The form eludes me –
a red breast in Mexican branches –
the shape of your waist –
a childhood of tears –
the voice of a dog.
A humming bird’s wing –
huipiles yellow and green.
I wait, time passes.
The nude in black ink
moves away, becomes more
breasts, face, legs parted.
You hold me form and figure –
these green stalks bend.
The storm approaches.
beach baby
White flesh underwater
fire of blue tropical pools.
In the first exploding breath above water
The scent of coffee and purple jacaranda
The cobblestones lead to a white table.
Far to the north she begins pulling bones
from the wall – leaves with what she can carry.
Here: clay pots frozen by fire – each
olla a well where she will drop offerings
beans, chiles, her gold wedding band.
All day she borders the other country,
she goes back and forth recalling her mother’s
face. In the market pinwheels of color turn slowly
a smooth brown foot under white awnings
and a pyramid of red tomatoes.
Coming out of the bakery her face reflected
is the red neon face of the moon over the desert
where a man who leads her horse
hides his eyes behind a straw mask.
Near the barbed wire fence they
dine on delicate cactus – a sweet
relief from this new way of life
she cannot completely know.
When much later she takes the train
to a canyon with an ancient past
she can hear rocks moving beside her
like friendly beasts between
urine soaked stations – women in
T-shirts pass watermelon-red
slices of shadows through the open windows.
She remembers the black cat
at home waiting to be lit by
the first tongues of sun.
early 1950s
after a painting by José Clemente Orozco
Gone now – his back legs cut off
below his hips – the masked warrior
tucks the small body between his
legs, meaning to bury him in the
piled up earth – his mask a shield
as the warring men with red bodies
in the sludge of Texcoco move slicing legs, arms,
feet leaving corpses stuck – next
to the lake, on one of those sunny days
the battle surging, a child wandered
into the relentless encounter
then suddenly… dead.
August 1955
La vieron a la distancia
congelada – mujer dormida – un espejismo
entre esos españoles errantes
en su sombra – toda blanca
era – donde el hielo se desliza –
un espejismo de isla flotante.
sola donde el hielo se desliza fácilmente.
El arrebol atraviesa el mercado de flores en el valle.
Es como si la muerte estuviera de paso –
a la distancia el volcán Iztaccíhuatl
parece lejano a las aguas de Xochimilco
Axolotes – días oscuros lejos del Iztaccíhuatl
lejos del arrebol que atraviesa el valle
de flores… establos… aflora un valle
ella está por encima de ellos –
su arrebol – a través del valle congelada sola
donde el hielo se desliza fácilmente
El incesto es un hacha cruel – corta el lazo
de la unión – de la unión amorosa – de amar –
y huir después – y aún en su sombra
en el valle de los lamentos – el dolor
permanece dejando un lago seco
donde comienza el crecimiento de los rascacielos
¿Ha visto un despertar – un amanecer tan profundo
tal destrucción?
¿Por qué entonces nos sorprenden –
años perdidos llorando, recorriendo carreteras?
Días oscuros lejos del Iztaccíhuatl
de su arrebol atravesando el valle
de los mercados de flores – congelada.
Su sombra de desdichas permanece
todavía – lo que ellos vieron
era una mujer dormida –
una isla flotante, un lago a sus pies
en su sombra… Texcoco.
¿Hubiera sido más fácil viviendo
en las islas míticas
el volcán más bien concha
tallada – hueca – iluminada por dentro – sombra
barroca – oráculo oculto
descansando, en silencio, en calma –
acariciar sus superficies de talavera?
El colibrí y la flor
la flor se adhiere al colibrí
Iztaccíhuatl congelado – escondido –
intacto – ¿una virgen huyendo de
los años perdidos? grabada, tallada –
una flama debajo de la nieve
blanco y puro.
Él espera.
August 1955
They saw her from a distance
freezing – a sleeping woman – a mirage
among those Spaniards wandering
in her shadow – all white
she was – where the ice slides –
a mirage of a floating island.
alone where ice slides easily.
Dawn blush across the valley of flower markets.
It is as though a death has come to pass –
in the distance the volcano Iztaccihuatl
appears far from the waters of Xochimilco’s
ajolotes – dark days far from Iztaccihuatl
far from the dawn flush across the valley
of flowers – stalls – flowers a valley –
she above them – her dawn blush – across the valley
freezing alone – where ice slides easily.
Incest a cruel ax – cuts the cord
of union – of loving union – of loving –
then to flight – even as in her shadow
in the valley of sorrow – pain lingers
leaving the dry lake where
skyscrapers began to grow.
Has an awakening – a dawn so profound
ever been so destroyed?
What surprises then – weeping years lost
wandering on freeways?
Dark days far from Iztaccihuatl
from her dawn blush across the valley
of flower markets – freezing.
Her shadow of sorrows lingers
all the while – what they saw
was a sleeping woman–
a floating island, a lake at her feet
in her shadow – Texcoco
Would it have been easier living
among the mythical islands –
the volcano more like a carved
shell – hollow – lit inside – baroque
shadow – hidden oracle
resting, quiet, undisturbed –
to caress her Talavera surfaces?
The humming bird and the flower
the flower cleaves to the humming bird
freezing Iztaccihuatl – hidden –
untouched – a virgin fleeing
the years lost? Etched, carved –
a flame under snow
white unstained,
He waited.
late 1950s
The moon is an amber heel in black waters
Or a tiny scull† of light dissolving in the sacred cenotes
a perfect circle of light erased, darkly glowing –
a fungus enclosed by a gold ring –
among a flora of stars.
It is a dark forest of dreams
where parrots of distinctive plumage
are the shadow passing –
returning to turquoise water of the cenotes
where the frail scull† of the moon
is dissolving with a quetzal’s cry.
Here a tread the color of an ember heel
tracking through black waters
in the well – here a smoke covered moon –
a moon that could be an amber heel
set down – requiring gold beads and rock crystal
to match inexplicable movements in the black sandpaper sky.
It is the winter solstice, another year
gone.
* Tainos were the first people encountered by Columbus on the Island La Hispaniola. They believed at night the waters around them reversed and became the sky.
† Editor's note: She probably meant “skull.”
with an admirer, early 1960s
The leaves are green fish
splashing above me fresh on the trees
as this dust of eighty thousand mule
bones settles between my toes, clogs my nose
spices my brain with power of long forgotten
beasts – eighty thousand of them that heaved their loads
of silver ore out of the prudendial mountain clefts
more mules than people praying
kneeling shadowed in dim churches
these Guadalupanos pleading to their goddess
beneath the elbows and knees of the Sierra Morena.
Cactus grows in the cement
Staring at me with purple thorns.
1960s
I.
After the click comes panic, the rush of desperation, the conviction I must go back for something left on the other side of the door. Nothing will ever be the same, something I long to complete to live out like the life of a wave. The door seals the separation. Alone. Locked out are faces I love, people who touched me, talk to me in dreams. They are saying something, mouthing the words slowly over and over, but I cannot make them out. There are men in uniforms. They have stamped me in. They are part of the door. It is always night, always the hard side of the moon, the plane is at the dark end of the tunnel. There is no going back to my tousled bed. My heels, my hat are my armor.
There’s no going back, though I’ll try, I’ll try over and over again for the rest of my life, I’ll keep going through gates, listening for the click, watching the man stamp who I am and where I’ve been in purple ink. I’ll look back trying to find this faces that knock at my dreams, and I’ll long to pull the covers over my head for just one more hour of sleep.
II.
Yellow, blue, white luxury of water swirling, light refracted, confusion of air, muscle, skin pulling to emerge, air torn lungs, the swaying waves above surface, sand dashed legs, all of life green and bright and beautiful, every palm tree a clear frond, a specific piece of the mountain side, rocks flat, tilted vertical, torn and reassembled in wet black ink, cliffs to blue sky, mangroves lifting bone-toed stepping in water, coral reefs press to shore in wafered layers meet life edging out. I want to stay here forever in the sand cold then hot loving the crunch of it sliding to outline the contours of fingers, elbows, breasts, thighs, sealing my skin like a kiln seals wet clay.
III.
In the beginning there were children and there was clay. The children looked at the clay and felt the energy of excitement flowing into their fingertips. They touched, pounded, poked, pulled, pinched and squeezed. The clay wiggled in their fingers. It opened, closed, broke and was stacked. The children chortled with joy. They had discovered their power. They spoke for the clay, moving to mimic the creatures, articulating the lost worlds they were part of. They imagined themselves to be animals, becoming the thing taking shape before them. When a child says, “I made this”, he or she is saying, “I can make this”, “I am this”, “I AM!”.
Rome - 1969
Wide as a gash in the flesh, lava
flows from the innards of earth
reminding us of our evolution –
of the earth before us
where other humans existed
in the caves of Gibraltar.
Their fingers, the same as ours,
carved rock, made tools and spears.
Fifty-five thousand years ago they
inhabited these caves fleeing the
arrival of our ancestors, a last hold out
in a world becoming foreign to them
after three hundred thousand years.
I watch the boat loads arrive from Africa
on the evening news – more arrivals
escaping the ruins of towns invaded
by those to whom we gave license
those whom we called, “father” “mother”
“grandfather”.
The heat of streaming lava pushes us
out of our homes, our streets, our
beaches. I watch new arrivals from Africa
And Haiti – boats full of humans
whom we will return to the rising waters,
the sinking earth.
Rome - 1969
Lost in the mountains
among the monolithic and abandoned stones
I try uncovering the dead
who under white crosses
are deaf to me.
In the dust of Texcoco I sift through remains
while the city grows to ten million
try walking backwards…
…frozen in childhood.
I gain a severed arm in formaldehyde,
a bronze equestrian statue
and what is left of the shaman
a dried hummingbird purchased in the market
among herbs and deers’ eyes.
This mosaic fits you to the wall
a mural in small sections:
see the red Oldsmobile c.a. 1948,
the ceramic plate of “pan dulce,” a great aunt,
a hand under the white table cloth.
Crawling in the cathedral
pain was relief following me
like the eyes of Black Saint Anthony.
Rome - 1969
The raw sky bleeds
red blood of sorrow
filling the cistern* where
we can see – as they did the movements
of the reversed, inside out, upside-down monuments
the Otomi built around them – pyramids, temples
secret passages they came so far to find.
Walking together as a long serpent might cross a plain
leaving seeds and waste – the women holding
the newborn and the dying, they came eating toads and snakes, and sometimes each other, to find this reflection of unknowable forces – to watch the turning of the universe that they called
Spirit and Soul.
How were they to know the emptiness of that space – those wanderers of the incomplete sphere – the unknown jungles and mountains yet to be crossed? They came to sing, to dance the spirits, to cage the birds, capture the monkeys and to hunt the deer
more swift than lightning.
I come to rest and watch the canyon wrens
gather winter seed.
*The first Meso-Americans built cisterns at the foot of their temples in order to watch the nocturnal movements reflected there.
Rome - 1969
Counted in decades
when my father of watches first
took me la cueva, to those old rocks
tumbled and pierced, that sheltered the first ones
to arrive in the laguna among the scaled
peaks sheered by lightening – humbled,
bedraggled to change the mud in Teotihuacan,
before us – we who came to touch
ruins of thousands of years, to breathe
and dance and sing their bright song.
Cracked, rough and red with age – a ceramic bowl
from the valley pierced by rocks counted
in millennia – it was the valle of Teotihuacan
that was our home – though it had held others
who left us their traces – Teo-ti-hua-can for a daughter
who succeeded him.
Rome - 1969
Padre, eres pequeño
de ojos negros
las manos con uñas claras
como lunas llenas
eres de tres tias
que llevan velos y van de negro.
Padre, en esta noche de
despedida
he visto en tu sombra
un niño pequeño y perdido
que va llorando
buscando ojos negrosv
sobre este avión vacio.
Rome - 1969
I.
I followed the river
bloated with mud
breathing in small rushes
having traveled for centuries
without stopping squeezed
by rock walls – searching
for what? A place to rest perhaps?
II.
Old rocks tumbled, turned by early
hands, the first ones in Teotihuacan
– ours too – in glass cases
traces, what belonged to others left, carved in
green stone – bowing men, women offering plates
clay figures in glass cases.
III.
Forgotten in the frenzy
the bloom quickly falls
under speeding rubber –
The face in the sand – a
puzzle in rock – a walk
among the magueys ignoring
their thorns – embroidered
petals in the above
branches – the gusts hold
me, torn between spring
and snow. Here no frozen ground,
I walk under this heaven – ancient
blood moving through my heart.
Selfie
I
Seguí el río
henchido de lodo
respiraba en pequeñas erupciones
luego de viajar durante siglos
sin cesar, apretujada
por muros de roca – buscando
¿qué cosa? ¿Un lugar para descansar, quizás?
II
Viejas rocas cayeron, volcadas por manos
tempranas, las primeras en Teotihuacán
– nuestras también – en cajas de vidrio
rastro que perteneció a otros y dejaron tallado
en piedra verde – hombres
en reverencia, mujeres ofreciendo platos
figuras de barro en vitrinas.
III
Olvidada en el frenesí
la flor cae rápidamente
bajo el tope de velocidad –
la cara en la arena, un rompecabezas
de roca – un paseo
entre magueyes ignorando
las espinas – pétalos
bordados en las ramas
superiores – las ráfagas me sostienen
dividida entre primavera y nieve.
Aquí no hay suelo congelado,
camino bajo este cielo – antigua
sangre moviendose a través de mi corazón.
Traducción: Iván Soto Camba
Child art is not about teaching children to create like adults...
This room is gray with gurneys
closely parked. I’ve come to say
good-bye. He is weak now,
cannot easily walk. He leans
heavily on me. There is only this
moment in this room – at the end
of a life he leans sweetly to
the almost rest of long bones.
We make our way among
one after the next – gurneys still now
they line the wall – barely notice
‘till here a high narrow
metal structure. This is all I can do.
We stand together – dead.
...it is about seeing what they see before they become adults.
for George
The drawing you made
all black lines capture you
sitting cross legged one hand
holding your left leg the
right hand in you’re mouth.
Is it a cigarette you’re gripping?
The white paper brushed
to gray behind you is too small
to hold your body your eyes two
dots stop your brush at the top.
Firmly placed they study the
scene before you – what exactly
were you staring at? All arms
and legs crossed, one line
slighting your body thins
the blubber your sweat
shirt covers – only reaches an
elbow, but it’s the eyes I come
back to peering into the drawing
barely there, yet they hold me –
Straight out meet mine above
the lumbering body sitting
on the floor.
late 1970s
for John Sours
My hand on the gate
pulls me up clinging
to this barrier
I see a young man in
Ford Coupe, he leans
on the steering wheel
laughing at me clinging
to this tin separation
wanting to be rescued
I am laughing here
in a garden where lilies cup
their gold, I am Eve among
the cacti, and maguey –
where do we go
from here? Could it
be a world
without end?
with young artist - July 1980
encroaches night after night
another day of the growing few –
a feral awakening crouches
on black rock, an icy dilemma.
What has it been? Chemistry
of ages crafts the hair of mongrels –
we are born out of elements
gyrating forever, files of chance
ordering, disordering particles
who knows from where.
Dulcinea
Words, palabras, vistas –
seeing, the red and black bird.
I am difficult to live with –
I am a replica of my mother.
My dog is blind – but it is hard
to live with me.
The voice was saying, “the
beginning is recognizing the fault.”
I want you to take care of me –
That is all I know of how love
happens between a man
and a woman. Pretense, trick
the other. Lie.
Fail.
with students - 1980s
Alone in the house there is little to direct her.
She is like an octopus of feeling
putting out tentacles, each a different
color, red, green, blue. She hopes to reach shore
before nightfall. The window is black.
Not even the outline of her cheekbone is visible.
Brown waters are below her, lumps of earth
turning under the surface.
And the glistening, flashing fish,
large enough to hold, like children,
are just breaking the edges of ripples,
catching, (the candle light, the starry reflections.)
Alone there are no bridges
she can cross to the other side. The barranca
below has been eaten away by thousands
of years of rushing rivers. Great mountains tumble forward wrenched, slammed, narrow peaks
granite shelves of pain moving inward.
1980s
They waited for you to speak
and listened while trains
knocked you through Brazilian jungles
your daughter’s face
the flower on your lapel.
You were more surprised
Than I expected –
Now I feel you slipping
back through sunlit Spanish
summers, as I watch you
receding down the hall
banging against my ribs.
1980s
Quiet
the smell of flesh burning
quiet
smooth oak counter top
quiet
the brown waters underground
quiet
inside a refrigerator
Fifteen years of quiet
a muffled scream
of tissues tarring
quiet
a dead womb smell
quiet
you leaving
quiet…
1980s
Black and white: the photos
avoid color, instead etching
outlines, ladders as purple zippers
to climb, a hand here, a shoulder
there, lips SOS signals, legs
forever crossed stuck
in the old album.
None is the true picture –
but how do you capture pain
with the shutter of a camera?
The welts don’t show on
the small face of the girl
no speech was recorded
no threats documented
people didn’t talk about
the pain. No one asks
“did you have pain today?”
Here, a shutter unable
grovels deeper in the pit
of the stomach – nor does
her hair curl where it has
been pulled. She is black
and white in the photograph
no purple shows. She is holding
animals: a cat, a monkey, a
white and brown dog named Patches.
The black and white story
that begins before she was born –
ends with a shutter.
having a meal - 1980s
As a child I pressed my hand into clay.
Small bones.
Gave it to my mother and father,
her shoes were always too big,
even at eighteen my toes wiggled.
Wore my father’s flannel shirts
rolled at the cuff
over boys blue jeans.
Fit myself to the man.
Getting the right measurements
I couldn’t miss no matter who I married,
I wore his grandmother’s wedding shoes
small white satin I kicked
off at the reception.
People pointed.
Now coats of different colors.
A woman says, “buy something red or yellow,
something younger.”
Still my head bobs
I am a puppet draped
Bones too small.
In this new country
nothing fits.
with friends - 1980s
Pineapples slow to arrive
in the hull of the galleon pointing east
all sails wrapped, tied, to unkeep the wind
this prize from the new lands.
Will it hold?
The king’s table waits
for the nectar more yellow than flame
while its fruits decay,
moldering juices will
burn one’s throat a, gift
betrayed by time –
a gift from the midnight
waves that lap the Basque
shores not yet unfooled
by India – so much
still unknown.
Best we leave it thus,
the shore, the waves
the pineapple much too
over ripe, too rotten
to taste.
with students - 1980s
A man alone loosing his teeth
A man with a mustache
A man with black wavy hair
A man with “eagle eyes”
A man who worked and studied
A man who had a friend at the delicatessen
A man who loved baloney sandwiches and ham and cheese
A man who carried home jars of pickles and cold cuts
A man who played tennis at the British Reforma Club
A man who took a bath once a week
A man who took his daughters to church because their mother refused
A man who dusted the dining room table holding the cat singing “si pumpsi, si pumpsi”
A man who loved parties and dancing
A man who drove a 1919 DeSoto six days a week
A man who gave the policeman a bottle of tequila for Christmas
A man who had tailors make his suites
A man who drove his family to Acapulco and rescued the sister who floated away in an inter-tube
A man whose best friend was Bernie Roseback who gave me a letter from a famous writer
A man who loved San Jose Purua with the bubbling sulfur baths
A man whose sexual appetites
led to the worst crisis of his life
and changed him forever.
with young artists - 1980s
You are an old man
frail under the white
sheet when the nurse
uncovers you I see
for the first time your
whole body the small
penis between your
legs – what does it mean
now after all these years
of denial – denial after
denial – liar they called me
but you knew
in that last bed that
you could simply say – Yes,
I did it, forgive me –
And then I wept, you laughed –
I go free.
1980s
The one thing I am glad
of is no child calls me Mother –
a terrifying word to overcome
where others have gone and
glad of it – not me – nor do I
call “papa” or “papi” or “father” who
might have begot it.
I am sure of the walls
that hold me up
sure no bloody shard remains.
My own Mother always
said “she did it” meaning
my sister pushed the ladder.
White-wrist-welts result
to prove the razor was easier
the water hot – the bath
a bloody sarcophagus –
Blank spaces left in Mother’s gray
matter – so my libretto –
also untrue – was it this, was it that –
Why did the story keep changing?
I never dared to hold
the bleeding cells in my uterus
I burned the basket – let the knives cut
them out – then gave up – altogether
– no more zygotes – never wanted them.
You’re so young they said – out
I repeated – my amnion done – never Mother.
child artist receiving award - May 1991
Hay una cosa que me satisfase
no hay niño quien me diga Madre –
una palabra atorrizante para mi –
adonde otras han ido
con gusto – ¡yo no! – ni
llamo – papa – o – papi – o – padre
a quien lo haya concebido.
Estoy segura de los muros
que me sostienen – que no quedan
pedazos de cristales sangrientos.
Mi propia Madre siempre
decía “ella lo hizo” indicando
que mi hermana habia empujado la escalera.
Cicatrices- blancos en sus puños para comprobar
la navaja de rasurar era mas fácil –
la agua caliente – la tina –
un sarcófago sangriento –
Espacios vacíos dejaron en
la materia gris de mi madre – así mi libreto
también era mentira –
porque el cuento siempre
cambiaba – ¿fue asi, o fue asa? –
¿por que siempre cambiaba el cuento?
Yo jamás atrevi dejar las cedulas
ensangrientadas que se multiplicaran
en mi útero – quemé la canasta – deje
que los cuchillos la cortaran –
y luego desespere – totalmente
– ya no habra mas zigotos – jamás los quería.
– Pero eres tan joven – me decían – fuera
repetía – me amnion terminó – nunca madre.
on her horse
El milagro de mi vida es la vida
que surge de manera quieta
de mañana a noche, que busca
un fondo preciso donde los recuerdos
de manos duras de insultos
de voces llenas de furia
aventadas contra la sangre que pulsa
en mis venas – descansen, siembran
pequeños milagros como semillas
de girasol, como las amaneceres
llenas de operas de calandrias.
El milagro de mi vida es que existo
que seguire existiendo hasta
las ultimas cenizas caigan
al suelo.
Miriam + Mike - June 1998
The great head above the floating bodies
reaches for air that is disappearing
in the marshes of Texcoco.
A hoof above the spear of a bloated
dead unknown to him – who will be sacrificed –
slaughtered in the bloody waters – for what?
For naked men who slice each other’s bones – cut
away feet – gurgle blood?
All that matches is the color of it – of the horse who
tasted the grasses of Spain, of the men who rode him –
of the men who met him.
2000s
Slow the daylight
through the trees
wind pushing in
sounds of thrushes
slighting the green –
life resumes, no illness
here. My dog barks,
echos others up the hill
under Mexican trees.
Oaxaca 2004 - from Nancy
MER as in ocean you say, as in the deep sound of
humming under water
as in whales sounding to find each other in the dark –
to know how far they have to go to where
the light, shut out, holds only the call
vibrating through the green and blue night – as the
call I hear from you under me
when the music surrounds us, where your face
has put on a white mask and I feel the humming
begin below your bone cage lay
my cheek against your smooth throat,
listen to the journey
we are taking
together.
Miriam and Devon
You are holding me.
I feel your arms tighten around me –
the breath in my mouth is a white flower
blooming – it opens and petals fall on you –
you are soft, I dip into you like a dark closet
full of my mother’s old velvet gowns,
of shoes worn from walking
remembering the way your skin smells
when you come in out of the sun
the salt in your hair after running.
Thank you
He necesitada la caricia
de su tibia y delicada tentación
el mojado dedo que corre
por mi espalda
para saber como
es ser amada
como es recibir el dulce
calor de un abrazo
inesperado.
with Lee Gould
So maybe this is the way it is, coming over the bluff and seeing the infinite colors
of the wind above the water that is gray and peaked,
restless under the push of the evening fog, the brightest
nugget burning clusters threadbare.
I look over my shoulder to the lavender belly of fog
erasing the Bridge towers – orange stuck to the grassy slopes in
front of me – I could be looking through gels, orange in this light, the chiaroscuro
patterns of the fading sun on the Berkeley Hills.
You are stretched out the whole length of the bed
a red Oaxaca bloom pulled over those precise bones.
Beside me my dog trots. It is her spirit world we are paying homage to – both of us in
the outdoors together. I let her set the pace. People whose faces are passing.
Listening to the kites make whistling sounds – the gulls
I am thinking about friends,
about life among them.
Mission College Santa Clara - 20 December 2018
No torches last night moving through the dark
no small pueblos suddenly
flaming to light on the mountain
side where people welcome
the fire of the new year –
just black, not even stars – under
the heated blanket I dreamed
of sexual union – of two becoming
one – a journey to the cosmos tender
and loving – triumphant and full of surrender,
a sacrifice of sorts – the extraction of a beating heart.
In the morning I find it on the butcher’s shelf
behind glass, already dead.
Mission College Santa Clara - 20 December 2018
While the news tells us there is water on the moon,
cellos sing to us what it is like to be the inside of a tree,
and wish only that their soft wind resemble
echoing woods. If they could speak to us
more clearly they would tell us what we are leaving
behind – the fragrance of embers in stone hearths,
the sound of silver from a piano key, how
their roots explore what has passed for hell
in different languages – life without air –
what life will be like without you.
Lee, Paula, and Jack with Miriam - Guanajuato friends
for Victor
The window sheltered us
sitting in the dusk –
women young and old
children also, passing by,
many too young to remember –
two old people holding hands
in the window sharing the
fading light, and a smile
perhaps.
2020
The tongue so wanting to say
la yegua
ears soft architecture, an arch.
The brain has seeded recesses
that sprout unexpectedly – el cielo
Bending the mind in its reflection
Espejo – choosing the palabra
Between dog and el perro
Between blue sky and el cielo azul
Between aqui and beyond.
on the water
I never knew what being old
meant until I had to leave the
ashes of friends behind –
until my knees were no
longer knees but sticks
to hold me upright.
Do you believe that
dogs take us across
the river? he asked.
He was worn and wrinkled
but still he knew the old
ways. Yes, I answered
I believe they carry our
souls over the water.
My old dog smiled
meaning she knew
the way.
from Devon
for Madge
My nails grow to help me thread
the bright sways
of morning’s light
that bind me – weaving
strong threads
by hand as they fall
nearer the eye of the needle.
On the sands that hold you
forever after your death –
like the weight of an unwanted
lover – you who wove as did Penelope
the dark shadows that lingered
so too will your nails lengthen.
But you will still be dreaming
when I reach that grave of sand.
How to know why they stopped
those threads, that wove the weft
and warp making Chinese stitches
ever entwined on an ancient bole?
Always you were that close, woven
into my small self waiting for the next
star threading Italian lakes while we
laze on the ancient shore.
with Alejandra of the Museo Nacional de Antropología - 2023
Soon someone else will have to take
over this day that has belonged to me
since my first breath, as I took it over
from Picasso who must have taken it
from someone else – a minotaur,
a harlequin perhaps, or a woman
with a contorted face all angles –
I will pass it on with best wishes
to another child – maybe Chinese
who will celebrate with noodles and rice
and write letters backwards – who
will speak a language I never imagined
when talking to her Chow Chow – who
will speak a universal tongue same as
my long and bony pooch.
Coyoacán- 10 February 2023
The white shadows zipping across the ceiling immediately recall Zihuatanejo salamanders, years ago, a place long forgotten, likely crumbling under rotting palmetto. But this place is not crumbling, it is a lively beach with humble structures, all tottering on the edge of a mangrove that moves inland to shelter turtles and alligators. Hand painted signs on blackboards or newspaper remind us dinner time is coming and we better hurry up and choose among the few breezy, barefoot places before all the stools are taken. Offerings: guacamole with red onion, guacamole with white onion and cilantro, guacamole and quesadillas and perhaps a few shrimp; beer for happy hour. The dog sitting in the sand by the door looks just like Moza, and the one chasing waves that slide away from her pushing the breeze, also looks like Moza. Then there is the dog that approaches me on the dirt road who wags his tail and asks, “where is Moza?” who looks exactly like her… I think I forgot to bring her. Next time, I tell myself. She would like it here, so much like old Zihua: the guys on the beach playing kick ball between the topped over turquoise fishing boats; the little girl in underpants covered with sand making for the wave that plops her down. But what most reminds me of the untampered playas of long ago, is the lack of bright lights, the barely illuminated palapas, the quiet voices of people at sunset on the beach, and my simple room with salamanders darting where fans spin effortlessly and nothing but the long, white drape breaths – no TV, no cars, no street lights, or video cameras eyeing me, just me, in a white room on a white bed thinking about what a joy Zihuatanejo used to be.
Guanajuato - 2023
Strange this aging, time slowed down, longing for quiet. What I keep noticing is that the objects around me are aging as well. My beautiful rugs from Oaxaca, and the Middle East are threadbare in places. The one in my study, from Afghanistan has a hole that Moza covers when she stretches out in the morning. Strangely, the visibility of wear and tear is comforting. When I come upon one, I often pause, wondering if it is serious enough to be replaced, then I move on comforted by the memories of where it came from, how it got here remembering the village woman I bargained with. Objects have come to mean a lot. The guitar that was given to me when I was eight years old is tucked under my oak table from Mission Street. The table is stripped of the gray paint it came with, an Arts and Crafts seriousness about it. I still wonder if I should start taking music lessons. At eight, the strings cut my fingers. One of the most endearing objects is my father’s tennis racket. It is propped on a chair in my bedroom. I look at it every day remembering the young man who loved to play, in his white shorts, and our mornings at the British tennis club, “Club Reforma” where the members celebrated the Queen’s birthday. My father never told me why it meant so much to him, but in the long time since I retired, when the puzzling questions about the past absorbed me, I realized that it was related to his own childhood when my grandfather was working for British Petroleum in Mexico City. I still have trouble pronouncing “Theater” with the hard “th” of American pronunciation.
As I grow older I also realize how important stillness and privacy are to me. That may have to do with writing time, but I think it goes deeper, to the still mornings when I hung out the window smelling the fresh cut grass, looking west to Ajusco, a mountain that was one of many in the valley that belonged to the Aztecs. Juan Velorio on TV Friday night spoke about a well known Guanajuatense writer, Jorge Ibargüengoitia. I walk with Moza, past his memorial, in a park where ashes, recovered from the airline crash, are buried. Velorio said that his writing was something readers are drawn back to because of his humor and sarcasm which are typically Mexican. Is that because the humor that has passed though unknown metaphysics of osmosis, from languages still spoken here? There is a quirkiness about it.
Ashland, OR- 20 September 2023
Dusk – dogs answer motorcycles
on empty streets. Above my fence
the cypress is a dark bird
gathering birds.
A plane uncovers
the first star and I return
to those evenings
lying face up on the roof –
estrellas one by one
in the yellow Mexican
night – return to a single
light-bulb kitchen – dark women
moving arms-filling aproned waists
to the cri-cri of the clock
over the molcajete – molcajete
moving me home.
Ashland, OR- 20 September 2023
There are places we have been together
which I do not know
so many ways of telling each other things
sometimes by touching.
In the large halls you walk
in my mind a small warm figure
a possibility –
The curves a carpenter makes
he has learned from loving
the way a breast is smooth
the small of her back
all peaceful transformations –
a German carpenter wanted only this
for his son and now you
build with redwood
I will lie on.
Miriam - two months before her passing
So she looked and saw
there was no way I would
stay in the house
once it became a prison –
no way I would sit mumbling
at the window – no way
I would let the chaos
overcome me – my body
belonging to others, do this
do that even their good
intentions would rankle me
me sitting by the window
that was no longer mine –
better to let the whole
thing go – collapse, re-find
the cells it belonged to
conceding one cell
at a time until they
were earth again
and I was gone.
Miriam - a few days before her passing
Mostly it was the light, the way the light slanted in through the tall narrow windows between herself and the doors on the other side of the room. It seemed to fill the room with a tentative glow, as though a small, cold light bulb were projecting its light into the room from the other side of the glass panes. The light was, she imagined, like the light in an icebox when the door is opened: pale, uncertain, traveling over frozen objects buried in ice. She knew on the other side of the windows the ash trees were thin, almost bare. If she turned her head slightly she would see a few skinny branches leaning into the window ledge, a brown leaf dangling from one tip. Perhaps the autumn sun traveling through those branches had been strained, clarified, distilled to this cool chill that filled the room. Her shoe rested on the doorsill, a raised piece of stripping at the entrance of every seventeenth century room to keep the drafts out. She did not look down to check. She knew by touch.
The room was large, empty and the wooden floor sighed as she stepped on it. Directly in front of her were two doors. Fifteen paces would carry her to them. The light from the window on her right was from a sun sliding away from the Earth further bleaching the faded blue rococo decoration on the ceiling. The painted motifs of griffon and shells ran evenly and symmetrically above the pale blue stripes that marked the beginning of the ceiling. Next to the doors was a fireplace she calculated to be taller than she was. Everything, walls, door knobs, window frame, the ledge below it, the dull parquet floor, everything was covered with a fine powdery dust. The room was chilly. Aside from the door she was standing in and the one directly across the room there was no other way in or out. She had planned to walk through the room without stopping. Now she found she hesitated to enter, but stood on the threshold feeling the chill of the diluted sun, studying the pale gray light that seemed to reflect back off the walls. She could feel no one had been in this room for a very long time. Her hand on the brass knob felt the fine dust under her fingertips. The room was waiting.
The stone fireplace, with its marble mantel and claw- foot embellishment was in keeping with the colors of the walls. The worn paper hung in several corners. It was screened with alternate stripes of pale blue and gray, outlined in thin, tarnished gold lines. Her gaze came to rest instead on the mirror above the mantel. The glass was fogged over with a dull hue, and it seemed to stare like a blind eye into the soul of the room, collecting the drift of the dust on the weak rays of sun without returning them, absorbing them, changing them to muted shades of gray-blue: clouds after rain streaked out of focus. Parts of the glass were tarnished by the decomposing silver behind it, so that small bubbles stained the surface with metallic mold. Movement of dust was so slight as to be almost imperceptible. It was a dull eye. She stepped fully into the room breathing the fine dust in deeper breaths. The chill of the room made individual odors difficult to separate. There was an odor of mildewed cardboard and old glue. Perhaps as she approached the fireplace there was also the smell of long extinguished fires. She could not be sure.
The eye, or mirror, seemed blind to her because she knew the blind looked inward, to a different landscape, a different perception of events. The mirror seemed to be dreaming the room. It seemed to be dreaming a room, a room of different dimensions. As she approached she watched the different angles of the room shift slowly in and out of focus. She could not see her own small head or shoulders come into view, as the lower edge of the mirror was above the top of her brown hair. The room continued to shine blue and gray and gold, slightly out of focus, with the even, white painted garlands running above the wall paper, on the soft curving plaster that rose towards the center of the ceiling. When she stopped, she was directly in front of the mirror, searching the silver pickings to discern the patterns of light on the high wall behind her. High on that wall a white carved head of a woman looked back. The mirror seemed to want to hide the shape, for she could not see it clearly it was so far behind her and the pale light fell below where the garlands met, crescendoed into a crest and lifted what she could now see was a full figure reclined. The figure resembled the griffons painted among the garlands and leaves on the edge of the ceiling, but the lines of the haunches, the curve of the claws, the balance of the tail were not so angular. They were the softer contours of a lion shape sprouting heavy, feathered wings. She saw that the whole creature was pushed up on its forepaws to a partially sitting position. Altogether it bore the head and profile of a woman on whose chest were smooth pointed breasts, the breasts of a young, succulent virgin. Suddenly she longed to lower her fingers to the crevasses of her own body, she longed to feel the hot, warm moisture between her legs. The small sphinx looked directly ahead through the rocky silver texture of the molding mirror, and it seemed as though she was seeing a cave that moved back into the scull* of time, to a womb, a passage way coming to life through the broken silver surface behind the glass. Then the dark erased areas that she was rubbing released something and she sunk to the floor.
She was the small sphinx. Delicate, straight nose, the deep set eyes, the small mouth and perfect chin. The power and muscle of her body rolled, her breasts unprotected. Then the question came out of the dark, “Who will rescue me now that you are gone? Who will love me with undiminished passion, unfaltering hope? Who will take over my destiny, give me form and meaning, but you? Who will cure me, take responsibility for this weight, this black that makes me blind except to the deep feeling of misery, pain and unhappiness? Who will sanctify me, make me feel like a perfect, clean and beautiful Madonna?” If I loved the world before I met you, I love it twice as much now – the green trees, the lawns, the meadows where we walk until dawn.
* Editor's note: She probably meant “skull.”
with Jorge Negrete in his hometown - 2023
The home for young unwanted boys was down a long, narrow street on the east end of New York City, near Sheepshead Bay, where it sheltered the children from the snow and sleet in an old clapboard home that had lost its shutters, and whose wooden steps to the oak door were split in several places. In the rear lot, which had once been a garden, a newer concrete structure rose several stories, with an orderly arrangement of classrooms inside, next to the Jesuit brothers’ church, a respectable place of worship for the carpenters, tailors and longshore men who lived in the neighborhood with their wives and children. Up the block a bit, was a business building of many stories, a proud example predating the sky scrapers to come that were to distinguish the island city in the new Twentieth Century. Here men in suites and tailored jackets arrived each morning, parading up the subway’s steps, pulling their bowler hats and wool scarves around them, keeping the bay blasts from the making their eyes water and their noses turn red. That business building faced the world, distinguishing itself by offering the only clock whose huge face evenly, steadily, marked the hours, day and night. At night, the stately face of the clock lit up, and precisely signaled, hour by hour the exact time in the otherwise darkened neighborhood, flashing with electrical precision, a number of times until the hour was struck. It was the first, and only clock in all of New York City that did, for in 1919 electricity was brand new.
Memo, my father, had been living with a family, the same family with whom he had traveled from Veracruz, Mexico, to New York City. He was fourteen, a slender boy whose thick black hair was combed back, behind his ears, a handsome lad, though his small, delicate bones told of different beginnings than the others he met on board the steamer that traveled between Veracruz and the New York harbor. There the fascinated sailors had tossed him coins to hear this native boy speak in fluent English. The surprising literacy that showed a preparation beyond his fourteen years also surprised the brothers at the Jesuit school when he was registered after his long trip by sea from Mexico.
In 1919 there was a war happening in Mexico, referred to in the New York Times as the “Mexican Revolution,” led by Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa (whom we later discovered was not the real Pancho Villa, but a Bandido who had taken the name of his assassinated leader). Everything was confusing in those days, Mexican trains didn’t run on time, or were blown up, telegraph wires were cut and used to hang priests, the U.S. Ambassador had put a drunken General named Huerta in the president’s office after the elected head of state, Francisco Madero, was shot in the back, and Rosa King, the British ex-pat, who had invested her inheritance in remodeling a palacio as a hotel on the main square in Cuernavaca, had to flee over the Ajusco mountain where she was maimed, loosing all her silver and silk belongings besides.
Younger generations were affected as well. Schools opened one day, then closed the next. School children played in the street as there was nothing else to do. Memo was one of those children who, with his classmates, had been abruptly dismissed from the American School as rumors spread that the rebels were marching up Avenida Insurgentes. A large, shaded park was in the center of Colonia Roma, a few blocks from the American School. My father’s family lived near by. In 1919 however, the school was attended by Mexican and American children whose parents worked for newly arrived international industries in La Capital. My grandfather had come from Puebla, first to study at the Real y Pontificia Universidad de México, created by Charles V in 1557, then, began a career, accepting an accounting position with the British, who had appeared at the end of the Nineteenth Century to assist the country’s prosperous families by installing railroads, electricity, telephones and sending engineers underground to dig for gold, silver, and especially, barrels of oil newly in demand. It was the British Petroleum Company, Aguila Negra, that had quickly usurped the oil industry. Bernardo de Uriarte spoke English, as after the defeat of the French forces in 1865, in Puebla, Doña Francisca, my great grandmother, had declared, “from now on this family will speak English, not French!” So my grandfather had attended English classes in Puebla, and my father was sent to the American School near the park, beginning kindergarten in 1911 in la Capital, after the family had settled in Colonia Roma.
On the day in 1919 that my grandfather came home early for the midday meal he found Memo in the park with his young friends gathered around the fountain throwing stones across the water and aiming sticks at one another, making strategic moves to avoid being soaked by the “enemy”. My grandfather abruptly called the game to a halt asking what they were up to. “We are playing Pancho Villa”, my father yelled, “I am Villa, and those are Obregon’s troops!” The boys gathered around the older man who was not amused. “We plan to join Villa’s troops as soon as they arrive in la Capital!” Memo added. The boys cheered.
“You will do no such thing. You should be home studying. Why aren’t you in school?”
“The school closed,” shouted the youngsters, “No more school! Villa’s troops are coming!”
“Zapata has been murdered! Now Obregon will be president!” Memo added.
My grandfather took Memo by the arm. “Enough!” he said and marched the young boy home, where his mother wept at his disarray, and his father said, “Guillermo must study! He is losing too many days. We will send him to the United States, where he can attend a Catholic school and live with a family I know who is traveling to New York City next week on official business.”
Memo recalled this day often as he lay in bed in the dormitory of the abandoned boys home waiting for the face of the clock to strike the next hour of the sleepless night. Mexico seemed very far away. He recalled the park and his playmates sadly, his dog waiting at the door, his younger sister dressing her dolls in silk skirts and bonnets, the odors of maiz freshly crushed by the cook for tortillas in the kitchen, the big bright room where his father’s books lined the shelves, and the sounds of the street vendors passing, calling their wares, “¿guajolotes?” “¿camotes calientes?” “¿leña?”. And what of Alvaro Obregon’s daily hike through the streets of la Capital on his way to the Presidential Palace? Was he still walking through Colonia Roma at 8:00 a.m. every morning, striding with great, long strides to keep physically ready for the next battle? Memo had waited by the gate for him to pass. They had then exchanged salutes, Obregon asking, “¿Y tu abuelo, adonde esta?” The eight year old boy had gestured to the house behind him, “¡Alli!”
He lay in a dark room of sleeping classmates, a dormitory that smelled of urine and dirty feet. Would he ever go home? Who would rescue him? Why had the money suddenly ceased to arrive paying his room and board? Why had the compatriots, who had brought Memo to New York, insist that they could no longer provide for him? Had his father disowned him for playing in the park? What would he do in a country where he knew no one? Just then the clock across the street began to flash. As each number was struck the face of the electric clock flashed once accordingly. The huge face lit up one, two, three, four and on to twelve times. He pulled the pillow over his head so that his sobs would not wake the homeless boys whom the priests sheltered. He was thousands of miles from la Capital, alone.
During his childhood my father, Memo, lived with his family in Colonia Roma in Mexico City where the prehistoric lake had been settled by the Aztecs nine centuries earlier. Since the arrival of the invaders in 1519 the Spanish soldiers had cleared the pyramids, but it continued to be identified by the Nahuatl word “Zocalo” referring to the heart of the empire. The Spanish had spread out building palaces and churches thereby transforming the ancient landscape into one that was habitable to them, bringing a culture that was highly impractical for the lake bed. They built European palaces, and enormous churches that in the coming centuries would sink, with each recurring earthquake pulling walls apart. Here they lived with Indian women who bore the first mestizo children.
The house was designed by Luis Lamm with French flourishes, niches, wrought iron balconies, and pink carved stone parapets. The two story home was enjoyed by different generations of the family. My grandfather Bernardo and his wife Mercedes shared their home with Jose Luis, a gentleman of the old school, who spent his evenings playing chess with his son Bernardo in the big room with lots of books. The chess games often lasted all evening, therefore the children were forbidden to enter, so they retreated to the bedrooms upstairs, inventing games to entertain themselves. These regularly included the cat who was dressed in doll clothes until their mother appeared in the hallway insisting they bathe, say their prayers and go to bed. Otherwise, Memo, and his brother and sister, spent the time in the kitchen with the cook pestering her for sweets, hot chocolate or cold tea. Their mother, Meche, knitted in the parlor, or organized tasks in the house.
At the end of the hall a shelf above which two small paintings of Christ made the space into a quiet retreat reminding the younger members that their heritage was from Spain, thereby dismissing any of the pagan superstition they might encounter among the populations that filled the streets. Several white candles made the shadows of the saints dance on the wall.
As Memo lay in bed recalling these days, Pancho Villa rode through Chihuahua with intention, disrupting routine, stability and communication by cutting the telegraph wires that communicated the citizens in Mexico City to their neighboring country to the north. The dangling telegraph wires were then used to hang the unfortunate priests in local parishes near-by.
Fortunately the telegraph wires were repaired within weeks and the telegram with money for Memo’s upkeep was again deposited in the bank. Meanwhile, the brothers had managed to locate a Venezuelan family who attended their church for Sunday mass. They were kind people with two children of their own, and once approached agreed to take care of Memo. As a teenager I remember my father sitting at the dining room table in front of his typewriter, writing yet another letter to the mysterious family in South America.
with father, William - Xmas 1970 at Museo Nacional de Antropología
Miriam de Uriarte was born in New York City in 1942 and promptly taken to la capital de Mexico where she spent her first twenty years living with her Mexican father and her American mother. Her bilingual education was completed at the American School in Mexico City where she studied the early curriculum of José Vasconcelos, which deeply engaged her in the history and culture of the country. Her graduate degrees in Mexican History and English Literature presaged her future interests, deepening her identity with, and her knowledge of, both countries. From 1968 to 1993, she was an art educator, and helped to pioneer a new understanding of how to foster creativity in children. She developed curriculum for their artistic and perceptual development, based on research and experience, first in Rome, then in Berkeley, California.
She also published poetry, short stories, and art reviews in the Bay Area including in the East Bay Express. She previously taught at the UC Berkeley Extension, founded the Berkeley Child Art Studio, was education director at the Mexican Museum, director of the Stockton Children’s Museum, Director of the Museum of Craft and Folk Art in San Francisco, and Director of Education at Museo del Barrio in Manhattan NYC, as well as working in Mexico City with the Museo Nacional de Antropología, and in Guanajuato at the Alhóndiga de Granaditas, one of the great museums of Mexico’s five century heritage. In Guanajuato, she published repeatedly with the Embajadoras Press and wrote a monograph, Gerold Heinz Luft-Pavlata: a German Painter in Patzcuaro, published in 2019 by Embajadoras Press. In her last years, she lived in the capital of the Mexican state of Guanajuato.
She traced her ancestry deep into pre- and post-Revolutionary Mexico, taking pride in the Basque name from her great aunt’s side of the family in Puebla. As a child in the capital of the country, she studied the documented history of life in Mexico after it ceased to be a colony of Spain, before it formed, in 1810, one of the first independent countries of the Americas. At the same time, she was reading books describing the independence revolt, plotted by Franklin and Washington, of the Thirteen British Colonies. Her passion for history comes from these early studies and from her dual U.S./Mexican ancestry and citizenship. While writing short stories and poetry in English, she explored the early history of the American colonists and the Mexican independence seekers. This earned degrees in history, English, and Spanish.
She influenced how art is taught to children by founding the Berkeley Child Art Studio, one of the first of its kind, where she documented the development of creative genius in young children as they discovered art. This work was not about teaching children how to do art like adults but about giving them space to explore their own unfiltered creative impulses. Through this experience she learned what was needed to teach art teachers new ways to foster creativity in children, and to understand the meaning and value of early scribbles and forms, too often sadly desprized, in children’s art work. She was proud that some of her students went on to become successful professional artists and art educators.
This work put her in direct contact with historical, anthropological, and child art museums, and involved her in many art outreach projects. Her museum work and experience mounting exhibitions, put her in touch with many contemporary artists and the art scene on the East and West Coast of the U.S. and in Mexico. Art often inspired her poetry.
…
Most of the poems here, including the bio above, were taken from her collection Pulling Bones. She passed on 5 July 2024 as the book was nearing completion.
Museo Gene Byron - 18 September 2022
I only knew Miriam the last two years of her life when she was keenly aware of her physical and mental decline. She had no children, no living relatives she was close to, and almost all her dearest friends had predeceased her. We met at the Guanajuato English Language library where we volunteered. She mentioned she was nearly finished with a novel she had been working on for at least a decade but was unsure of what would become of it. I asked about and offered to read it, and then suggested I might be able to help her get it into book form and on Amazon, having done this several times for friends. On review, she revealed she was not satisfied with the novel. The overall story was not coherent, it seemed, to her, and she confessed her increasing inability to concentrate on the ambitious project of making it so. It seemed too episodic, a string of loosely related stories. She was frustrated.
In the process of helping with the review, however, I learned she had written and published much poetry as well as articles, the latter mostly connected with her vocation as art educator and critic. I suggested we put together a collection of her poetry and publish that. There was so much to choose from in finished or nearly finished form. I think both of us felt her time was running out and we jumped on the idea. The collection Pulling Bones is the result. Since her death, I have discovered enough poetry for several collections, not to mention short stories she had written, and many essays and articles on art education and criticism. Some published, most not. She had earlier published a monograph on Gerold Heinz Luft-Pavlata, a German artist in Mexico.
She lived, at the time, with a beloved dog in her house in Marfil, a village just outside Guanajuato, the historic capital city of the state. It was a nice house in a privada (a small gated community) next to the Guanajuato River. I had been traveling light around Mexico for two years when we met and was considering staying long term in Guanajuato, so she offered me a room to rent in her large house stuffed with books, art, and the rowdy young Belgian Malinois. I accepted – despite the dog.
In these last years, she seemed desperate to travel as much as she could, eager to show me the town of her paternal ancestors, Pachuca, north of Mexico City, the museums there and everywhere we went, and Mexico City itself, especially the colonias where she grew up. Shortly after I moved into her house, she took her last trip alone to visit old friends in New England, and then, later accompanied by me, more friends in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she had lived the middle part of her life, and then onto Ashland, Oregon to see more friends and then a student she was especially proud of in Portland. She would have given me a grander tour of her life if her fragile body had permitted. She knew people in South America, the UK, Italy, Spain, France, Asia, the Fiji Islands, India, and no doubt places she had long forgotten. If her time had permitted, we would have scrambled over pre-Colonial indigenous ruins throughout Latin America – the art, pre-history, archaeology, and anthropology of which she was expert.
She recounted anecdotes from her life, adventures, many travels, important people she met, and accomplishments. As a child, she was treated by the same doctor who saved Frida Kahlo’s life… about the donkey and monkey she had as a child, about the tabs the CIA kept on the curriculum of the American School in Mexico City she attended. She introduced me to her many still-living friends and contacts here in Mexico, hinted at family scandals and intrigues… It dawned on me I was to be the repository of the content of her life. A reluctant social voyeur when not an outright recluse, in stark contrast to her gregarious tendencies, I am not sure we would have gotten on well had we met earlier in life, though we shared many of the same literary and cultural interests. I am forever grateful for the many connections she made for me. (She had once been married to a philosopher and remarked that it was her fate to be now living with another.)
We were both Scorpios. Both passionate, stubborn, judgmental, a little arrogant. She told me how her illustrious ancestor Admiral Francisco Javier de Uriarte y Borja fought valiantly against the British at Trafalgar, and was even honored by the British in captivity. I informed her I, too, had an aristocratic great great great… great grandmother, Catalina Gomez de Coy y Corral, a Spanish noblewoman, the maternal ancestor of a slew of conquistadors, and, probably, a crypto Jew. If the genealogy on my mother’s side could be believed, I was related to this woman, along with a million other nobodies… I queried her about the depth of the bad blood between her and her sister. Like Miriam, I could be unforgiving, more so, I argued with her. So much that I never forgave because I never blamed in the first place, preferring to reserve blame for those who clearly knew what they were doing… and these were so few.
In the end, I became her caretaker and confidant, the inheritor of her estate in Mexico including a vast collection of manuscripts and typescripts of her writing in the form of journals, diaries, letters, clippings of published articles and poems she wrote, as well as thousands of photographs, books, and her art collection. She preserved everything from grade school report cards, to love letters from grade school boyfriends, every holy scribble of generations of pre-adolescents, a scathing final letter to her sister documenting traumatic childhood spats between them culminating in life-long alienation, to detailed journal entries of making out with one of her admirers in the backseat of car in the late 1950s, her letters described a loving but troubled relationship with her father, and more distant one with her mother, and a boy who died before she could marry him… to hint at the barest surface of her life and literary legacy.
In one of her poems, she expresses relief no child called her “mother,” yet she spent almost a lifetime educating children, or rather, educating adults to what children saw in the world. Some of those children followed in her steps. Some became successful artists in their own right.
She recorded every nuance… For whom?
There was just me, a man she barely knew to whom she bequeathed the record of her eight decades.
– Victor
January 2026
“This Bitter Earth / On the Nature of Daylight (Max Richter)” – Joy Denalane, Daniel Hope, and Christoph Israel.
“José Pablo Moncayo, Huapango” – Alondra de la Parra & Orchestre de Paris
Rome - 1969
As time permits, I plan to digitize and link to more of her writing here. This may include scans of articles, stories, more poetry, images of fine and folk art collections, stories about her… maybe even drafts of her novel… as well as other items yet to be discovered. This site I expect will be saved at the Internet Archive for posterity.