for Ritchie Valens
Ritchie, the world is as a person, this December ice
jeweling the leaf, the sidewalk in sapphire, each step
a ballet against the melt; neither conqueror nor
captive, the trapped air of such temporary surface,
attention does not escape. Our cravings & fears, this
gravity a beauty, an energy balancing refusals. Rain,
froze last night, & dawn’s trees: radiant chandeliers—who reigns
over this inverted earth, now celestial ceiling? Whose eyes
look up at us in the twilight dark? Are stars no more than this,
reflections of the light we cast to them? Are we the steppes
whose pinnacles we mistake for depths unsurfaceable?
Ritchie, neither refuge from this fate, as warrior, nor
as captive, escapes the tragic subjection; both knower
& the known practice turning gravity back, struggling to rein-
in the eclipse inside the seed, &, still, I don’t know my own surface,
my temples & cheeks scarred; skin as pocked as salted ice.
I think of my self-squandering, the failures, the falsehoods, & the steps
taken to denude myself against armoring the lie, this easy smile, this
pyrite anchor to drown grace inside a kiss, simply to deny the hiss
sounding through my vein’s pulse & slither; neither the heart nor
the mind are of a form we can grasp: sin & distortion follow my steps,
the fragment voicing, “I”, & I want to cry my hunger still, but the rain
fell & falls, the trees frozen into warped visions of themselves,
I see, humiliated here, idistension, in every surface
turned in upon itself, inassimilable, unassailable. & how could we surface
from such depth when the air sought is naught but ourselves? This
hunger must be violence directed toward violence [the melt], emptying the ice
of all that remains outside hunger, &, then, neither the hunger nor
its indulgence may gather us back into itself, our childhoods pooling the rain
outside our cupped hands, in the spaces inside the mirror, in the footsteps
left behind, that were punched into our skin as into snow, &, our steps,
after—ebbless oceans, sacrifices unnavigable, yet, undergone; surfeited,
saturated in abandonment, we catalyze forever fruitful, refusal reigning
inseparable from equity; in the dimensions we cannot reach, there, this
ceremony, the closed world, everything is achieved, & we, neither body, nor
philosophy, but of more tangible loss, we loveless echoes gather for eyes.
J. Michael Martinez received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for his first book, "Heredities." "In the Garden of the Bridehouse," is available from the University of Arizona Press. His third collection, "Museum of the Americas," was selected for the National Poetry Series by Cornelius Eady and is published by Penguin Press. He is the Poetry Editor of NOEMI Press and his writings are anthologized in Ahsahta Press' "The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral," Rescue Press' "The New Census: 40 American Poets," and Counterpath Press' "Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing." Martinez may be found online at jmichaelmartinez.org.
