MARIOPSA DUENDE
Photos by: Alex Waterhouse-Hayward
Over a decade ago, I began to work with the camera to unveil the visual imagery that accompanied both my dreams and poems. I worked obsessively on both sides of the camera lens, choreographing what I later recognized as a profound and personal metamorphosis. I did not know at that time that this transformation would presage the spectre of breast cancer and the loss of my mother, Frances, to this same disease.
The work of Marion Woodman, particularly her final chapter “Beloved Enemy: A Modern Initiation” in her book
"The Pregnant Virgin", launched me into a new exploration of the Psyche and Eros myth, and at the same time, I could not separate Psyche’s journey to the underworld from my desire to follow the Mariposas Monarcha to Angangueo, Michoacan. It was on that journey that I experienced the tonalli and yolia of ancient Mexico. The tonalli is a complex entity, but most importantly, it is a life force felt and transmitted as heat. The tonalli is also one’s fate, destiny, and name. Spirit is the animating power of breath, but the soul is eternal, and the yolia is the human heart. When we pass over to the next realm, it is said that the bird of the heart has flown.
These poems and photographs are maps for the journey, however fragmentary and non-sequential, as only time knows.
MARIOPSA DUENDE
Not knowing, not tasting the potential for wings
Her daughter’s egg hangs from the heart-poison branch
It is not hers to say the will of wings will carry her
Down to the breath of Xochipilli’s cave
The sacrifice of spring on her lips, dark Eros
Blinded by curiosity or deadly desire
In the yellow-cream bead she sings three songs of mercy
One for love, one for love and one for love
* * * * * * * *
It is the failure of the heart that brings her such distance
From the pyramids of the sun, from the edge of the moon
Psyche wakes and in the telling she is banished to the cold core
Of her other world, trying on skins, trying on the tender steps of kings
All the while shedding skin and buttons of constraint
Until she too hangs her wings to dry
* * * * * * * *
The women of Brazil move lithe as ballerinas on the ballroom floor
Their blue-jade jewels hang about their hair like prisoners of etiquette
While the men, their lips full and promising, caress hips as they dance
Give way to the pull and tangle of this private agony
And in a step or two the maiden with the castanets sings a shriek
Of unfamiliar scorn, the hum and flutter of Psyche’s diaphanous wings
Alight the constraints of the senorita’s dizzy ears, and gone
Gone to greater skies where daimones bathe in elixir dream
* * * * * * * *
Men and women recite ave marias
Telling themselves they will be cured, the curse of cholera
Will not take their breath tonight but for a cloud of red
Not quite blood but excrement from the insect’s broken flight
Who will not land but glide in swarms of tiger’s wings
Whatever else, they are pressing their best thorn to the south
A tear of red, a startled shock of poison, only the fragmentary glue
That sheds a deeper trance shall cross their paths again
All in a shell, a winding cloth of fabric incubates their discontent
Distilled to a drop, the potent chalice sets her free
And the mobs spread antidotes of fear to snuff out the work
To breathe again the clean air of ordinary lives
Burning the tiny bodies in the cholera days
Burning by flame the wing of her praise
* * * * * * * *
What uplifts us? To what minstrel’s silence
Do we toss against the ship’s mast to cross
The angry Atlantic, knowing the agate sun
While our unison-tribe dreams the green coniferous mountains
Of Michoacan, in every word, the message of light
Mariposa Duende, to sleep with heat, to speak of stars
Corazon, my fallen angel of the deep ochre soil
You have come home with wings upturned, nothing but history
Between us, in the near-sleep we tangle dusty feathers
While the grosbeak shadow tears at our roost
We need nothing, our offspring will herald the northern spring
It is our intricate weave of black and gold
Beacon of gossamer limbs, death by declaration
We are not afraid of fire as it swims our blood, drives the winter away
Puts stone to rest, the bellicose our rival
A gem of emerald under the tongue goes a long way
To cure the faint of heart
We, the diurnal travelers, set free.
Photos by: Bill Almond
WHAT THE SURGEON DIDN’T SEE
A crescent moon, a sun sitting on the coast
A perfect quilt patch to spare me the absence of light
While he cut away the small army of prolific cells
Marauders not quite formed, hustled now to their petrie graves
To be filed on laboratory shelves, tubular cells
Rare as amethyst in this cold country
And when he wasn’t looking I planted another seed
One that would vanish my mother’s pain
That would grow beams of light to guide us --
Travelers both on this sea of unknowing
THE BODY OF GRIEF
The body of grief has no shame
The body of grief tears back the sheets and lays his weight on your chest
The body of grief knows no limits, takes a bite out of your heart, is all fingers and teeth
The body of grief always tells the truth, won't let you sleep for weeks
takes your breath away, speaks from the gut in low persistent groans,
The body of grief wears a five o'clock shadow, makes your chin raw with his kissing
The body of grief walks in your boots, licks your toes,
The body of grief gets into your jeans, won't leave you alone, follows you home,
takes up the whole bed, sleeps with his head on your thigh, fucks you in your dreams
The body of grief rocks you on the dance floor, pours another drink, puts his
tongue in your ear, sweats in your eye, stings
The body of grief has no shame, licks your tears
drinks your eyes, leads you to water
makes you crazy with life again
LOVE NOTE TO THE CYTOLOGIST
Skin of skin, bone, milk . . .
Deliver me from your restless stare
put back the bites you have chewed, the needle tears
the eye of fear not blinking the weeks ahead
find a gem of light
a fragment gift of salt
what I am made of, not torn but one
just give me your tick
of approval, the sting is nothing
compared to your wayward heart
don't let your colleagues convince you
a planet doesn't talk and the earth is flat
paint my slides with rouge, give them lips
embrace the glass casing
with all the rogue and incubus cells
of my daemon, my daemon, my daemon breast
get up and dance across the lens,
across the delusions of the clock
and all the dark and risky filaments
that stalked me in my years
deliver me from your latex touch
see a star in flesh, a perfect orbit
go on to bigger things
why not take in thighs, or other caverns of lust
I'll spin you on your petrie dish
give a twist to your
all too grave reflections
Skin of skin, bone, milk . . .
Don't after all these nights
take my flesh, my desire away.
Yiana Belkaloupoulos Workshop October 2002