fever_fwd.html

Fever Dreams:
Contemporary Arizona Poetry

Edited by Leilani Wright & James Cervantes

Forword

It has been twenty-five years since I drove south from Searchlight, crossing the Dead Mountains and the Colorado River, bouncing along abandoned railbeds in a Land Rover we nicknamed "Camel," its water packs and gas cans sloshing as we turned toward the Hualapais. Late afternoon light set fire to the world, an infinity of desert sky and circling hawks. My friend stopped in a dry wash and killed the engine. There was a silence that I had never known, but that the poets of this collection experience often: a silence bordered by wind and the human pulse, primordial and perfect, a quiet voiced by the cliffs, the raw sun, and the passage of millennia.

We spent that night and several others waiting for moonrise on the desert floor, and then for deepest night, a halo of galaxy and dense starlight, camped in the river-carved arroyos, following the thin trails of rusted food tins and extinguished fires among saguaro, yucca, ocotillo, and prickly pear bursting into flower after the briefest rains. My friend was searching for geodes, fire opal, and quartz, petroglyphs on the dark walls of the dry washes, holy places and a sense that, no matter how injured he was from his attempt to vault the rising Berlin Wall one early morning in I961, he could still find a place, pure and ungoverned, from which to retrieve his soul. "Europe is the past, for another time. This is for the spirit." I was too young to know what he was telling me. This was my first Arizona.

Many nights passed, and days climbing rock ledges and wandering through ghost towns, following abandoned trails and the broken hopes of prospector claims. We collected a grocery bag of burro shoes, and geodes split like eggs into shimmering amethyst grottoes. We didn't talk very much, but I filled several notebooks with illegible notes. We were very close to the first settlements of the original people: Anasazi, Sinagua, and Salado, who knew this world when its rocks were soft and its animals spoke. Now their pit houses, pueblos, cave dwellings, and kivas remained in the mystery of sudden abandonment. Coyotes howled in the lavender hills. If poetry, then the kind that arises from what Jane Miller calls a "lunar" stillness-and from the trembling grid of its latter millennial cities, Phoenix, Flagstaff, Scottsdale and Tucson where, the poet Jon Anderson writes, in "the summer, something . . . explodes every two or three days."

If one cannot keep vigil in a canyon, then one can be humbled by the expanse and learn something of the Sonoran Desert's power and enormity by reading these poems, which sojourn in the future as well as the deep past, in dream-time that resembles the aboriginal, a fever dream of fire-clouds, chamizo, loaded guns and uranium, in "vast spaces / at high speeds all watt and animation" (Jane Miller).

Arizona's poets are from the Hopi villages, from the Fort Apache and Tohono O'odham (formerly Papago) peoples, and from the Sleepy Rock People, Bitterwater Clan, Red House Clan, and Red Streak Running into Water Clan of the Navajo, from Mexico and also from Augsburg (Germany), Austria, Boston, New York, Pittsburgh, San Diego, and Texas. They write in English, Spanish, and the tribal languages, each distinct and other, making of poetry what it could not be without this place, translating into poetry its timelessness and awe.

"To Navajo eyes," writes Rex LeeJim, "landmarks come alive with ancient stories of the Navajo world: Locust heading the emergence, gods arguing over who should raise Changing Woman, monsters being slain, Coyote showing up everywhere. Northern Arizona is holy ground from which my voice rises."

In this "restless / critique of the sun" (Ofelia Zepeda), Arizona's poets have forged a language of "separation, hopelessness, needle and spoon" (William Aberg) and are awake to the late century's accelerations, "where everyone has a therapist & no one has a lover," and where one senses "the apocalypse in Cecil B. De Mille-Dolby-Wraparound / Cineplex-Stereo with the seams of the globe quaking open" (Barbara Anderson). They write of jazz, serotonin levels and talk shows, homelessness, convenience stores and gunplay, Tiananmen Square and Bosnia, and they write with foreboding: "but how can we presume / rats in a maze do not presume / mesquite trees cut down to give / a smoky flavor to butchered cows / do not presume" (Richard Shelton).

"The moon comes and goes," writes Jeannine Savard, "a drunken woman / with white combs in her opening hair." And Ofelia Zepeda writes, "It is 1:30 A.M. / Sleep won't come. / She listens to music / O'odham waila music, San Antonio Rose." We are awake with them, these poets of the early future, whose writings answer their land's extremities, who are making an America and its poetry in the open, restless, radiant, and knowing, in a place which Michael Bowden, following Herman Melville, claims "can't be found on any map."

Carolyn Forché

Waila Music
by
Ofelia Zepeda

It is 1:30 A.M.
Sleep won't come.
She listens to music.
O'odham waila music, San Antonio Rose,
a wild saxophone and accordion.
In her mind she dances.
She dances with a handsome cowboy.
His hat is white, his boots are dusty.
They turn in rhythm together.
They don't miss a beat.
Their hearts beat in sync.
Their sweat is mixed as one.
The earthen dance floor beneath them,
the stars and the moon above them.
That rhythm, that rhythm,
it makes them one.

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