do ten years make a single minute?

Two poems 
by Ivan Argüelles

THE HALLUCINATORY HAGIOGRAPHY 
                    OF VALUM VOTAN  

the last is one of many the uncounted 
to remember how far back it goes to 
wooden fences and evening curbstones  
echoes of voice without words sounds 
in rings of bluish air the famous sky 
with its escutcheons and battle axes 
former names a world without any 
pronouns lengthened shadows hollow 
call far into the oncoming dark dense 
the fabric of stars in dreams and 
the resurrection among unpiloted 
galaxies between threads of rumor 
and repercussion the body of summer 
rising from the foam of eternity in a 
new sheen of memories and devastation 
do ten years make a single minute ? 
do skyscrapers and wind-curves from 
farewells unbidden do taxonomies of 
air in all its platforms make for a heaven 
without gods only pentimento of divinities 
foot-paths of ether intimations of sound 
noise of rock and water colliding in  
a month not yet projected and skipping 
shades trellises ivy smothering walls 
a hand reaching to support its other 
in a claustrophobic gesture of flight 
cancelled wings apparatus of vowels 
deconstructed behind the garage where 
night is born on a revolving whetstone 
injuries of consonants knees and shoulders 
the small painted wagon rounding 
the edge of a sidewalk recorded one  
hundred and twenty three times ago 
when sunlight was grafted on to windows 
and hollyhocks flared on the lip of absence 
it was always whenever the myth applied 
the bronze pleated armor of warriors 
depicted rising from tellurian deaths 
clots of envy and ire threats and gloves 
sketches of the future Mexico City 
on a tombstone erected like an adjective 
on the outskirts of Teotihuacan dust 
and solar disks emptying their maps 
in the midst of a hieroglyphic syntax 
running round in circles indecipherable 
ramparts of atmosphere and error 
resounding universes one at a time  
in the ear’s blank shale and quakes 
and volcanic eruptions the cinema 
of the last known leaf to speak 
 
03-02-21

THE WOUNDED MEMORY 

not anymore what you expected the dash 
to inferno blind and intoxicated by the god 
of willful self-expression the lacquered days 
bereft of mind the lashes and circumflex 
of addiction and obsession the futility 
what art was about and gone hitchhiking 
amphetamines and mind altering powders 
hastened to the pit of resurgent unconscious 
debate with the chained other the demonized 
soul tied to agony and reflection for a life 
that could never have direction only terminus 
being mortal being driven to divinity 
false lies of time and its opposite the jazz trip 
of the instantaneous neither front nor back 
illusory as plate glass that contains the sun 
blackening embolism among the planets 
hierophantic triumphs of numbers that 
lack a backside alpha and omega no 
greater than the downsized beta they abhor 
glyph and noise of faked pedigrees 
the enormous alcoholic hour when everything 
is consumed and light splinters into deranged 
universes scattered across a numinous thumbnail 
awake and not awake the indigestion 
of the soul the mind lost on its raft 
across the tempestuous water of memory 
wounds compounded by the roseate kiss 
of the alternate paradise of unfinished fists 
not knowing who you are ! where is 
the italicized phrase which is money ? 
it is legend that wears all those finger-rings 
excluding the finger you lost in the grass 
one evening forty lives ago in a childhood 
of broken Mexican mosaics and maps 
that delineated the hallucination of travel 
to what necropolis floating in its lunar ellipse 
moths and beetles of delirium scraping 
a grave beneath the floorboards of learning 
no wonder the cicatrix resembles a bride 
betrayed in the holistic hour of consummation 
Sanskrit digits and integers of arrogance 
burning like small intaglios of mysticism 
in the cursive script of the Subconscious 
smoking alternately cigarettes and Time ! 
in the end the Outback took you home 
dipped you in an Arcadian delusion 
of freedom baptized you in unrecognized loss 
the death after death that chases you back 
into the infinity of your previous existence 
                for Joe 10 years and counting 
 
03-09-21 

​​Ivan Argüelles is a Mexican-American innovative poet whose work moves from early Beat and surrealist-influenced forms to later epic-length poems. He received the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award in 1989 as well as the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award in 2010.  In 2013, Argüelles received the Before Columbus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. For Argüelles the turning point came with his discovery of the poetry of Philip Lamantia. Argüelles writes, “Lamantia’s mad, Beat-tinged American idiom surrealism had a very strong impact on me. Both intellectual and uninhibited, this was the dose for me.” While Argüelles’s early writings were rooted in neo-Beat bohemianism, surrealism, and Chicano culture, in the nineties he developed longer, epic-length forms rooted in Pound’s Cantos and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. He eventually returned, after the first decade of the new millennium, to shorter, often elegiac works exemplary of Romantic Modernism. Ars Poetica is a sequence of exquisitely-honed short poems that range widely, though many mourn the death of the poet’s celebrated brother, José.

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