Where poetry meets science
WE NOW KNOW genetic memory is real. Epigenetics and brain science indicate we inherit the emotional experiences of our ancestors, and those experiences come to rest in our bodies and oral traditions. If an entire community undergoes the traumatic experience of conquest, colonization and loss of the land, trauma is both individual and collective. A cold, pale wind, pálido y frio, came. First the land, then the plazas, and finally, nuestros casas.
No nos ven, m’ijo.
“A lovely old adobe, the same family lived there 175 years! Would you believe it had linoleum over a dirt floor? But we sure made a killing!”
We thought los gabardines just didn’t notice, speaking as if we were children. “They just don’t like outsiders.”
No nos ven, m’ijo.
“Get your horse off my brand new lawn!”
Señora, mi caballo no sabe que ya no es su pastura. *
Con el tiempo, lentamente, paso por paso we began to become transparent, hasta cuando we could see landscapes, light
brillando through la plebe, como whispering dolls of wrinkled cellophane, todo la plebe, mi Raza, walking around the plaza that isn’t ours anymore, talking in dry, papery whispers Jamás me vas a ver, m’ijo.
Knocking on the old door, no one is there anymore.
“This house is haunted!”
*
When I pass the old placita at the corner of Valle Verde and La Loma I wonder if the mirror is still there. My great-great-great-great grandfather, Tranquilino Abeyta, who lived to 110, built that house. He embedded a broken fragment of mirror, precious in those days, in the adobe plaster for his wives, who died, one by one, all five of them. They said at the Senior Citizens’ [home] that he poisoned them.
We were not allowed to ask about Papa Tranque, but I secretly believed his wives left their faces in that mirror. Its surface had sagged with the weight of their secrets, and when I stood on a chair my reflection rippled, warped and screamed silently, desperate eyes watching me.
I wonder if the ghosts of the poisoned wives have learned English from listening to the strangers who live there now.
*
An old man people called Amarante Klan used to hitchhike from town to his half-collapsed choza in Ranchos, its windows broken, the stove pipe listing steeply, a thick crop of weeds on the dirt roof. He carried an antique pistol on a braided horsehair strap across his filthy rag-shrouded, cavernous chest. “Pa’ cuando the pinche KKK comes to Taos a lynchiar la Raza and take what’s left of the land!” he said.
When it was summer and I could roll the windows down, I would give him a ride. His clothes were black and stiff with soot and kerosene, and the deliberate slash of soot on each cheek told me it was not only the KKK he feared, but witches who never bother you if you have soot on your face. It would take him three minutes to get in my pickup.
First, he would try and piss me off.
“Eres Gringa, verdad?”
In response to the insult, I compulsively recited the obligatory roll call of my ancestors, and he would wait until I got to Sostenes’ name and then he would shout, “Agrrah! He was STUPID!”
And then he would tell me how Sostenes sold the land from Placitas to Ranchitos for three white horses.
“!Y hace tiempo que se murieon los pinches caballos! !No ay que vender la tierra!”
*
Four cold, pale, perfect trapizoids of moonlight
paint peonies, with worn-away patches,
scrubbed, prized Montgomery Ward Catalog
linoleum perfectly conforming to the shape
of the living earth underneath, walked upon one hundred and seventy-five years by the same family’s feet.
*
What weird wind trembles petals, shuffling shoes whispering earth walls, generations talking, eating, dying, birthing, fighting, making love, cooking, laughing, crying.
Layers and layers of mud plaster. And that eye, masquerading as a mirror, watching the walls, layers of tierra vallita, every spring full moon
ghost-women, with sheepskins, stroking the shimmering, mirage moonlit walls
with invisible stories, sorrow, songs and poems of loss.
*
The first act of American Imperialism was
the conquest of half of Mexico, including Taos, in 1847.
The walls at the corner of Valverde and La Loma remember witnesses telling the family about the hangings in the plaza, how the church at the Pueblo was cannonballed, they knew the names of those who died, how the wives of hanged warriors
who sacrificed themselves were forced
to drag their husband’s bodies four miles from the plaza back to the Pueblo. Those walls listened to how high Mora’s flames reached into the night sky as it burned to the ground, they listened to how the shots and the weeping of widows, sisters, mothers and daughters sounded.