Frontera NorteSur, July 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.

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Paige DeShong
Like the Earth, Life Shatters in Patterns

Pieces of the windshield, that's all that's left,
maybe a tail pipe. See the birds, they fly
against a blue sky en route to a sanctuary
in Texas, then up some crisp river.

From above, the windshield is a sparkling wake,
a mirage that lures them down then rips
their little beaks as they drink. Still they keep
pecking water, water.

Stella Brice
Christ Jesus In A Cage

Who can live
in a cage
like this?

Who thrives in such small
chains?

Who wants
to be worshipped
with Kleenex
& snot?

Whose HolyPart
has been carried
perfectly
upstairs

but the man-part
locked down
so cruelly

like we do
the offensive breath of leopards.

Like we do

worldwide
Tigers.

We have murdered
His Muscle, His Fur & His Bone.

We have blanked
out His Tail-Swinging Eye.

His Sacred DrinkEye

that dilates the Jewelled Garden.

His DrinkEye
that dilates
the Night.
(But Christ . . .

Christ is not the kind of God
who eats Dark
& all that fingers
down there
in that tangle.

He does not
take Food
in the Dark.)

Sharon Klander
Roadside Bibles and Crosses

They look as permanent in bleached cement
as the Lord's own heavy tablets clasped
to the chest of a shepherd climbing down
the mountain, knocking occasional rock showers

with his beaten, sandaled feet. He was lost,
wishing the stone were cut with a map
instead of that difficult list he knew
no one would keep, that could break

over a knee. But these books, mounted solid
on blocks, lie open at the feet of crosses-
not old news, but Gospel-immortal stuff
Moses could have used in the wilderness.

And here the desert isn't wild,
It's an asphalt path any complaining child
could follow flat through the heat past
brittle grasses and bushes burning in summer sun.

Salvation is easy: no walls, no trumpet, no one
left behind. Even the bloody body-given-for-you
is memory, the crosses wiped clean and small,
non-transformative against towering poles

and dangerous wires. Still, what farmer
wouldn't stop a moment here to shade his eyes,
looking up and out to the mountains, wouldn't know
these words with his fingers, wouldn't pray

to these crosses for his son on the other side-
and later, dozing at his table, wouldn't jump
at the sound of the telephone and a voice
that might as well have been brought by God.

Anne Marie Mackler
Summer

The cicada's buzz stopped
when tires screeched and twisted
into her quiet summer night.

She found you, all black, bent
into the van's hot metal,
like a used sparkler.
She wrapped her silky
see-through wings
around your seven-year-old arms,
and your childhood
became permanent.

You can't chase that big summer bug
anymore, catch her, put a thread
around her neck and fly her
like a plane circling
and circling your curious world.

She still visits you
among the generous plastic flowers
rests upon the tons of earth
between your cocoon
and the echo
of her interrupted song.

Jerry McGuire
The Cages

First revelation: that everything is bent, double:
(only for instance after passing / which on the ruffled roads has always some distance off twin beams of light coming on as in a mirror / after getting up the nerve and passing / while overhead a hawk overshoots a cowbird, goes by screeching / after what the ones in the long slow lines call passing / as deep underneath, ancient codes pass from this to that until all hooks up like Christmas lights and suddenly above a blossom opens / after passing, more passing

Second revelation: the compound is elemental:
(scarlet dress, on the stairs, music up, lights dimming, her breath, lips, on my knees, face in her, her sway, give, come down, pulling at my shirt, now tugging harder, now fierce, then roll down together, in the corner, someone's short barking laugh, all this as one, indissoluble, between the last breath and the last pulse

Third revelation: all is one, but then there is exclusion:
(nothing opened like a radiant gate.
nowise "ethnic."
someone saying, "See you later!"
the rest not silence, but low hum.
nor not musical, either.
someone saying, "You'll be sorry!"
no refreshments, no commodities.
a metaphor did not flow through it.
someone saying, "You promised!"
as a thing of spirit, too quick to be uplifting, too loud to be profound.
afterward, everything beautiful is framed by its cage.

(hear something faroff emptying. Tense moment of redrilling, rescraping, recutting. No evidence disposes any face of time accomplished. No face either of those first, simplest contortions, eye and tongue. Trips forth, louder than the heart can handle under an arc of stars assigned to no real horizon. As in a mirror to see a stranger. As on the telephone to hear one's own voice answer back: Is it really you? Did you miss me? Do you love me yet? As on the dark hot jagged road you make yourself a holy thing, killing your lights and riding on the beams of the stranger behind you.

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