The fallen fortresses the chaparral
Forgets defend a way of life again.
I speak as if I knew this road. I speak
The Spanish that I never really learned;
The mission walls, spit out like broken teeth
Along the desert roads, are punishments
I can't recall, but vaguely recognize.
The Spanish that I never knew at all,
My heritage and punishment, the walls
At once too sharp and weak to lean upon,
The screeching of the hawks - with these, like them
I want to cut a road, an artery
Directly to the place I know. Pretend
You know it too, imagine gold is words,
Pure gold is in our chalices and throats,
And watch the mission priest tame hawks for pets.
REI TERADA
Piero di Cosimo
after Panofsky
People of no importance still lay curled on the ground
asleep. The boy encamped on someone's cloak
still cupped his elbows, cold from earth, in his unlined palms,
not knowing exactly how long the others had worked:
the fire-blower, and the horseshoe-forger, he
with the thinker's brow, the blacksmith's arms and chest,
and the thin, stiff leg which made him the gods' laughingstock,
now making a second horseshoe which a youth
who leaned from his calm civilized horse was anxious to see.
The time had not yet come for level planks,
but that the time was coming anyone could feel:
the builders had framed their second hut that night,
and the baby was learning how to say the word "family";
hadn't they got from furs to suede to wool?
The old man crouched boosting the fire was no one's fool.
He was Aeolus, shepherd of winds, and he knew
progress was just collective weariness. The plums
were sour and the ants malarial,
