Following Ghosts Through the Yucatán
Double headed jaguars settle on lattice
carved stone in a temple buried to the tips
of butterfly wings which is also where iguanas
stand in slow motion and bats and sparrows
whicker in corners and you can run your hands
on the moss thinking how tall the trees grow
woven with vines this far from home you are sure
you know about perpetual about the weight
of existence and otherwise about growth and decay
so you drive and keep driving through the rest
of the day to the veined city to the big market
brimming and vying with hedges of fruits
such cacophony all of a sudden such color you can’t
ignore the clacking chickens the mounds of iron
or the yoked goat in the corner but you go outside
through the arch where scorched women in crisp
white cotton fold legs bowed as gauge wire
under their bodies their tight ravaged bones
on a small square of pavement you can see
their old fingers devote to ripe oranges
you give your mind to the tang to the zest
as they strip rind and pleats of pith in ruffles
as they leave beads of juice for purchase you are
surrounded by detail the low defiant sun finds
its scope and you don’t know it then but
you will think about this for years and for years
you will want to shape the almost vanishing
into a poem it is these women who come to you
in sleep and the women at the church in Chiapas
who sloped forward with ten colors in their
throats and with chipped Christ dolls on bent
groaning hips but you still don’t know what
you need to say or what exactly you saw so
you sit with your daily scribbles in the desert
at home your mind pungent engrossed
with the images you sit and know nothing know
only that a body ages and mourns in the sinuous
motions toward death know you were lucky
to see it to linger on the street and in the jungle
and now you figure you might get to say that life
is a brink a blink a surface you land on you
might get to put it on paper
| Lauren Camp |
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levelheaded: Following Ghosts Through the Yucatán
This poem’s speaker is very clear about the fallibility of her memory, explaining “you still don’t know what / you need to say or what exactly you saw.” The poem’s lack of punctuation destabilizes its vivid scenery. The images are clear, even as they they freewheel down the page in a wide column. The poem’s momentum comes from its rapid-fire chain of collapsed grammar. The poem’s essentially a long run-on, but there are also moments when what we might call “sentences” end and begin without warning. It feels like a quick read, but it’s full of speed bumps and choke points – moments that stop the action and reward contemplation.
How does this technique jell into a poem about memory? By allowing the reader to piece things together, the poem enacts the elusiveness of memory. The speaker “shape[s] the almost vanishing / into a poem.” The “ghosts” of this poem’s title are the speaker’s memories. The “ghosts” are “the women who come to you / in sleep and the women at the church in Chiapas / who sloped forward with ten colors in their / throats and with chipped Christ dolls.” These are vibrant memories, but they are memories nonetheless. They are colored by nostalgia, experience, and time. They are momentary. They are “a brink a blink a surface.”
If the poem is about the ephemeral quality of memory, it’s also about our impulse to commit memory to art, or in this case “to put it on paper.” The “Double-headed jaguars” in the first line are a reminder that the art of the past is unknowable. The poem doesn’t claim poetry will strengthen a memory or clarify its meaning. In fact, the speaker’s impulse to write this stuff down comes from not knowing “what / you need to say or what exactly you saw.” Words like “whicker” don’t have a widely agreed upon connotation. Then phrases like “the veined city” are steeped in life, blood, danger. The poem moves back and forth between clarity and uncertainty. It squeezes out a version of the speaker’s memories, but to a different end, it finds just the right words to describe the manner in which we remember and record.
-The Editors
