Tongue-tied to the Border

HALF-BLIND WITH CRACKED TONGUE Between the story and the telling, mythos and muthos, these poems challenge the standard framing of a culture war and presage emergence of a Greater Aztlan - the Place of Herons. The old world gods of herders and grain harvesters are irrelevant in this land dedicated to the Corn Mother. In 1963, I read A Canticle for Leibowitz, a sci-fi novel by Walter M. Miller, Jr., who envisions new nations arising after an apocalypse. One of those is the State of El Paso. That's where I live. Not the edge of a continent, nor the frontier of a nation, but the center of the universe, the bellybutton of the world, another dusty gate of heaven - El Paso. When I was looking for a home, El Paso accepted me. Though as a boy I spent summers in Parral, Chihuahua, and Ruidoso, New Mexico, El Paso took me back. Though I traveled the world, working, studying, or visiting, El Paso always welcomed me home. So I am a proud paisano, un paseño leál. In 1980 I met the artist Jim Magee, who had moved to the border from New York. Magee told me El Paso is a great vantage point from which to view America. To this day, if I must travel to cities in the interior, I call it visiting America. Aad De Gids, a poet from the Netherlands, has commented that my work comes from “standing a bit out-side or along society to see with greater clarity.” That per-spective is a beautiful quality of El Paso: on the fringe, looking in, both to the U. S. and Mexico. This brown spot on the road to nowhere, this pass between one desert and another, I declare to be a holy land, as holy as anyone needs. I am nobody from nowhere, but El Paso is my metaphor and El Paso is the song I sing. In March, 1998, I attended a workshop, as part of the Border Book Festival in Mesilla, New Mexico, led by Ben- jamin Alire Saenz, (author of Carry Me Like Water.) He challenged those in attendance to “define the border with-out sentiment.” I wrote “Border Illusion” in response, and it is from that poem the title of this collection is taken. In the movie, City Slickers, Jack Palance tells Billy Crystal that the secret to life is “One thing. Just one thing.” But each person must figure out what that one thing is. The twentieth-century sculptor, Henry Moore, told the poet, Donald Hall, that the one thing pulling and pushing an artist forward has to be a task impossible to accomplish. Therefore, how ludicrous to think I could define this beautiful chaos, the border. And if sometimes a poem dips into sentiment, there is no problem; the problem arises when sentiment is used in place of thought, to unfairly manipulate readers. I do not shy from the hard truths though the past be sepiated by the dust of time and the present be seen through blood-red lenses. I hope these poems uphold Ludwig Wittgenstein's precept: “Look. Don't think.” Admittedly, I possess the vision of a half-blind observer who speaks with a cracked tongue.