3 Poems by Susana Plotts-Pineda
REQUIEM
How all the little angels wept
when their music ceased, pink hands
traced rosetta patterns over a bromine night,
and every cupola, yellow mouthed
in a painted sky, rife with amphibious movement
delphic clouds, veiled glass skin, felt
this peninsular sigh, a small drama in
pen marks obliterating the foreground
of an ink blot forest, brown trees
in sepia wind, discolored
sun, a howling of many
orphaned animals against
a paper breeze.
ARIA #1
Filled with fish and starry shock,
enmity, and brine in spectacular operatic
pallor, I bring you pinecones
made for shelter, turn zealots from the balconies
in large unexpected droves
falling palms, bougainvilleas, droughts
like those that first lavished our irrupteous
volcanic body in deep-green irradiations,
blunt masculine fields, voluble produce
melon stripes and blight. We regret to tell
the womb and its instantiating purview,
mold that bridges me from you
and this world from the catapulted next:
I like the color of sea sponge,
I like your envy,
am everyone, an architect,
irascible like the veins of every palm, zealots
still falling from the buildings in a soft,
inconsequential, decrescendoed
brush—my bed, my hands,
you and the prescient stars we
die into.
DOBLE CODIFICACIÓN
In the university lawn felt strangely loosed
from the world, felt the sky turn
perspectiveless, no scale, at least on any realist terms,
beyond vaguely suggested models,
on the contrary, an incorporation
of the toponymic glyph into
an alfalfa hill, house of sticks, stables, gardens
the building it was meant to represent
in leaves and pauses. Fortress
and battlement in twigs, stones, because
one must avoid giving the Spanish undue credit
and an archaic imagination creeps into me at this hour
attributing their conception of space to
otherworldly tar, gray-yellow portal in the black road,
a faithful adherence to the Italian Quattrocento.
From my blank office window experimented
with the adoption of a new style:
the early European engraving guiding
the brushstrokes that make up textiles
and suits of armor in the Códice Tlaltelolco
driving the question skyward, one is allowed
to make fictions of the
squirrel or jaguar headpiece and cloak,
sparks in the tall brown grasses,
architectural and decorative elements, all that derives from
a glyph now smoothed to stone, the museum’s left entrance,
poorly signaled Western models or
a mark like an x on the mouth of the road
a circular word like a swallow’s call coming back to
an x on the blackened projector slide or
the minutious incorporation of renaissance tropes into
the roving tapestry of a tree-lined question
producing a strange effect inside the “Pre-Hispanic” canon
singular in that its summit can hold multitudes, large gatherings.
The encounter is even more subtle
because, I stepped out into that first ochre film and
when the tlacuilo smuggles a reference to his own conception of time
never returned.
Didn’t we all in some way or another want to
emblazon the seal with our silver palms
in a representation of San Sebastian’s martyrdom?
What is the link between these
transmissions, sea to radio, saint to T-shirt,
quetzal feather crown to Christian tabernacle,
photographic image to what already happened and all that
won’t, as if the overall landscape, image-field eluded
revolution, empty classrooms,
Western influence, as if the painter were sitting on the boundary
lines of her own culture, open to any and all reinvention,
the muralist tells us
without jeopardizing the original matrix
that his murals are all gone
like his hopes accessible only in black and white,
red thread, synecdoches
veil of judgement’s night, labor
and field after slate field. Sunflowers
in double time.
The pictorial translation of a political and cultural strategy
reinscribed into the eave of a new millennium, biblical
scenes not fifty years away where
a man fades
into a very recent metal
under an ancient sky:
the black pupil of the road
in the middle of the light,
or the Códice Sierra where
the conquest penetrates into a remote
town in the Mixteca, Texupan. Murals
hover above empty chairs, empty desks,
doors that close, ways to sit at a given table, steel syllables
helix reality into two, a weft in the world
of a dog named Cuba in the lawn
where a painter from Culhuacán
draws a cave from which his grandparents
dead center, always patient, were born
an eyeful of the latent world
cinematic light on the speckled white dove
as well as certain gods.
Susana Plotts-Pineda is the author of In Order to Extract the Memory it is Of Course Necessary to Build the Room (May 2026) and a recipient of a Fulbright Award in Mexico City.