P.. Rico

Cristo was ever one up
on the mercantile grid of the Old San Juan,
so it was to Cristo
I swore I would come.

 

I expected, like the rest,
another street enduring of the vagaries passed unto it
by whims on holiday:
its parapets emblazoned with barroom titles considerate
of the English tongue and poppy in the latest font,
its art stores of ironed whores
sucking decimal points from tags about wooden santos' necks,
its glassy blue cobbles, blue as veins
and polished over as fine as expectation
by fat ladies' thongs and tire tread.
Save that on Cristo stands a cathedral,
aged as the round world.

There's graffiti on its back; I do think there's writing there.
I know Cristo's next, for here's the plain end
of the same structure that marks Cristo,
and I think I see letters scrawled into the plaster.  Yes,
Cristo it hacks in cuneiforms of strikes against the wall,
or so I'm hopeful to believe
by my long search for that street.  And why not,
whether it be some useful sign for lost travelers,
or a signature in the seams as school boys do
with their own close garments.  But 'venido' that follows
a yard of plaster away is unexpected
as the third word 'ahora':  Christ come now,
as plain as X's on priestesses' graves.
And, by the gasoline chaw of some pennies' man on the corner,
as fruitful too.  Cristo? I asked, pointing,
and the pennies' man turned his head as if to see;
and turned his head to look at me, as if asking the question.
I'm sorry I answered in English
and found him American nickels.
I come to Cristo one block away.
 
The doors hang like doors,
the cross that bungs the false front of the old building
is but two sticks in discord;
stony men that make a poor argument for immortality
in the Caribbean sun show the rough hew of the chisel,
and the steps that underscore the entrance hesitate
in polite
and acceptable
intervals.

Across the threshold, holding so many dead and expiating colonialists
from seeing their work in the day,
the sunlight too curves from the entrance --
save for those dulcet tones allowed to pass through the scaly membrane
of the nave's hornbook windows.  Still,
there were people in the pews, and then draggling down the aisles
as if suddenly sentient of their own weight in the timeless tomb of Christ.
Or  perhaps they're just fat.
Unschooled for so long
in the manner by which man manifested itself
over land bridges and through clefts in the glaciers -- unused, that is,
to walking.  A trouble exacerbated by a city plan
that seats the hotels so many more blocks away from Cristo
than the guidebooks let on.

Such a mass of people,
patched by the underworld's cut, stitch and haul
of business shields and logos,
proud on each breast and back and permanent cap
like tallied parts to a mail-order mansion.  A mass of people,
patting their hearts and thighs for some grave device
to keep their link to the weekly world.  Of people,
not persons, who dredge their score
through the productions of space and time
like rudders through reefs of corral.  A hurry of people,
it's a wonder the candles are lit.

                            That the candles are lit
for a man such as the man with avian feet for hands:
he shrives the whole lot by towing his wealth behind him
in a cage on Ashford Street,
he tries without method to shake the hands of passersby
only to perhaps shunt back his sensitivity
by a shake of the living -- but, really,
who proper should want to catch their death
by touching a man
with what feculence might flit his hand?
It's a wonder the candles are lit.

                            That the candles are lit
for such a woman as the girl who dived from the ferry
into the aerial waters surrounding the isle of Culebra:
slippery with wet, she skirred through the incidental blue
like a maritime myth, breaching the vault of the bay
until she was held suspended on her back between the cooler elements,
a plane of water trying without attempt
to close about the topography of her body, only to leave
exiles of dew to her hazelnut skin; the unhurried wind
to convey her laughter to every sucker-foot on the boat,
watching with more wonder than alarm as she backstroked
into an unctuous rainbow of leaking petrol --
her last libation before sickening,
nearly drowning instead in her own vomit,
nearly hanging for her rescue.
It's a wonder the candles are lit at all,

especially for all the cathedral hurry,

but that the candles are lit by red bulbs of plastic
with a filament charged for a coin
perfectly repeals the wonder.

In a side arcade,
I stood before the chiseled eyes of Mary,
the wooden and painted Mary,
packed in a box of wood and shredded news
and freighted over from the used continent.
Her cheeks were too red and she had been dedicated
to some Franciscan for a long tenure of exceptional detachment.
A shrinking lady, somehow rid of the mass,
kneeled before the bare feet of the statue
and was filing a polaroid of some luckless man in the toes.  Myself,
utterly estranged by this conspicuously ecclesiastical event,
withdrew into the crowd and buckled through the resolute maw of curiosity,
until I reached an empty arcade at the back of the cathedral,
into which the dark itself had withdrawn and into the start of a passage.
In deference, I passed through, into a passage of ponderous nothing.

                            For all my discontent,
I was alarmed at the quickness of absence, the dark as recurrent
as the scrape of my shoes.  I had a sudden, gut apprehension
that the depth of the walls were exactly prescribed
to conceal any kind of aberration from the glory without,
both of sight and sound.  True,
there's an unnerving in every trespass, but its soon a senseless,
unhinged imagination
that had a priest in every possible relief
of the walls around me,
at the spot ready to catch my shoulder and deliver me forcibly
back to the mass.  I was about to turn before the clutch of priests
when a faint yellow dim caught up to my eyes
and disclosed the folly of my imagination.  Alone,

still in the passage, I breathed and stepped again
and followed the light beyond the dim
to a chamber of painted statues and figurines,
stories, scenes and saints and martyrs
unmoved to their reckoning.
It was a storehouse of cathedral props:
a wooden Abraham, a tall plastic Isaac,
a reflective Nicodemus with a name tag in block letters,
a smooth Timothy, his ears and hair sanded to the knots;
four sheep stacked in the periphery of the pale light,
oxen of the tiniest scale, and grossly expressive mules:
 
a shepherd
that's turning its head
to look at me --

at the rim of the dark, I could make out a figure,
a shepherd who's turning his head to look at me --

he's looking at me full, painted to liquid eyes,
he's looking at me full, he's turning his head as if to see --
this figure in the hollow of my wit --
he's turning his head as if to see the passage through which I came,
and then back
he's turning his head to look at me.

Clogged,
I hadn't breathed for cycles.
And for all the silence there was a hum.
A steady drone.
And when my senses took to the register,
there was a buzz throughout the room.

I approached the shepherd,
its wooden head still moving back and forth,
and found crossing its nape

wires, infusing the back of its deadwood skull.  There were wires
bundled and snaking the floors of the entire chamber,
catheterizing each painted statue, figurine,
saint and martyr with an alternating current.

My own nerves infused but with returning blood,
I stood in audience of the droning circle of automatons,
charged with keeping the culture of God in the currency of man;
and then,
devoid,
returned by the passage
through which I came.