Ode to Chiloé

Intro

I have spent hours contemplating on cramped buses,
Squashed between sweating bodies, in the pounding rain and stench;
The vibrant yellow flowers
Against the grey sky and the rain – a forget-me-not,
And forget you I shan´t, but how do I explain?

Part I Pleas and Questions

I have sat drinking mate in rainy
Deserted restaurants, that only served empanadas and curanto
When the neighbours came to drink litres
Of beer in the early afternoon;
When they can’t pronounce “lets get in the car”
Because the salmon’s out and beer is everywhere.

Lumber built you, salmon broke you,
Left broken windows, empty houses, half-built;
Salmon left the rolled up nets that stink
Of decomposing fish; and the ghost towns
And the drugs – thousands of buoys,
Gravestones of a trade, tombs of opportunity.

I have wound through deep bushes
Avoiding the thorns, sat there in the constant rain
Among the drunkards and gangs of dogs,
Looking aimlessly, like them, at palafitos,
The manicured and the abandoned

I soaked up what I could of memories
And slurred speech of your farmers and fish folk,
Fear and hope pours from their wet eyes,
Specter memories of the mounted hero
The hundred churches and
Six minutes of pitching earth, to make way for the
Sea, that pitched upon the earth and swept the houses out –
And not by the heaving, sweating mingas but the rolling Pacific,
“Only by name” are one man’s words, who’s house is perched
On a bluff, far from the reach of the Pincoya

I´ve thought about your hanging bell flowers, pink and purple,
That speckle the bushes and run the confusing lines
Of island, point, mainland… where do they come from?

You are lost I think, in the lazy work
Of yelling “Cheese! Sopaipillas! Empanadas!”
And drunk on salty air and booze.
Part II
The Nightmare

This is what you dream of:
Blue, grey, constant rain,
Soft smell of the falling flying water, straight from
The sky,
Skulls and spaghetti come from the sky,
Pale from the midnight – A blue wind
From below till the tingling blade
Feels down your spine – no stars here, just
Never-ceasing drops that drill the eardrums,
Nerves are exploding all your senses, motionless.
You awake, sweating, to the still rain and quiet sea.

Another day passed and this is what you dreamt:
Colourless still and the bouncing drops
A dark wind is felt in the heart but not
The sea, not a ripple.
Only now, a bow breaks the calm and
The blue sail painted by a sorry moon
To appear from nowhere, and they board your soul
All the eyes in this blue hell are closed
Until fantoms rip you apart and screams pierce
The raindrop blanket – you are awake, sweating, headache,
Voiceless.

Part III
Dogs

They sleep all day like the resting fields
Green-bordered green to the rippling sea
Where leathery skinned ancients speak
Through half-mouthfuls of teeth, penniless
To wander down the seashore where some
Beg for beer – or just peel garlic and potatoes,
Screaming in the street –
So they sleep all day till sun sinks away
When they roam, limping about to settle
Endless canine battles and wake the
Sleeping workers who come from their
Dry fields and abandoned salmoneries.
The grey, the grizzled, the wild mad crazy
Bastards that hang by municipal bus station
Garbage bins to stare down anything
And spit through their teeth
Or snarl into the empty street
Because everybody has gone to sleep now,
Caressed by drink, beaten and persuaded
By the hand – that hand of mother earth –
The hand of supply and demand.

Part IV
Blood and Caves: Invunche

Maybe somewhere below the man´s little shack on the bluff
Under the fields, there is a sea
Where caves open in the dark body;
A flavour, cant say – a smell
A flutter of wings or what
Doesn´t use a broomstick to fly –
Its all charcoal, like the remains of a curanto fire,
In the earth, a burn, a scar, impregnating monsters.

Maybe, in their sea – vivid if you close
Your eyes – the shadows and blood
Human flesh in human teeth, putrid
Carcasses that make this sea an ocean
Of humanity – torcioned and twisted –
You do this to yourself! In the vastness of an
Endless dark, Invunche´s foot comes to his eye
And the arm they sowed in has been devoured
By his thirst – only a bump remains, until the growls
And the bodies that feed a cave.

This is respect.
This is humility.
Say it to yourself now,
Not only to the lashing sea.

Part V
Awe

I have stayed up all night, by lantern
Light, to the sound of fighting strays
In the street – always wondering
How to weave everything, like chilote wool
Everything that is: the tinny songs
That blast from shops; sheep wool artisans
Weaving their lives away, each knit to the
Rhythm of the infinite waves.
And where are the clams in this labyrinth?
In streets the shouting children collect oysters
300 pesos a piece, on the beach, sorting through
Barren algae and beached boats and shit on tidal flats;
Flung into a flaming pit to the sound of accordion
Flying kerchiefs, flowing dresses, stomping feet.

I lie here, jaw dropping in the grassy bluff
Above a wild animal “nothing pacific about it” –
Mist blows off crashing whit foam, curling
Toppling penguins into steadfast cows that graze
The foggy seaside pastures.

Who comes, who goes,
Who flies across spotted blue to whit cones
Like specter locomotives, lumber children
Chugging the mazy coastline of timber and iron,
Between pastures
A green – these blades – that slice the sea
Into millions shattering the shuddered landscape
So wistful branches alone for days, until
Herds come from un-walkable beaches, impassable
Straights, of a frigid sort
I see the billion birds calling banefully to
These pages, streaking their bills with ink,
Dipped in the never-ending sky that kisses
A salmon-marred bay.

Part VI
The sickness

A massive rock sits in my throat,
It contains everything that came in my pores,
A saturating fog that lifts for the
Southern cross and love – a sheet –
In the wind – millions as one and a million into one,
Moving with the power of a weeping soul,
One into this stone, one into this singular
Blue memory of brown eyes and ice cream;
The abyss of garbage caves and the putrid
Smell of rotten fish, meeting of eyes, explosion of laughter,
Driven in the solid stone the hearty hand and a number,
A blinking paradox that chokes me when
I think of grease and toothless drunks
Conversing with a priest, an educated man,
In the empty wood of towering varnish and spirits –
Never arrives, never let in –
But by a rebound, like your people that
Swim about my granite but couldn’t swim
Their boats to safety in the rusty straights
Between abandoned and uncultivated fields.

I sit, coughing and choking
On this saturated chilote stone
Here and there in space time
Sweet salt comes to my lips, I see eyes and
Millions of birds wheeling over the periodic
Dolphins; screeching cry of a lapwing – abrasive but evocative;
Others come with burning, acidic, sad and angry tastes,
Is this about you? Or me?
But a painful and life giving egg is forever
Nesting in my soul now, terrifying and orgasmic,
Beautiful and ugly, frightful, happy – must
I continue?

Part VII
In Memory

In the end, what is left is a flower,
A tiny pink and purple chandelier, a lamp
That explains the delicacy and beauty
A ravenous appetite.

It is a memory – frightful plaguy delicate touch
Of paint on textured mural, illuminator
In a corner the sun doesn´t reach;
A miniscule explosion that opens into giant
Open space, that occupies and imagination
(And a throat)
No, it is imagination. I imagine.