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and the lumber and turpentine camps back up in the piney woods, red-dirt farms poor as pellagra where I hoed figs, picked strawberries and mustang grapes, pumping gas at crossroads service stations,
tooting my harmonica and singing my ditties at fish fries, church socials, railroad stations and whorehouses.
No good water, no good houses, no jobs, no prospects, East Texas was a text in human misery, a message I was not ready at sixteen to articulate, though anyone with eyes understood the injustice of that poverty.
Oh, and I met a girl I called Dolores, though that was not her name, and tasted in her hair at midnight the secret essence of the wind.
Nineteen and twenty-nine, first year of the Dust Bowl, I followed my daddy Charley to Pampa, Texas, working as night clerk in a flophouse of one hundred and twenty cots for oil field roughnecks, a hardhanded collection of drillers and riggers, timber haulers and mule skinners, boomers and roustabouts,
and the girls on the top floor priced accordingly at two dollars a throw, plus a quarter for the bed, hence the all-night serenade we took to calling the “Rusty Bedspring Blues.”
When the bunkhouse closed I worked at Shorty Harris’s drugstore, sweeping, hauling, tidying the shelves, jerking sodas up front while he poured corn liquor and Jamaica Ginger for parched souls in the back room.
That’s how it went—I dropped out of high school, got fired, got hired, took things as they came, time wheeled past, until one day I found a dust-covered guitar in the back of the store, polished and tuned it, and set about learning to play.
Matisse: Tahiti (1930)
If I were young again I would forgo Tahiti and move to America to begin a new life in New York, a city both human and classical in its geometric modernity,
as I have discovered much too late, on my passage to the Pacific.
Nonetheless I pay homage to the lovely Polynesian women and tour the scenery dutifully.
I search out Gauguin’s son, Émile, living the life of a fisherman,
with no wish for European ways and a contentment unknown to his father.
They are filming a movie here, Tabu, and its directors, F. W. Murnau and Robert Flaherty,
invite me to live for a week in their camp on an idyllic cove
more lovely than any I have seen before.
Still I find myself eager to depart for the outer islands,
the far Tuamotus, eager to escape
Papeete with its film of dust and colonial snobbery.
For three years I have painted nothing at all.
I have abandoned my wife
on her sickbed to travel halfway around the globe in search of what—
jungle flowers, an exotic cast of light?
Why does my heart remain loyal to art alone?
My dearest Amélie, let me tell you about the Tuamotus: night is a wash of stars in ash-blue ether,
dawn the rustle of trade winds, glitter of flying fish at the horizon.
Days, I swim in the lagoon amidst marvelous creatures of preposterous vividness,
sea horses, anemones, plumed aquatic ferns.
Imagine a life stripped clean of every artifice, nothing but a small house on white sand amid coconut palms,
and all of it, everything, subordinated to those vast, borderless fields of color—
the sky and the sea.
It would require a new medium to equal their purity,
and at this age I doubt myself capable
of more than these sketches of tropical foliage, shapes and notations
toward a project I sense at the furthest horizon
of consciousness,
Mao: On Patience (1931)
Sick with malaria, I withdraw from the clamor
of disputatious cadres
to live in a bamboo pavilion with He Zizhen,
my revolutionary companion,
who has surrendered our newborn daughter
to be raised by peasants. A model comrade, she would not
saddle the Party with an infant’s needs.
Word of my wife’s execution in Changsha has reached me,
and my youngest son dead, in hiding, of dysentery.
Nationalist troops have pillaged
my home village and desecrated my parents’ graves.
But I have long purified myself of any attachment
which might belie the Revolution.
Who can blame a river
for the stones it tumbles smooth?
Here, I bathe in a basin on the moss-covered floor
of a cave above three ancient pagodas.
I take time, in the evenings, to inscribe the poems
I have jotted down on horseback
throughout these many months of struggle.
Returned from Moscow, the young men of the Party
exalt in the examples of Lenin and Stalin
and find me an impediment to their stratagems.
I am accused of “mistaken work methods”
but not of “patriarchal tendencies.”
I am accused of a “roving bandit ideology”
but not of “right opportunism.”
Running dogs, Mensheviks, bourgeois revanchists,
mountaintop-ists and closed-doorists—
life has become a contest of euphemisms,
and it is essential to win this taxonomic battle
by which future categories of enmity shall be fixed,
so that our mistakes, if any are detected,
shall be defined only as “errors in terminology.”
High on a hill overlooking rough forest
I have named my new home “The Hall of the Wealth of Books.”
Here, like a scholar of old, I wait
for the latest intrigues against me to play out.
Like a wise farmer, I will sow patiently.
I will husband my strength,
studying the weaknesses of those who oppose me.
It is better to burn 100 acres of grain
than to let a single snake escape the fire.
Zora Neale Hurston: Farmyard Hymns (1932)
God made mules
and He made men,
maybe God should
try again.
God made chickens
cheep and squawk,
foolish creatures
shush your talk.
God made roosters
crow and preen,
stupidest birds
I’ve ever seen.
Bacon from the sow,
ham from the boar,
is that what God
made piglets for?
God made horses
strong and fast—
who cracks the whip,
who wields the lash?
God made us,
for good or ill,
I wonder
is He happy still?
Frida Kahlo: Self-Portrait with Hand-Mirror and Retablo of Leon Trotsky (1933)
my canvas my prickly cactus my pickaxe
my accident my bus ride my all mixed-up insides
my androgyny my lost progeny my petite bourgeoisie
my bloodworm my cauls my sack of penny nails
my hammer and sickle my tinsmith my pictoglyphs
my disease my pliancy my splintered bones
my pelvis my Coyoacán my womb my home
my white light my Blue House my red red flag
my workers’ protest my clenched fist my amanuensis
my shark my shadow my heart of darkness
my lovers and letters my his and my hers
my transfusions my transformations my testimony
my reflection my being my agony
my me my me my me
Picasso (1934)
Spain and women: they bleed,
they argue and protest,
they stink of camphor and the sea.
Yet I cannot live beyond their shadows.
I cannot create my art
without their elemental ore.
I quarry them. I gore them.
I rage against their flags and lances.
I am the bull—certainly, I am the bull.
But I am also the matador.
Orson Welles: The Stage (1935)
Empty theater, New York City.
WELLES
What lasts, what endures, as Shakespeare knew, is this:
the story of a life. No more, no less.
The stage is dark, the screen a blank, and then:
let there be light, up with the floods, the cans,
the scoops, the luminaires and follow spots,
beam from an old projector reaching out
like the mind, like the dawn, in the beginning was
the word, spoken by me, of course. Who else?
Cast against type, I stand outside of time,
forger of destinies, smelter of ore,
my voice like storm-wind swelling every sail.
For I am neither Lear nor Harry Lime
nor Charlie Kane, but he who tells the tale.
Fate’s chime, destiny’s roar. The narrator.
Fade to black.
Woody Guthrie: Come to Nothing Blues (1936)
By nineteen thirty-four I had married a local gal of sixteen years named Mary Jennings and settled down in a whitewashed shotgun shack behind her parents’ house with our little baby daughter Gwendolyn.
For some time I’d been playing with the Corncob Trio weekends at Flaherty’s Barn or the Willard Club, and had grown proficient not only on harmonica but the spoons and standard drum kit, guitar and mandolin, double bass, and could even scratch a tune on fiddle and warble a few notes of saxophone.
Weekly we appeared for fifteen minutes on the KPDN Breakfast Club broadcasting across the Texas Panhandle.
On the side I had a family trio with my Uncle Jeff and Aunt Allene, and one time we signed up with a traveling tent show supporting some Kansas City chorus girls with magic tricks and my cornpone palaver and pontification between sets but it didn’t come to nothing at all,
which was about what most folks had in their pockets those years, which is how I commenced to hanging with the hoboes again, singing the “Come to Nothing Blues.”
Nineteen thirty-five the dust rose up and buried Pampa, Texas, like the Red Sea swallowed Pharaoh’s army.
Many thought it was the end-time come instead of black Kansas topsoil blown off hard-scratch farms a mile high, and that year I took to the superstition business to feed my family, reading fortunes and healing by touch, offering lessons in telepathy, clairvoyance and the ciphering of dreams.
Faith healing mixed belief and money about like wildcatting for oil or anything else in Capitalism’s kingdom, and so they paid what they could in nickels and dimes, sometimes a greenback dollar bill or a sack of chicken feed, once a red rooster and some jars of garden vegetables, which is when I took up the “Pickled Beets Blues.”
Nineteen thirty-six, nineteen thirty-seven, what can you say about those rock-bottom years of the Depression?
Pampa was nothing but a load of sorry shacks abandoned by the boom to dust devils, oil derricks running right up to Main Street and carbon black refineries spewing acrid smoke, how could I feel sorry about leaving that mess, or my pregnant wife and child, with no solid income or aptitude for fatherhood?
So I hit out of town hitching west in a snowstorm, across New Mexico along Route 66, then riding the rails from Deming to Tucson, all kinds of fellows on the road, bindle stiffs and tramps and vagrants, men looking for any job of work,
and I had my share of easy riders and snug reefer cars, of railyard bulls and hobo jungles, sleeping under bridges wrapped in newspaper, door-to-door looking for food, on the bum, dead hungry,
and I hobbled through Glendale, Bakersfield and Fresno, drifted through the old glittering Sierras where the gold once was, waited in line with five thousand other fools for a dam-building job in Redding,
and finally come down to Los Angeles where I took what work they had, hammering roof shingles and playing guitar in saloons full of Okies, drinking away our homesick sorrows with the “Lonesome L.A. County Blues.”
Guernica (1937)
The canvas that yawns against a wall as blank as Guernica.
The hand that guides the brush that seeks a form.
The name of the town toward which the bombers dove: Guernica.
Cattle on green hillsides, sheep in flocks above Guernica.
a wall a city a ruin a trope a painting
For the fist and sickle, for the brotherhood of the republic: Guernica.
Against the triumph of lies, against the darkness: Guernica.
What painter, what artist, what other man than I, Picasso,
could create such a work, duly signed by my hand: Picasso.
As for Spain, as for politics, I have stood mute until Guernica,
watching from the safety of exile the tragedy of civil war.
Now, with paints and brushes, I march to war.
a flag a tyrant a lamp the eye of god a war
The name the lightning burns into our hearts: Guernica.
Let it stand as admonition and animadversion to all war.
Let it serve as totem and reproof to the idiocy of war
as the painting I so name bears witness to its modern form,
to Franco’s savagery, the death of innocents, to war
in its ruthless, mechanical guise, twentieth century war, total war.
Against the bombs of the Fascists I counterpose my painting.
Against the destruction of Spain and its people, let this painting
embody the tribute and testament of Pablo Picasso.
The name of the matador and the name of the bull: Picasso.
The name of the Minotaur, the name of the tauromachist: Picasso.
The name of the enemy and his implement: war.
Against which, like the thunderbolts of Zeus, Picasso
hurls paint against canvas, creation against death: ¡yo, Picasso!
From the blue sky, by the hundreds, bombs falling on Guernica.
oil paint the eye of god a sword a scream Picasso
a candle a memory a dream the world in flames Picasso
Mothers bearing dead children are anguish given form.
Stink of burned flesh and wool is obliteration in animal form.
In the eye of the bull, in the scream of the horse: Picasso.
In art there can be no compromise; only while painting
can I perceive what transcends the historical act of painting.
a lance a banner a template an annunciation a painting
A brush is a weapon of vengeance in the hand of Picasso,
to strike down death-merchants, haters of modern painting,
Franco, Mussolini, Hitler with his sentimental flower paintings.
“If cities are destroyed from the air, the enemy cannot carry on the war.
The annihilation of Guernica resembles a victorious painting
by an old master, not this infantile, degenerate painting.”
From failure, from breakage, from silence, from loss: Guernica.
The name of the dove in the burning dovecote: Guernica.
a vision a wound a flame a teardrop a painting
With pencil, with chalk, with a brush I shall seek its form—
with my hands I shall remodel what tyranny deforms.
As for Spain, lost to medieval slumber, to a violent form
of self-abnegation, like an apparition from a Goya painting
she sinks again into the darkness. Power is a form
of narcissism; totalitarianism corrupts even as it informs
those who destroy and those who create, both Franco and Picasso.
In a century to which devastation has given its true form
Guernica is an elemental dispensation, a document formed
in the name of humanity to denounce the nightmare of war.
Against chaos, against ignorance, against all future war
a brush moves across canvas and truth takes the form
of Leningrad, of Nanking, of Hiroshima, of Guernica.
The name of the burning world is Guernica.
a vigil a vessel a fist a pyre a form
a plume a banner a vision a trope a painting
a veil a scream a wound the world in flames Picasso
a tyrant an elegy a lamp a dove a war
a dream a ruin a teardrop the eye of god Guernica
Mao: On the Long March and Protracted War (1938)
For two years, exiled from military leadership by my rivals,
I issued petty regulations
and promulgated land reform in the soviet base area,
amid the remote hill country of Jiangxi and Fujian.
Rules for farm ponds, for fallow land, for bamboo groves.
Proclamations urging the farmers
“to carry out the spring vegetable planting with fervor.”
My brother Zemin produced a currency
stenciled with Lenin’s likeness on crude grass paper
we forced upon the local landlords in exchange for their hoarded silver,
while in the cities, we are told, people cart inflated money
to market in wheelbarrows.
What buys three eggs in the morning
at sunset purchases only one.
Encircled by the Nationalists, besieged, we retreated
into the desolate mountains of Guizhou,
across far Yunnan, in the shadows of the Himalayas.
Harassed at every turn by warlords and enemy forces,
still, how could I not feel joy to be reunited with the Red Army,
to be vindicated in my strategy and recalled
to my position of leadership in the Party apparatus?
If the enemies’ troops climb the ridge behind us,
I reflect on the inevitability of the defeat of feudalism.
If their airplanes appear in the sky
I recall the great poets of the Tang dynasty,
Li Bai and Du Fu,
whose words descend across 1,000 years of history,
from human mouth to human ear,
from heart to heart.
Bullets cannot kill such truths.
Forty-one years old, my only possessions
