Poem
Averill Curdy
CHIMERA
CHIMERA
CHIMERA
The wake sewing shut those white lips
and after when leagues and all behind to salt
fell the grateful Spaniards prayed
It became their habit to turn eyes sore away
from surfeit Rashes and abrasions of spring
leaf stem vine blossom aphid & berry stridulant
intricate and promiscuous without the rose
or borage or pomegranate embowered
in flaunting silks on gauntlet cuffs No
none of that repose their soldier-love required to root
20,000 had died in Ravenna He survived
without mark to show what he knew
how fear cramped each man solitary
inside himself until the spark that leapt stinging
them on to violence the grass-fire battle-frenzy
the grass that kneels to its burning
Then aftermath’s
vegetable melee limbs and bodies
But what is not threat in this contagion and panic
of green Whores wives saints sovereigns
this beach that thick-leaved mustardy shrub Names
he thinks the names keep slipping
Swift intent armored obdurate as beetles no one man
felt the wound of where like Adam too late he walked
* * *
The air flexing began to bruise green around them
the fresh human injury of them Like flies
trapped in a bottle they didn’t know what to do
and carried on doing it
while bird by bird invisible rescinded its song
while the sun a drop of vinegar in milk curdled the sky
Quiet sumptuous as pain eased by what hand
abrupt as that held in the breath
exhausted just before the witch confesses
Like an executioner who ropes hair over hand
to bend and lengthen the neck for his ax
the wind brutalized palm trees spun men
before it loosely as leaves in a stream
He linked arms with another
Broken wing Splintering oar Chainless anchor
dragging through darkness thick with sand and water and noise
whistles braying drums timbrels & ululations
Pressed all night to the porch of the storm his ear
mistook the self’s own alienated music called it sorcery
That the fury never ended he would learn
walking the eye of its silence
After the hurricane the stunned brilliance like a spell
or question he woke into waking by himself to himself
and naked as a saint to discover his ship
with its ropes tools weapons salves Spain
was the anchored ship
now hoisted on planks of sunlight over the palm-trees
sailing out of sight The boat sick
for such mirth
made by root sap riverbank & squirrel
it would return to that green oak it once had been
* * *
In what hour of what night did he know his soul
to turn a stranger to him
Pilgrim he will venture forth across uncertain fields
Explorer he will cry out
He may be nothing more
than a hide rigid with gore & soil to be
scoured pounded abused by caustics and by iron
and in watered pigeon-shit kneaded until supple
for the hand—
but whose and must
the hand continue to wear or it will toughen again
* * *
Daily he marched his men into corrugations of
blue distances dissolving one to another like promises
of gold & corn made by guides snatched from villages
As the Spanish found new ways to die natives
loomed naked on the horizon they looked
splendid & violent as idols Their women & children
restored for ransoms of melons or fish
Often some chief would repeat his good friend
possessed more of each thing they desired His noble gestures
spread like balm his speech intoxicating
but so militant their hunger his words came entire
& legible to their sense as the amber & musk that steamed
from these his fine furs
* * *
His dwindling force
through swamps & ambush labored circuitous stalled
like mayflies in their brevity & towarding and never
fable riches youth nor rest to take
Only the body
with its anxious extremeties eccentric naked
not natural from which a vein of fascinated shame
opened darkly glittering smoldering
like sea-coal Every eye interrogated
Each inquisitor humiliated
by these echoes of himself his body violating
the silence
* * *
Now alone and exposed approaching
he amassed his ocherous archive of blister
and of bruise the old fabulous
atlas of faith in blood & smoke redrawn
Still even the most exacting map dreams
omits & lies brindled
with sums & suppositions
Every step makes him more wilderness
He goes interiorly
to trade conches sea-snails & screw-beans
for red-dyed deer-tail tassels and the arrow-makers’
sinew & flint between ragged bands
surrounded by enemies enthralled by visions
that command them to bury their sons alive
Girls whose marriages would multiply their foes
become meat for their dogs
Where were the jades turquoises zinzibar Where
the sacred monsters cannibals or kings fielding legions
of dog-headed warriors
Husbands groaned
bucked by pain onto the dirt when wives gave birth
& both sexes wept
strenuously after any absence overjoyed to see each other
again in no essential changed
Had any man traveled farther than he
* * *
Whether time is the ripening of fruit the dying of fish
& the position of stars or all
the king’s clocks ringing his will upon the quarter-hour
hunger is the self’s severe eternal god
From desert skies could be harvested evanescing
bounties dove rabbit wild boar mountain lion
when for two months the natives drank bad water
and ate only oysters
Or salamanders ants dirt
deer dung but also many days without
To suffer only this much
demands devotion or the ingenuity of the wasp
which deposits eggs in the walking nursery of a spider
A single brief season happy to know enough
everyone was summoned by neat cornet-shaped fruits
the prickly pear migrating north as it sweetened
from parrot through orchid
What use ambition in the desert or will
The pangs can shrink but never close
* * *
He came late to healing Even a stone
they said possessed its virtue and how could he
as well so different from themselves solicit less
Left within his heart sealed it might sour
Farther they starved him
The power grew Passed along from tribe to tribe
intangible economy of magic
increased by use
Fright filled some with a lassitude they withered on
others suffered cramps headaches or had been struck
by a sorrow a terror a surfeit
Blessing each joint with a cross and that something
of him might be spent on the hurt
he breathed over it Just a little game he played to eat
before his mind emptied stroking down & up the air
like a kingfisher
under the shadow of the vaulting falcon that played it
When he lifted his hands his fingers
glowed like ten lamps of fire Why not be all
fire
* * *
How much can I change before I am changed
It has been years so long
without abradings of any other to recall him
Dilation digression by these ways he will return
Natives said he could not be
Christian whose eyes they felt crawl over them
as if where women & men had stood was
desolating space His own people turned
away warding off this apparition of a new fault
in themselves This man
neither their stone houses
nor the need that stirs the fox’s miles nor the moon
following which laid down his bones
to scry the distances in him but as though
pierced by some small passive wingless insect
whose gall blighting him
would concealed suckle & multiply its question
down a thousand generations
he was that
which they’d feared most to find
now abject now famous
Twice a year his skin like muslin pulled from his body
Without armor or felted wool or hide afterward
he was now discovered
small pricked loose & unpleated opening
to manifold injury & errand
A channel for pain and a channel for hearing
© 2010, Averill Curdy
With some liberties, the poem is based on Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (ca. 1490–ca. 1557) and the six years he spent in the Americas. The exact route he walked is disputed, but the record of his travels (La Relación) is one of the earliest written accounts of south Texas and northern Mexico, including his observations of the native peoples he encountered, first as their slave, then as a merchant and a spiritual healer.—AC
Poems
Poems of Averill Curdy
Close
CHIMERA
The wake sewing shut those white lips
and after when leagues and all behind to salt
fell the grateful Spaniards prayed
It became their habit to turn eyes sore away
from surfeit Rashes and abrasions of spring
leaf stem vine blossom aphid & berry stridulant
intricate and promiscuous without the rose
or borage or pomegranate embowered
in flaunting silks on gauntlet cuffs No
none of that repose their soldier-love required to root
20,000 had died in Ravenna He survived
without mark to show what he knew
how fear cramped each man solitary
inside himself until the spark that leapt stinging
them on to violence the grass-fire battle-frenzy
the grass that kneels to its burning
Then aftermath’s
vegetable melee limbs and bodies
But what is not threat in this contagion and panic
of green Whores wives saints sovereigns
this beach that thick-leaved mustardy shrub Names
he thinks the names keep slipping
Swift intent armored obdurate as beetles no one man
felt the wound of where like Adam too late he walked
* * *
The air flexing began to bruise green around them
the fresh human injury of them Like flies
trapped in a bottle they didn’t know what to do
and carried on doing it
while bird by bird invisible rescinded its song
while the sun a drop of vinegar in milk curdled the sky
Quiet sumptuous as pain eased by what hand
abrupt as that held in the breath
exhausted just before the witch confesses
Like an executioner who ropes hair over hand
to bend and lengthen the neck for his ax
the wind brutalized palm trees spun men
before it loosely as leaves in a stream
He linked arms with another
Broken wing Splintering oar Chainless anchor
dragging through darkness thick with sand and water and noise
whistles braying drums timbrels & ululations
Pressed all night to the porch of the storm his ear
mistook the self’s own alienated music called it sorcery
That the fury never ended he would learn
walking the eye of its silence
After the hurricane the stunned brilliance like a spell
or question he woke into waking by himself to himself
and naked as a saint to discover his ship
with its ropes tools weapons salves Spain
was the anchored ship
now hoisted on planks of sunlight over the palm-trees
sailing out of sight The boat sick
for such mirth
made by root sap riverbank & squirrel
it would return to that green oak it once had been
* * *
In what hour of what night did he know his soul
to turn a stranger to him
Pilgrim he will venture forth across uncertain fields
Explorer he will cry out
He may be nothing more
than a hide rigid with gore & soil to be
scoured pounded abused by caustics and by iron
and in watered pigeon-shit kneaded until supple
for the hand—
but whose and must
the hand continue to wear or it will toughen again
* * *
Daily he marched his men into corrugations of
blue distances dissolving one to another like promises
of gold & corn made by guides snatched from villages
As the Spanish found new ways to die natives
loomed naked on the horizon they looked
splendid & violent as idols Their women & children
restored for ransoms of melons or fish
Often some chief would repeat his good friend
possessed more of each thing they desired His noble gestures
spread like balm his speech intoxicating
but so militant their hunger his words came entire
& legible to their sense as the amber & musk that steamed
from these his fine furs
* * *
His dwindling force
through swamps & ambush labored circuitous stalled
like mayflies in their brevity & towarding and never
fable riches youth nor rest to take
Only the body
with its anxious extremeties eccentric naked
not natural from which a vein of fascinated shame
opened darkly glittering smoldering
like sea-coal Every eye interrogated
Each inquisitor humiliated
by these echoes of himself his body violating
the silence
* * *
Now alone and exposed approaching
he amassed his ocherous archive of blister
and of bruise the old fabulous
atlas of faith in blood & smoke redrawn
Still even the most exacting map dreams
omits & lies brindled
with sums & suppositions
Every step makes him more wilderness
He goes interiorly
to trade conches sea-snails & screw-beans
for red-dyed deer-tail tassels and the arrow-makers’
sinew & flint between ragged bands
surrounded by enemies enthralled by visions
that command them to bury their sons alive
Girls whose marriages would multiply their foes
become meat for their dogs
Where were the jades turquoises zinzibar Where
the sacred monsters cannibals or kings fielding legions
of dog-headed warriors
Husbands groaned
bucked by pain onto the dirt when wives gave birth
& both sexes wept
strenuously after any absence overjoyed to see each other
again in no essential changed
Had any man traveled farther than he
* * *
Whether time is the ripening of fruit the dying of fish
& the position of stars or all
the king’s clocks ringing his will upon the quarter-hour
hunger is the self’s severe eternal god
From desert skies could be harvested evanescing
bounties dove rabbit wild boar mountain lion
when for two months the natives drank bad water
and ate only oysters
Or salamanders ants dirt
deer dung but also many days without
To suffer only this much
demands devotion or the ingenuity of the wasp
which deposits eggs in the walking nursery of a spider
A single brief season happy to know enough
everyone was summoned by neat cornet-shaped fruits
the prickly pear migrating north as it sweetened
from parrot through orchid
What use ambition in the desert or will
The pangs can shrink but never close
* * *
He came late to healing Even a stone
they said possessed its virtue and how could he
as well so different from themselves solicit less
Left within his heart sealed it might sour
Farther they starved him
The power grew Passed along from tribe to tribe
intangible economy of magic
increased by use
Fright filled some with a lassitude they withered on
others suffered cramps headaches or had been struck
by a sorrow a terror a surfeit
Blessing each joint with a cross and that something
of him might be spent on the hurt
he breathed over it Just a little game he played to eat
before his mind emptied stroking down & up the air
like a kingfisher
under the shadow of the vaulting falcon that played it
When he lifted his hands his fingers
glowed like ten lamps of fire Why not be all
fire
* * *
How much can I change before I am changed
It has been years so long
without abradings of any other to recall him
Dilation digression by these ways he will return
Natives said he could not be
Christian whose eyes they felt crawl over them
as if where women & men had stood was
desolating space His own people turned
away warding off this apparition of a new fault
in themselves This man
neither their stone houses
nor the need that stirs the fox’s miles nor the moon
following which laid down his bones
to scry the distances in him but as though
pierced by some small passive wingless insect
whose gall blighting him
would concealed suckle & multiply its question
down a thousand generations
he was that
which they’d feared most to find
now abject now famous
Twice a year his skin like muslin pulled from his body
Without armor or felted wool or hide afterward
he was now discovered
small pricked loose & unpleated opening
to manifold injury & errand
A channel for pain and a channel for hearing
With some liberties, the poem is based on Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (ca. 1490–ca. 1557) and the six years he spent in the Americas. The exact route he walked is disputed, but the record of his travels (La Relación) is one of the earliest written accounts of south Texas and northern Mexico, including his observations of the native peoples he encountered, first as their slave, then as a merchant and a spiritual healer.—AC
CHIMERA
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