodies Double
Evening O Evening
 
Till the worlds converge
On incantation
O Double Life
And Triple Life
 
The Sumptuous Hunger
Reunion
Hands upon hair upon
Blue limbs incarnate
 
O Communion
O Tears upon
Sweet Tears Numenate.
 
                                  Day of the Dead, 2000

 "Nude," ©2004
 
Is she lying there where light falters
in rectangles of brown and bone
as maiden? Is she courtesan, sister,
slave, wife, student? Has she been paid
to recline so, falling asleep
like a creature in the afternoon sun,
ankle a point of light piercing?
Is she somehow nothing of these—
new and capacious in sleepy defiance?
Against history, then, so the eye
for once suffers amnesia. She is not
desire, not mother, not even bits
of negative and positive space, color
and shadow. No, not animal.
Is she meek? Is she fearsome then?
Where does the mind’s eye wander
in this numb space? Is this her new redolence?
She does not exist on the side
of any boundary, nor in the definitive,
nor for the man’s eye upon her
nor the woman’s field of esteem.
And while there is all this limiting,
all this blinking out and blanking,
something enormous fills the landscape,
pure abundance. So it is
with all we give away at great cost:

paradise rushes toward emptiness.

 


 "Matter, Hunger, Storm," ©2004
 
As if this pale delicacy: petal,
and the fire around it,
and some hint of ash,
and a time lapse,
the brown eye that sees.
 
As if the gesture: desert,
and the dark skin, women’s hands,
and the silk not theirs,
vanishing years,
the clouds’ gradual descending.
 
As if the poor: bending,
and the knees on fire,
and some dull shimmer,
the flash forward
to aching, blue thunder.
 
As the dust lifts,
as the tender, underneath.
As the ankles.
As the.
As.
 
 A wicked lightning.

 

 

 

Poems from A Flock of Scarlet Doves: Selected Translations

of Uruguay's Delmira Agustini, Sutton Hoo Press, 2005

 "Ofredando al libro," ©2005
                                  a Eros
 
Porque hace tu can de la leona
Más fuerte de la Vida, y la aprisiona
La cadena de rosas de tu brazo.
 
Porque tu cuerpo es la raíz, el lazo
Esencial de los troncos discordantes
Del placer y el dolor, plantas gigantes.
 
Porque emerge en tu mano bella y fuerte,
Como en broche de místicos diamantes
El más embriagador lis de la Muerte.
 
Porque sobre el Espacio te diviso,
Puente de luz, perfume y melodía,
Comunicando infierno y paraíso.
 
--Con alma fúlgida y carne sombría...
                                                                    Delmira Agustini

 

Dedication ©2005
 
                 to Eros
 
Because you turn Life's mightiest lioness
Into a lap dog, and imprison it
In the chain of roses of your arms.
 
Because your body is the root, the essential
Knot between the discordant trunks
Of pleasure and pain, gigantic plants.
 
Because it emerges in your hand, beautiful and strong,
Like a brooch of mystical diamonds,
The most intoxicating iris of Death.
 
Because beyond Space it is you I glimpse,
Bridge of light, perfume and melody,
Joining hell and paradise.
 
--With a shimmering soul and flesh that shadows us...


                                                                 trans. Valerie Martínez
                    

from VisiÓn
 
Acaso fue en un marco de ilusión,
En el profundo espejo del deseo,
O fue divina y simplemente en vida
Que yo te vi velar mi sueño la otra noche?
 
En mi alcoba agrandada de soledad y miedo,
Taciturno a mi lado apareciste
Como un hongo gigante, muerto y vivo,
Brotado en los rincones de la noche
Humedos de silencio,
Y engrasados de sombra y soledad.
 
Te inclinabas a mí supremamente,
Como a la copa de cristal de un lago
Sobre el mantel de fuego del desierto;
Te inclinabas a mí, como un enfermo
De la vida a los opios infalibles
Y a las vendas de piedra de la Muerte;
Te inclinabas a mí como el creyente
A la oblea de cielo de la hostia...
--Gota de nieve con sabor de estrellas
Que alimenta los lirios de la Carne,
Chispa de Dios que estrella los espíritus.--
Te inclinabas a mí como el gran sauce
De la Melancolía
A las hondas lagunas del silencio;
Te inclinabas a mi como la torre
De mármol del Orgullo,
Minada por un monstruo de tristeza,
A la hermana solemne de su sombra...
Te inclinabas a mí como si fuera
Mi cuerpo la inicial de tu destino
En la página oscura de mi lecho;
Te inclinabas a mí como al milagro
De una ventana abierta al más allá.
 
Y te inclinabas más que todo eso!
 
                                                   Delmira Agustini
 
  
from Vision ©2005
 
Perhaps it was a moment of illusion,
The deepened mirror of desire,
Or I was simply alive and divine
When I saw you tend my dream the other night?
 
In my room magnified by solitude and fear,
Taciturn, at my side, you appeared
Like a gigantic mushroom, dead and alive,
Blossoming in the corners of the dark
Damp with silence, and oiled
With shadow and solitude.
 
You were leaning to me supremely,
Like the goblet of a crystal lake
Over the fiery tablecloth of the desert;
You were leaning to me as to a patient
Revived to infallible opiums,
The stone bandages of the Dead;
You were leaning to me like the believer
Leaning toward the Host, the sky's holy wafer...
--Drop of snow with your taste of stars
Nourishing the lilies of the Flesh,
Spark of God touching the spirits.--
You were leaning to me like the great willow
of Melancholy
Toward the deep lakes of silence;
You were leaning like the ivory tower of Pride,
Mined by a monster of sadness,
Toward the solemn sister of its shadow...
You were leaning toward me
As if on my body the imprint of your destiny
Was on the dark page of my bed;
You were leaning as if to the miracle
Of an open window to the beyond.
 
And you were leaning further than this....
 

                                                    trans. Valerie Martínez
 
     

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