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[Return to Guest Poets Page] [Next Page]Peter Ludwin
Peter Ludwin lives in Seattle when he's not discovering people and
places (Acoma, Terlingua, the Mississippi Delta, the Wallowa Valley)
and sharing his musical talent on the autoharp and guitar. He
has published poetry widely in journals around the country and is
currently working on a memoir/cultural essay about living in America.
Every December, he sells Xmas trees in New York City. SATORI That night in Lajitas I saw all we are given to see. In your veins domed cities, empires, and in your face dawn over Machu Picchu. Was that a guitar where your teeth, like Lorca's poems, flashed diamond bits toward Mexico? I heard gypsies shape the moon and your hips bring the languid rhythms of the silk trade. It was all so clear, like the blues and yellows in Vermeer's maid pouring a pitcher of milk. That's why this distance now, with no way to reach you, rumbles like thunderheads that threaten but bring no rain, no rain. GLENDA You could tell she'd been around, scuffled for years in bars all over Colorado looking for that one breakthrough gig. Something in the eyes, a wariness, a frayed hunger that said hold it, thorns grow here and you might trip over the scars. But that was for everyday life. After the slick harmonizing duo sat down to normal applause she climbed onstage and let us have it, her rough, smoky voice a scorched earth policy that destroyed whole villages and made us want to eat steak raw and have mistresses and die from orgasm in a nest of tropical vines. Outside, high in the Rockies, snow was melting. Why she hadn't made it was one of those mysteries— the disappearance of the Maya, the back side of the moon. You had to catch her in the moment, a meteor from the night desert floor, you had to be looking for it: dark water, darker earth. DRIVING NORTH TOWARD THE HOPI RESERVATION So open this land even the fences along the road sing their freedom. Filets of earth lie exposed like salmon flesh torn apart by bears. The earth says My grasses sweep away to the horizons like the sea, and the buttes say From my heights you can see beyond the horizons, and the sky says I rule the earth and I have no horizons, and I say I am the wind, I will be a guest in all your houses. BREAKFAST IN BAJA (for Russell Salomon) Restaurant Jalisco, the sign read, a two-room adobe hovel sticking up like a wart from the desert floor. No, you said, it's too funky, we'll get diarrhea or dysentery or something even worse that nobody's got a cure for, this time you've gone too far— but of course we went in anyway to the little patio with its one small table covered with sand, which the old man's wife swept away with her hand before she took our order. You didn't want anything but she misunderstood and brought out two plates of eggs and beans and tortillas, which we had to eat or insult them and slink away like whipped dogs, and you grudgingly conceded how good it was while she kept bringing more plates of tortillas without us saying a word and avocados and the chickens ran by from the garden and the three kids kept trying to get the radio to work by beating on it with a hammer and the old man went about his chores, hauling buckets of water back and forth, the two meals coming to about $1.75. Do you remember, my friend, how that breakfast lasted all the way to San Felipe, where the pelicans flocked to greet us? MORNING AT GRAN QUIVIRA I sit in this ancient Pueblo village and let the sun warm my bones. No sound here among the kivas, the crumbled rooms and plaza, except a distant crow who talks because last night he had a dream which he must tell or fly crippled into his own deep night. On the drive this morning I saw many antelope grazing the yucca-dotted plains. Alert, elusive, they reminded me how you hovered on the horizon as I journeyed north toward Pecos yesterday, a presence as real as these vast distances that evaporate everything but pain. The Tompiros fled this site over three hundred years ago. The Spaniards who came looking for gold and converts abandoned these stones to the wind. I, on the other hand, seek a different history, a water from silent tongues that gleans your stories from the dust. It’s a mirage, this medicine. I find no stream where the cactus grows. Just a bird who squawks at me, who fertilizes the air with his madness where your shadow cools these ruins, a fevered beggar haunting the juniper like the Indians and friars who once toiled here, the music of your hand, rising. MECHANIC Putting on a tape of Mexican guitar music, Charro sets to work replacing my clutch. From his low rock wall I look out over Lajitas and the Rio Grande to Paso, where roosters shatter the still morning air. The guitar entangles your image in its strings, brings the memory of your aroma clinging to my hand after I drove home from the dance. That night I had a tremulous sleep. Horses pawed at my dreams as if they were snowdrifts hiding pockets of rich forage. Here on the border nothing is as it seems. The patio at the trading post is vacant, yet we are moving, moving in a world of sound and light, and there are some things even Charro cannot fix. A CHANCE ENCOUNTER Because she had once married a Greek because I'd traveled to Greece in the '60s because we were visiting a mutual friend on the Upper West Side, we had this conversation. And though I protested when she sat down that I had to get some sleep she insisted on just one small glass of wine. Which became two and then three as we agreed that where Kazantzakis was transcendent, Sartre was empty and Hemingway merely small. Her hands spoke passion, as if releasing flocks of doves into her voice, a soft liquer blend of European Texas that drew me into that old yearning for the expatriate life, for garnet angels and mandolins raining down on Russia and I thought yes, there's that chorus in the blood, the one that's attended all our births: to track the minotaur, the iron tyranny of THINGS, to find it and destroy it with the dance, with epiphanies of water, swinging up onto its head like a naked acrobat as the sun pours in from the sea. MIDNIGHT, STEENS MOUNTAIN I awaken to a flood-lit land, to a moon throwing down dappled light through supplicant branches of juniper. Even the aspens back up the hill behind me show herds of silent appaloosa. I feel them when a breeze quickens the leaves. Their hooves, flashing from constellations, stipple my face with ice. To be human now means to hang my skin from the nearest branch and step with no bones into the circle, into the moon and the sage. Or is it something else? This hour, the hawk's own vespers, feeds like an Aztec priest on the unsuspecting. Whence comes this talon grip, the mean guitar that adorns the temples of all the holy? CEREMONY (for Mary) Once a maker of longbows, you awakened curled up at my feet in the tipi a Nez Perce had offered us. Like tendrils of the sweet pea vine snaking in dizzy loops above the earth, something quiet and unspoken between us had not yet touched. That morning you went down to the Bitterroot River to bathe. When you came back through the forest, hair shaggy with muted suns, Nick was playing music from How the West was Lost. At Big Hole we joined in the ceremonies. As if to say they understood, some deer appeared on the battlefield and two small birds drove off a hawk above our heads. While I smoked the pipe with the men surrounding the buffalo robe you photographed the herbs burning from a large shell in the center. That night we followed Lewis and Clark and the Nez Perce over Lolo Pass into Idaho. Along the Lochsa River we set up camp where a tree grew under our tarp. You found a bathing hole with a full moon gilding the surface. We sat there a long time, and again the next morning, when your foot discovered a rock in the riverbed with a perfect tipi design. We both understood this omen. We touched at this place then. Not with hands, those clumsy warriors that clutch and fumble things away. But with eyes of cedar bark that pierced the finite boundaries of stone, silent voices chanting the ceremony, the purling syllables of swift water. Copyright © 1999. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Duplication of this poetry and/or art without permission of the author/artist is forbidden under copyright law. Please ask permission if you wish to use for non-commercial purposes
Tuesday, July 11, 2000 |