A Virgin in Mexico City
for Jennifer Clement and Victor Manuel Mendiola
As I walked out that morning from the Hotel La Casona
I was thinking, or I think that I remember I was thinking,
that the world is its own poem
and needs no writing into existence
by you, let’s say, or me. I walked
a block or so along Durgano
thinking how little use the city had
for
any
reflections
of
mine
on
its
wealth,
reflections
on
its
poverty,
so desperately, equally apparent,
how very little use the city had
for poems written by a visitor,
and
one
so
briefly
there.
I found
myself, let’s say, at a rotonda.
From it, six avenues radiated. For a while
I stood by a gas station in the triangle formed by two of the roads.
Notices by the pumps read Apague el motor.
Men
in
green
overalls
were
filling
up.
At
the
tapering
point
of
the
wedge,
close
to
the
traffic,
a
shrine
the
size
of
an
infant’s
coffin,
painted
white,
with two tall cypresses before it, and red roses,
was enclosed in a low box hedge.
High above was a sign reading PEMEX,
advertising Premium and Magna grades of gas.
Inside the shrine, in a padlocked glass case,
an
unprepossessing
plaster
Virgin
stood
behind
a
vase
of
lilies,
in glory.
If
you say the scene was unremarkable
I shall be tempted to agree, and I shall disagree,
for I was thinking then, and I think now,
of humble domestic altars with candles, joss and blossoms
lodged on the walls of Bangkok blocks
between
the
air-con
and
the
fire
escape,
and I was thinking of wayside shrines in Europe,
a
statue
of
the
Virgin
carried
home
from
Lourdes
on the back of a pilgrim who built a chapel for her,
a panorama of Jerusalem
painted for the fourteenth station of a Calvary,
and I thought then, and I think now, although I can’t say what the
thinking means,
that the universal spirit lives in glory, and is great, and will be known.
In Sant’ Antonio di Padua
Christ winked at me as I was on my way
to Sant’ Antonio di Padua,
surprising
me
with
an
affable,
almost
roguish
camaraderie
–
winked from a hologram postcard that showed him
closing his eyes as he gave up the ghost
then opening now this one, now the other,
or even both at once, depending where I stood,
as if to say he was only fooling and wasn’t really dead.
That
week
a
Pope
had
gone
to
the
Happy
Vatican
in
the
sky.
The basilica was a stir of pilgrims and tour guides, a bustle
of grieving and prayer.
Stewards were making a clatter, setting out wooden collapsible chairs
for the swollen congregation they expected at a vigil.
Among the school of supplicants that shoaled about the shrine
I watched a woman, thirty-something, business suit and pearls,
pressing
a
sheaf
of
paperwork
against
the
reliquary
–
she lip-served in silence as if she were giving a blow-job to a lizard.
The
Catholic
church!
–
I’ve
always
had
a
soft
spot
for
its
comedy,
its hotchpotch of the silly, the rotten, the true, the outlandish,
the
downright
horrific.
All of the kitsch! The bones behind glass! The everlasting chapels
papered
with
testimonials
to
the
Virgin’s
intercession.
The
first
time
ever
I
told
a
lie
was
in
the
confessional.
The
first
woman
ever
I
fell
in
love
with,
ever
desired,
was
a
nun.
The
first
man
ever
whose
brutal
ways
I
detested
was
a
priest,
an Irishman with a hacksaw voice and a harsh, abrasive smile.
How I thrilled to the ritual hiss of “those that trespass against us”,
sibilants pissing through Mass like the Trinity at the Eternal Urinal.
How I rejoiced at the thought of piecing the whole of the scattered
man together
when
I
saw,
in
the
Hof burg
at
Vienna,
one
of
John
the
Baptist’s
teeth.
A Jesuit lent me And Then There Were None
which
I
finished
in
terror
at
four
a.m.
in
a
room
in
a
German
pension.
Another
Jesuit,
when
I
was
fifteen,
wanted
me
to
go
to
his
place.
Another, Canadian-Irish, taught me the Gaelic for pullet shit.
The church was a giver and taker, a helper and harmer, a friend and foe.
It taught . . . not love, which had purer sources, but love-despite-
the-evidence.
I learned to love not only the man on the cross, the supplicant woman,
the vendors of cards,
not only the canny cardinals elsewhere, affecting to be above ambition,
but the whole of the terrible comedy in Altichiero’s Crucifixion here,
where a man who has simply done a job of work has turned to walk away,
making his way through the crowd, his thoughts on other things already,
the hammer with which he drove in the nails tucked carelessly into
his belt.