Borders

“He didn’t believe in countries and the only borders he respected were: borders of dreams – musty borders of love and indifference, borders of courage or fear – golden borders of ethics.” - Roberto Bolano

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He took a night bus to Cadiz, an ancient city of Neoclassical churches where stained glass baroque explorers named Colon sailed west, dear Nina, in search of gold importing their assimilated desire, converting heathen slaves into worlds of persecution and misery.

It was expensive raising funds from skeptical kings and queens expanding their empire. Rumor said Queen Isabella was convinced of Chris’s project over a game of chess. The queen became the most powerful piece in the game, hiss- story-ically speaking.

This explained why Cadiz women were draped in gold. Remnants from ages of reason, enlightenment and discovery. Ages of illumination, prosperity and knowing the unknown gifts of the Magi evolving from bronze to iron to gold. Alchemical reactions turned base metals into gold. Chains around wrists and necks sold by the gram were heavily displayed by Spanish patrons.

Butchers in Cadiz didn’t wear gold. Their hands gripped the sharpened edge of well honed Spanish knives paring off fat, cutting through layers of gristle.

A shop bell rang. A stranger paused in a doorway.

A steel mesh glove protected a butcher’s left hand holding meat. He slammed a sharp hatchet blade through flesh and bone. The table was littered with blood. Women lined up to buy their favorite cut. Slabs of acorn fed pigs hung in windows as white quality funnel tags attached to hoofs collected fat.

Wild boar and stag heads stared down from walls next to color photos of local bullfighters. Orson Wells and Ernest Hemingway posed with famous Ronda matadors. Red rivers painted capes as bull blood flowed down muscular necks.

Dancing along the devil’s whiplash big black hungry flies buzzed around fresh red meat dripping warm blood into dust. A dog’s ribs rolled over scraping grounded shade, begging for water. A drop in the ocean, is all H20 no matter how deep you dive. A wave washed the shore day by day. Stones sang.

The sausages sounded sweet, retaining a sharpness, inextricably swaying like dancers in a choreography. Tired, frayed strings bent under a mass of weighted meat.

Manuel, the butcher stared through his jagged window of broken glass remembering the Spanish Civil War. His face was a mask of weary, solemn stillness. A quiet lying fury.

His silent words were exaltations, evaluations, the expected surcharge on an empty stomach, a tax for services rendered as reinforcements riding hard through Basque valleys, heard waves of German bombers over Guernica on April 26, 1937.

Beleaguered International Brigade freedom fighters held their own inside stone shepherd huts trapped in desolate Pyrenees Mountains spinning, standing grounded, surrounded by empty canteens, bread crusts, discarded family heirlooms, spent shell casings and decomposing bodies relishing solitude.

Survivors fled to fields or huddled in shelters. They knew the best way to survive was to remain silent. Their town was reduced to rubble. Manuel was required to remember old Fascist propaganda - the spreading of information.

He is a fleischer, one who slaughters.

In order to eat and provide for his family after peace was declared with celebrations of music, church services, wine, and dancing after burials he was forced by economics to slaughter his remaining beast of burden.

His bull was his calling card, his vision, his hope, his dream and village identity. Everything else was stolen by dictators, thieves and Fascists. All he had was his dignity, integrity, and self-respect.

Time arrived short of sympathy, sentiment or condolences. He sharpened his short axe. Standing under the brutal Spanish sun he worked steel across a grindstone removing old edges. It was sharpened with passionate ambivalence.

Laughter’s axe was ready.

He walked into the center of the red clay ring surrounded by a white clapboard fence. The bull stood in the far corner. He approached the bull and held out his hands lined with pulse rivers. The bull slowly emerged from the shade. Looking into the animal’s eyes he saw memory reflected in his soul.

He sighed, clapped his hands together twice, bowed to the bull, as a Shinto priest pays his respects to Bishamonten, the Kami god of benevolent authority. He asked for forgiveness, for his act of fate, raised his laughing axe and brought it down hard and fast on the bull’s neck.

The bull froze and slumped, straining to escape the blade carving through weathered skin, muscles, tendons, sinew, snapping final bones. Front legs folded, rear legs buckled. The carcass shuddered as a final breath exploded in red dust.

He clapped his hands again, severed the head and dragged the body to his shop. He cut it up. He hung the head in his broken window. “For Sale.”

His wife served portions to family and neighbors toasting his wisdom. They consumed his life’s work. Sharing is caring.

I witnessed this.

A Century is Nothing

Eudaimonia

Dream Sacrifice

Humans dreamed their language acquisition cycle. They desire clarity and kindness with meaning.

Ironic beauty shared languages.

Hot and cold tongues rolled, spitting, parsing, and ejecting sounds from vocal chords forming English.

My 5,000-year-old Mandarin language of emperors and dynasties was filled with peacock thrones, concubines, courtiers, Forbidden City intrigue, conquest and opium warlords’ gesturing life or death with fingered deftness.

Gestures use us.

Mercenary survival skills allowed me to breath, absorbing death free from fear. Free from the small fear.

I am one with the sky.

I trimmed my claws, flaying skin from bones, grinding bones for a potion. I drank from deep unconscious wells. Hearing Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons my animistic archeologist recovered fossils with a brush.

I dreamed the Sun Dance of the Plains people. Nations gathered in late spring celebrating a four-day cycle of rituals and creation dances. Dancers choosing self-torture have their chests pierced by skewers. They hang under the weight of buffalo skulls for twenty-four dances.

Their sacrifice is successful if they have a vision during their trial.

The sun went home to earth.

One vision is all you need.

I spin, dive and dance through inner and outer landscapes. My transparency is automatic. A rock n’ roll manifesto shuttles my kairos through bark, indigo, camphor, jasmine and juniper fire inside nebulous gases of dancing electron particles and energy waves.

Meditating, my head is held by a string. I transfer delicate weight from cloud to cloud, disengaging from the stimulus. Incense rises from flames.

My muse spirit guide joined The Department of Wandering Ghosts. We design mysterious projects. We sharpen rose thorns. I felt sorrow and joy seeing two drops of blood on a finger after brushing a rose thorn. A thorn embedded in my finger flesh dissolved at dawn.

A bird pressed her breast to a thorn to sing.

A beautiful rose creates a sharp thorn.

My thorn is a claw, a sharp definitive talon for tearing meat from white bones. Satisfying my hunger.

I track rabbit’s form blending into underbrush. Floating on evergreen peak winds, I wheel. My eyes see a path you are destined to follow across helter-skelter earth. In, out, in, out, breath flashes fur. I circle above your feeling fleeting form. One eye sees where you’ve been the other knows where you are going past volcanic boulders, through valleys and dry riverbeds where you never sleep. Latent fears harbor your grieving desire. Your shelter search takes on immediacy as your energy adrenaline wanes. Wings fold with forgiveness. I dive. You take evasive action among wild berries. Their sweetness is a faint taste. My sharpness tears you from soil into air.

I rest with death. Claw thorns at your throat.

A drop of blood splatters. Pure red life floats to the surface. A finger smears one drop from skin. Small swift red rivers trickle. Veins release blood volcanoes. Red-hot meteors explode through space.

After Nam I became a regular blood donor.

“Are you allergic to pain?” asked a nurse in a mobile blood unit parked at Sunnyside Beach south of Tacoma.

“Only to pleasure.” A needle slid into a vein drawing A-.

“Writing is easy,” said Hemingway, “just open a vein. The secret is that it is poetry written into prose and it is the hardest thing to do.”

An earnest man discovered right words. Put them in the right order.

Squeezing the plastic handgrip pressure pump at the blood bank I bantered with a mother of five. Blood escaped arms down into plastic tubes out of sight out of mind into clear plastic liter bags with an identification number. Hugs from thank you clown.

I donated blood into sky.

On the shore four young men and a woman stood silent on wet rocks. One man held an earthen urn vase. He handed it to the woman. It was large and awkward. Dust and death are awkward.

Cradling it, she tipped toward water. A river of brown ash flowed over the edge. A fine dust mist dressed liquid. Her dancing arms scattered a dust trail of someone’s life. She handed the urn to a companion. He poured ash into miniature tides.

A bouquet of red, yellow and white roses with freshly cut long green stems flew from the woman’s hand into Puget Sound. The urn was offered to another man. No thanks, shaking his head.

A Vietnam veteran in shadows wearing a faded boonie hat played his weeping guitar. Seven lingering faltering notes ran through sand past an elderly couple staring at seas beyond life’s horizon. A playful father and son threw seaweed at each other. A crow’s shadow landed on a dead tree branch.

My blood flow created a cataclysmic flood. Cold mountain poems melted snow, painted forest trails, seeping to sleeping roots. Meadow petals opened to moisture. Earth lava blood carved canyons. Tributaries branched out from the Tree of Knowledge and Tree of Life.

Blood gouged out rock, cleaning earth, transforming stone to sand, to dust, erasing river bottoms, collapsing banks, overpowering everything in its path, forming new microscopic celestial arrangements.

Fingers painted blood on lips and threads. Luminous light illuminated weavers, diggers and fleischers. Shuttles click clack.

Blood dyed threads loomed stories.

Diggers rattled their blood. Brushes exploded seeds into rain. Laughing bones excavated histories.

A laughing axe split clouds into letters.

Alpha, Beta, Omega.

A thorn allows a ghost to realize a life principle.

Eudaimonia ‘human flourishing’ from the Greek means a good life.

A Century is Nothing