Frontera NorteSur, August 1999

These photographs were taken in northeastern and central Mexico in 1997 by Paige DeShong. They document descansos and roadside shrines of these regions. Framed with the images are poems written in English or Spanish by a diverse group of writers who are familiar with the tradition of descansos. The poems are personal inventions and meditations on the images presented in the photographs. More information.

Uriel Quesada
La Esperanza

I
Mi esperanza se alimenta
de invenciones humanas:
sangre, imaginación, mañana,
este momento.Transpira olor a planta rebelde,
a muerto incomforme, a desafío.
Perfuma su presencia, crece visible
o furtiva.

Ella se posa sobre el suelo
negro y sensual.
Desde ese punto se lanza
a las alturas
transformada en árbol y ave.
El suelo, que guía al reptil y a la raíz,
conduce también hacia el asombro
de la profundidad,
donde mi esperanza crea su color.

II
La esperanza conoce
el horizonte
y es capaz de volverlo multitud.
Forma el aire y se forma en el aire.
Intercambia con la altura
preciosos materiales: luz,
eletricidad, agua.

Ella gusta subir por la centella
al infinito
y atraer lluvia con su magnetismo.
Cae del cielo y aspira al cielo
como final de su ciclo,
pero siempre regresa
a mi vecindad,
como si fuéramos los hombres
inaprensibles para el olvido.

III
Para seducirnos, la esperanza
arrulla con el aguacero,
miente furia con el rayo,
se vuelve
nube apetitosa.

Por nosotros
hace tratos con el
universo,
crea plantas de arena,
animales rugosos,
se resiste a las reglas
de la razón,
arrasa sus propios límites.

IV
La esperanza se reinventa,
insiste para sí:
"soy plural y polimorfa,
perenne y permutable."

Entonces se vuelve mar,
y hielo y piedra y estrella.

En la totalidad,
su verde se topa con
rojo, negro, azul…
En la totalidad,
los colores se cuentan historias
para fecundarse
y salir de nuevo a señalar
los puntos cardinales.

V
Por ello la esperanza,
mi esperanza,
tiene hoy paisaje marino
donde el agua está ausente,
habla de rutas hacia el oasis,
carga al sol pegado al cuerpo.
Vive sin nostalgia por
el árbol y la humedad,
amarillo es su corazón.

Serena y basta, mi esperanza
toma el camino
del conquistador,
pero antes hace un guiño
al cielo:
se inclina brevemente,
sonríe.

Hope

I

My hope feeds on human discoveries:
blood, imagination, morning,
this moment.
It gives aroma to rebellious plants,
to the dissatisfied dead, to the defiant.
It perfumes its presence, grows invisible
or furtive.

She settles on the floor
black and sensual.
From this point she ascends
to the heavens, transforms
into a tree, a bird. Sleep, is guided
by the reptile and the root,
vanishes toward the astonishment
of the profound where my hope creates
its color.

II

Hope knows the horizon
and is able to multiply it.
Shapes the air and takes shape of the air
trades with the heavens
precious metal: light
electricity, water.

She likes to climb the spark
to a infinitesimal point
and seduces rain with her magnetism.
She falls from the sky and aspires
to the sky as if it were the end
of her revolution
but she always returns,
to my neighborhood,
unable to forget.

III

In order to seduce, hope
lulls us with storms,
fakes fury with lightning,
and returns
as a voluptuous cloud.

For us she bargains
with the universe,
creates plants from sand,
wrinkled animals,
resists all rules of reason
razes her own limitations.

Gilberto Lucero
El Descanso

Camino buscándola, sobre su piel, el desierto
por los cauces secos lineas de sus manos
caminos que me llevan, que me cargan
hacia ella.

Como ríos o rumores llego a los hombros
de su horizonte. El viento, su voz
y en cada lenta palabra, sílabas
hechas de alas blancas.

La sombra gitana, su manto
cae como el mar, entra y sale en furia y silencio
sobre su cuerpo, amenazando
los secretos de su cintura y caderas.

Mínimo, me acuesto en su ombligo
aferrado al cielo acribillado de estrellas y canto
ahogado en el aroma nocturno.

Rest

I walk seeking her, over her skin the desert,
through dry river beds, lines of her hands,
paths that take me, carry me
towards her.

Like river or rumors I arrive at the shoulders
of her horizon. The wind, her voice
and in each slow word, syllables
made of white wings.

The gypsy shadow, her robe
falls like the sea, it enters and retreats in fury
and in silence over her body threatening
the secrets of her waist and thighs.

Minimal, I rest in her navel,
held by the sky riddled in stars, and sing
drowned in the aroma of the night.

Claude Fouillade
Before I Go

Part I
today
as the sun wanders towards the future
all I experience is silence

I cannot remember
what brought me here

have I seen the sands of the pacific ocean
or crossed the jagged mountains of the north
maybe I rested my feet in a cold stream
and helped a shepherd or a farmer
somewhere

does it matter

yet
there is
one thing
I seem to remember

I lived on a farm
with my father

he offered to give me
a field by a river
because he knew
I could work its soil
forever

but I did not want to stay
and I can
no longer
smell
the sweet earth
my hands used to caress

Part II
things happened
so quickly
for a very long time

I can still feel the pain
in my hands
when they hit
the ground
then my elbows
and my shoulders
and my heart
explode
I think

I bounce
on the ground
like a wooden puppet
thrown in anger
at the floor
and I land
among cacti

the thorns
are still
in my hands
and
on my forehead.

I try to drink
the dusty air

I hear
a pounding
is it my feeble heart
or the rumble
of trucks and cars
and buses
on the road

the pounding slows down
like departing thunder
it is almost peaceful

and when I take
another breath
the clouds do not move

Part III
This is not me
this concrete block
and this cross

it makes me
uneasy
it may be
that I am not
ready to become
a reminder

I am plunged
into anonymity
as my name
withers away
under
the wind
and the biting dust

it bothers me
at first
then I realize
that it is almost
as if
I have to be forgotten
to be free
again
finally.

Kevin McIlvoy
Been So Good To Me

We were belted in. At the proper limit. Passing no one. One long hour from El Paso International Airport. I drove because he said he needed to sleep, but I knew he was wide awake and pretending, as we both had been for years. At the end of friendship, silence is the unending final suffering.
I made conversation with myself and the dairy cows at the brinks of their pens, their heads swimming from the chemical feed and the afternoon sun and the vertigo of having no freedom from each other. I asked them if they ever stopped - making milk, making milk. They shook their beautiful but cowish heads, gave each other that holy wooden look. Of all the things I thought they might want, I believed they might want music most. I popped in my favorite tape.
Lord! Lord! Lord! Lord! Lord, you been good to me.
You sure been good to me.
The Five Blind Boys. Oh, cows, I said. There is this one good thing. One. Lord. Lord. Lord. Lord.
We can sing with them.
Let us sing.
The windows closed, the air on, windshield clean, the commotion narrowing, the path inside widening, I wished again I was a man making a wish at the well in the heart of a friend. Well, I wished too I had sunglasses like The Boys do, and I wished them well wherever they were, at least sixty or seventy years old, rocking some First African Methodist Episcopal, or making tears flow at a brush arbor funeral, or knocking their own canes at the gates, the blue sheen of their suits blinding the faithful welcomed, at last, over heaven's borders.
Sure been good to me.
Saved my soul when my soul was in need.
How, I wanted to know, are men with the same thirst brought together, gathering other thirsting men around them? How do five blind boys find each other. What school? What old pine shack or glory tent pitched on what small town's outskirts? Which one cast his voice out first to haul in what he couldn't see, and touch the features of its bellstruck heart, and feel on his face the cool pouring baptism of another boy singing?
What age were they then? Seven or eight? Two of them searching out the vacant field, climbing the gum tree there in the hot sun and singing all the way up.
I took my savior's hand - said He led me to the promised land -
said he picked me up- yes, he did! - and turned me round,
you know He put my feet on sol-i-id gro-ow-ow-ound.
Never calling it practice but singing away and over and over, practicing more at the top, fire on their faces and in the star-shaped leaves on the fingers of the branches.
Sometime I stumbled, was falling down,
but you was right there to pick me up.
And deciding there should be a third for some belly to go with the heart and head.
Oh, Father, Father - yeah! Jesus! -
yeah! Jesus - you been so good, you been so good to me -
you been better to me, Jesus, than I been to myself - Jesus!
Boys, their parents asked. Think. Where can it lead?
It led them into the tree. Hands clasped into stirrups, shoulders made into steps to launch each other up. They smelled the tree pitch and each other's intermixed sweat, and laughed at the stink. The new boy asked, When do we sing?
Whenever we want, they said. From the first branch of the First Church of the Gum Tree they started "Somewhere Listening For My Name." Where slight and strong branches overlapped, the new boy asked, D'you either one preach?
Aww, yes, Lord, yes, they said, but neither one did when he called them out on it. They sang, I took my savior's hand - said he led me to the promised land - said he picked me up - yes he did. The new boy had bottom when he joined in, and joined only at the right time. They rested on an uncurved unstable black limb. Alligator skin, said one; the other said, Must've been found by lightning. The first one said, Ain't safe. The other said, What is? The new one whispered, I could go ahead?
They thought he meant to climb. He tuned his voice - Hooom! - and did a dead-on talking gospel.
I'm asking all you people now, say what's the cross you bear, where you bear it to, now tell me why and tell me why, and tell me when will you put that down? Ask for a visitation. Ask for a visitation.
That adds on, one said, Still, heck, I don't know. The other said, I don't either. But both of them did.
Three blind boys. Crowned in darkness and reigning it with
each other. You sure been good to me.
The dairies along the highway never end. The cow shit is covered with black tarp and the tarp with tires and the tires with sand, and it all looks like a burial ground. Currents of sand blow over the cows who stumble and hold still and bow and kneel like evaporating spirits.
I have kicked my shovel into my heart, and I am digging.
My cruise control is on. My wrists and arms can rest. I say to my unsleeping, undreaming friend, You're pretending. You should wake up and smell the cows. You can't beat cows. You can't.
I imagine that adding another boy was never planned. They went up the gum. They came down. Sang. Climbed. Sermonized. Nine or ten years old by then. Needed more songs. Found people with record players who wanted to share, but wanted to hear too, and said, Come down here, you boys.
Need the tree, the boys said. And ascended, and sang down to their friends who asked, How do you know how? and to their folks who shouted up, We never knew! and brought them food, and said they would leave but couldn't help themselves and stayed. And people filled that empty field. Miracle, they said. You heard them too? You heard?
Two years like that. The crowds gathering under the gum tree Sunday mornings and sometimes late, late in the weekday evenings. You come, the old ones commanded their grandchildren, come hear what God done to those blind boys. Up there. Oh, Father, Father. And, because of the music's deepness and the boys' blindness, no one asked should those boys be so far up in the darkness.
One singing night one boy stepped on the alligator branch and
sent it crashing down. People fell upon the ashes of that broken black angel, and when they learned the boys were all right, they wept, moaned, screamed, danced. They danced. Everyone sang. They sang out and danced around from that day on every time the boys sang down.
The preacher one said every night, I could go ahead? And -
Hoom! - he did - said, Sometime on this peaceful journey, friends, and they
sang, Ooooh, yeah, and he said, my burden get a little heavy - and they sang, Yeahyeahyeahyeah, and he said, I have to steal away and talk to my God and your God - tell Him all about my troubles - Ooooh yeahyeah-eah-eah - tell Him about how I been duped and sometime I been stoned - and this is what I tell Him when I been burdened - Say it! Say it out!
Two swaying boys below them howled to beat hell back, Father, I Stretch My Hands To Thee. And stretched their small arms and hands, and lifted their blind eyes, and no one asked when they had come or where from as they were lifted up by silent women and men into the arms of the three above.
Five blind boys.
And that's why, and that's why - and that's why-a-why-a-why I want to tell somebody else - Father, you been-a-been, you been-a-been, you been-a-been, you been so good, you been so good to me. Benches went up for the elders, and the elders, for some reason, started bringing small rooted canes of roses. So many climbing roses reached up even into the gum tree's
highest branches, no one could find the boys inside that color unless they listened for the singing streaming through it like sunlight. And how could those boys find each other then except by singing, except by hearing.
Wake up! I said, nearly shouted to my friend, dreaming and lost, pretending and awake, long-loved, and lost. What do you need? I want you to have that.
I believed he would answer back. I wished it, willed it. I said, I'll wait.

They told him I never knew what hit me when the eighteen-wheeler's blowout sent it at us and drew us underneath it with a will that made the wish to live give way.
He, my lost and dreaming, awake and pretending long-loved
friend, was thrown free. Thrown free. Thrown free. Thrown free.

All lyrics, traditional, The Five Blind Boys

José Manuel Garcia-Garcia
10 razones para ser enterrado en el desierto

Veleyo Petérculo, poeta del Salón de Ardadia, nacido en la Era de la Casa de Hermes, y autor de Cuique Suum (T IV .40650), reunió los siguientes degustados versos.

1. La muerte no anda los caminos en espera de tu sombra.* Tú eres la muerte en la frágil tardanza, en el pequeño olvido, en el medio segundo en que descansa tu destino. [* Sub-umbrare, siglo XII, falta de luz].

2. Después de todo, todo pudiera ser tan simple; la muerte es hoja al viento; el árbol desnudo, otoño y paraíso.

3. Acuérdate: entre flores y culpas, los que te conocen escupirán sus epitafios.

4. "El horizonte es un carnaval de ahogadas recuerdos de los vivos." [Epitafio en la tumba de Tulio el Chico Persio].

5. Los arbustos se nutren de mi sangre, el cielo ríe su nube de sarcasmos y la tierrra acomoda su cuerpo y me devora. Cómo quisiera estar muerto.

6 .Videla ligeramente Per Grull, filosofa: "Sea lo que fuere, lo más terrible de la muerte es su eternidad. Todo en el mundo es pasajero y efímero, menos ella."

7. Lejanamente escucho el ritual laborioso y hambriento de los perros.

8. Machado escribio: "Morir…¿Caer como gota/de mar in la mar inmenso?/¿O ser lo
que nunca he sido: / uno, sin sombra y sin sueño, / un solitario que avanza/ sin camino y sin espejo?"

9. En el deseirto, en el centro de la zona del silencio, en el sitio donde cruzan los arados de la muerte, allí, entre el calor sofocante y la risa do los locos, estará tu nuevo exilio.

10. Sepultura: Recuerdo, calor de los veranos, camastro de beso adentro, olor a mujer amante. Realidad perdida para siempre.  

El historiador Crucio Rufo dijo que Veleyo Petérculo enterro sus versos y reflexiones en el libro Quantum mutatus ab illo! Obra que se perdidó en el incendio de la biblioteca de Arameo.

10 reasons to be buried in the desert

Veleyo Petérculo, poet of the Salón de Ardadia, born in the Era of the House of Hermes, and author of Cuique Suum (T IV .40650), gathered the following unpopular verses.

1. Death doesn't walk these roads waiting for your shadow. You are death in the fragile dusk, in the small forgetting, in the half second that your fate rests. [*Sub-umbrare, siglo XII, falta de luz].

2. After everything, everything could be so simple; death is a leaf in the wind; the naked tree, autumn and paradise.

3. Remember: among flowers and domes, the ones who know you will spit their epitaphs.

4. "The horizon is a carnival of drowned memories of the living." [Epitaph on the grave stone de Tulio el Chico Persio].

5. The shrubs feed from my blood, the sky laughs its sarcastic clouds and the earth
settles its body and devours me. How I would like to be dead.

6. Philosophy of Per Grull: "Let be what has happened, the most terrible thing about death is its eternity. Everything in the world is passing and ephemeral, except death.

7. In the distance I hear the laborious and hungry ritual of the dogs.

8. Machado wrote: " To die...To fall like a drop/ of ocean in the imense ocean?/Or be what has never been:/ one without shadow and without sleep,/ a solitary wanderer who moves on/ without road or mirror.

9. In the desert, is the center of the zone of silence, in the place where the plow of death crosses, there, among suffocating heat and laughing of the lunatics, will be the new exile.

10. Grave: I remember, summer's heat, the rickety bed of a burning kiss, the smell of feminine love. Reality lost forever.

The historian Crucio Rufo said Veleyo Petérculo buried his poetry and reflections in the book Quantum mutatus abillo ! A work that was lost in the fire of the Arameo library.

Luis Alberto Urrea
Cruz

Eerie, these crosses.
They bite into land, white anchors
tethering ghost ships to abandoned
landscapes.
Not all are car wrecks as we assume, speeding
downwind to our own crashes: I know a cross
for a drunk died walking in the desert.
Coordinate markers
for disaster.

#

There is a spot coming off La Rumorosa that must sprout a cross
today. Then, in 1972, it was a page in a book of mysteries. My
father (who has a cross of his own in the hardpan desert south
of San Luis) was driving, I gawked.
Beside the road, a charred car.
I swore there was a blackened scarecrow of bone
in the seat. I saw in a speedblur a shape
like the skeleton of night.
You're crazy
my father said.

#

Three months later, the unlikely happened
like in Mexico it does: we drove the other way
past that same spot: police
fire men
an ambulance
circled the car. They pried the charcoal driver free.
He'd spent the summer unseen. Driving
into the sky.
Golden weeds.
Waiting for the anchor
to bring him down.