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Poetas y Pintores: Artists Conversing with Verse
The Artist The Poet
Kathy Vargas Valerie Martínez
"Invocation" (detail)
2005
Hand Colored Photograph
The Poet
Valerie Martínez
Invocation
Out of stone
Out of salt-smell
Out of silence and sepulcher
Out of moon-chasing night
Out of dead-of-the-night
Night buoying them up
They come
Out of the mind
Out of dream
Out of reminiscence
Out of figments
Out of gladness
Out of grief
They come
Girls with their earlobes
Boys with their lower lips
Men ravenous
Women of parched thirst
They come
Mothers and eyelashes
Grandfathers and teeth
Fathers with the backs of the neck
Come
Grandmothers and underarms
Daughters and sons aflame
Infants and tongues
They come
O Memory
How you want to cradle them
Drink from the syllables of their lips
How you want to offer them
Your regrets
Tender as fingertips
How you want to punish them
To save them from the deep
O Memory
O Second Sight
They are issuing from corner turns
They are disappearing
They are half-sight
And near-sight
Are out of touch
And into touch
The dead are watching
(See their pupils growing large)
The dead are sleeping
(How they turn their eyes inside)
The dead are swimming
(For the suns are full of distance)
The dead are humming
(Now they wander in new sounds)
Pull them into you
Tether your sighs to their hair
Float among them tonight
O Weary Travelers
So they come
Ask them to speak in tongues you cannot know.
Listen as if the sounds
Are the bones of prophecy
O Dumbfounded Ones
Show them your birthmarks
Your thin lines
Your braille veins
And numb scars
For they have none to trace and lament
Show them
They come in ribboned skirts
They come in linen and earth
They come with nothing to see
They come with everything under the skin
In nakedness
In cloth unwinding
In absence
So they are lovely
So they come
O Cemetery
O Honorary
O Funerary
Night of the Dead
Help them come
The dead are moonstone
The dead are hollow stone
The dead are mist on the bones
In mother-of-pearl
So fear them
And hold them
In the shadow of your ribs
With open palms
Evening of the crossing
Stars of the passing through
Moon-hole beckoning
O Mouth Curve
O Bodies Double
Evening O Evening
Till the worlds converge
On incantation
O Double Life
And Triple Life
The Sumptuous Hunger
Reunion
Hands upon hair upon
Blue limbs incarnate
O Communion
O Tears upon
Sweet Tears Numenate.
DAY OF THE DEAD, 2000
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