Featured Artist works
By: Renato I. Rosaldo
THANKS (original)
What made me wake when the phone rang,
thin and distant, from a corner of my dream,
is beyond me. My daughter, Olivia, had to tell
me what a ten-year old Mexican boy
in an Oakland, California grade school had told
her that morning. It happened on his way
home from school. His face pinched, eyes large,
he tried to muster English, only Spanish
poured out, el idioma de lo que se prohibe decir.
The migra stopped him and asked, Does anyone
in your house got no papers? The boy knew,
said no, kept walking, went inside his living room.
The migra burst in behind him, their dogs,
bristling into snarls, growls like big trucks.
His family had papers, but the boy won’t
finish the school year. In five days he’ll go
back to Mexico, where he’s never been,
the walk home from school without dogs.
************************************************************
ST. MOSCA
A fly hums close,
settles in front of me,
swivels its left eye,
and its companions
gather, buzzing accord.
It strokes a long leg
along a long leg,
bows forward and back.
The fly rises, spirals,
zeroes in on my toast,
licking, testing, tasting.
It dances on my butter.
It struts and mocks.
I take aim, swat it,
and yellow insides ooze into the jam,
but my plate is broken.
************************************************************
GUARDIAN ANGEL
My guardian angel blinks, stretches, yawns.
It’s Tuesday, his day to sleep in.
Dressed in blue shirt and grey slippers,
he picks at his pancakes,
devours the morning paper,
surveys the lives of his clients,
sees them safely in their routines:
the notary steps to his desk,
sits, and slowly traces his signature.
A reporter rushes after the fact,
already writing her story.
The teacher dictates the established rules.
Fine, the angel says, everything’s fine,
dozes off, but then the spirit, the duende arrives
and covers the teacher with a red cape.
I am that teacher. I slide to the other side,
the beyond. A woman enters,
sits on the bed, stares into my past.
I see her naked back,
yellow light looming from behind.
A green wave passes through my skull.
I feel the sound without hearing it.
When I try to walk, my left foot drags.
The angel glides in, rubs my toes,
kisses my cheek, and weeps.
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Prayer to Spider Woman
Rezo a la Mujer Araña
By Renato Rosaldo
2003
Gobierno del Estado de Coahuila
Instituto Coahuilense de Cultura
Mexico
ISBN: 968-5647-17-5
Reading Rosaldo's first collection of poems, Prayer
to Spider Woman / Rezo a la mujer araña -- I cross the
barrio in Logan heights, San Diego, back in the
fifties with a finger sliced by barbed wire, on my
knees, find a spider hole with its vast webs, curl
them around my wound, then walk away, healed. This is
the art of the spider-work, her writing, her system of
inscrutable solutions. Renato Rosaldo has studied the
spider and indeed these forty-eight pieces webbed in
three thematic arcs take us into a silky labyrinth
woven by a careful technician; weavings that provide
beneficial meditations.
Already a cultural beacon as an anthropologist and
literary critic, Renato Rosaldo makes his debut as a poet
appear effortless. He presents us a well designed
web-voice; the web-writing is expansive and precise;
we leap from one genre to another, from
one tonality to another, from report to seance, from
memoir to dream. And we cross ages and epochs in the
writer's life as well as in Chicano Latino poetics. For
instance we peer into the lives of "papa," Mama
Meche," and "Mama Emilia" in poems such as "Family
Adjustments, and "Border Crossings." We visit
familiar Chicano bilingual voicings as in "La Big
Sister" and "El Tony," then we sit next to "The Poetry
Chair," for day-to-day meditations on metaphors about
Institutional power and personal transcendence,
and deeper still, we enter the realm of the dead as in
"Mama Emilia Returns," and "He Leaves His
Body," --
“My father smells of dried leaves,
he slides inward, cacoons.
His meal matters less than the arm chair
where he slips along the seam.”
We spiral through terrains and time cycles -- Mexico,
Chicago, New Orleans, Mayan villages, the Phillipines;
cultural and historical icons collide, dissolve and
interpenetrate into each other: Charlie Chaplin,
Christopher Columbus, and Our Lady of the Serpent
Skirt, Coatlicue, the Aztec Goddes of Death, Rebirth and
Fertility. Death, dream, cultural and aural slippage insist
on blurring our boundaries and perceptions, between
story and poem, medical chart and vision, memory and
desire. Rosaldo takes inner-travel cues from Dante and
lyric harmonies from Lorca and escorts us to the realm of
liminal separations and interconnections as in "Guardian Angel.”
In this poem, central to his poetics in this collection,
we float between "derrame" -- the torrential psychic overflow
that comes out of nowhere and greets us as a "stroke"
-- and duende, the limp shaman that steps on our
consciousness and giggles when we are about to fall
apart:
“yellow light looming
a green wave passes through my skull.
I feel the sound without hearing it.
When I try to walk, my left foot drags.
The angel glides in, rubs my toes...”
Rosaldo's web is taught with amazements, yet the text
does not fall into intellectual machinations; here we
sense a living voice, tender, open, wounded,
tremulous, caught in the wondrous and painful waves of
mist, "inward cacoons," rage, "succulent bites,"
"boyish wickedness," and prayer.
Rosaldo's first collection, with companion poems translated into
Spanish, the best I have seen in decades -- is a
masterpiece. Prayer to Spider Woman also weaves
a delicate new bridge between Mexico and the United Sates
being published by the State of Coahuila and the Coahuila
Institute of Culture. Perhaps, as in Manuel Puig's novel,
The Kiss of the Spider Woman, two imprisoned voices
speak to each other, one of them in rapture, the other
in detachment; the detached one, the listener-reader
little by little, enters into the web, then both
are consumed by the combustion of unexpected forces
of radical perception, then released, together, healed.
:: Juan Felipe Herrera
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