Evening. Pan down a herringbone sky
the color of hammered copper, sunbeams
through royal palmfronds striking the indigo walls
Diego painted as a wedding present to Frida,
giving it a fountain for a mouth and a tongue of water
so it could bear its blue witness.
A slight breeze stirs papier maché
Japanese lanterns like penny-banks holding
echoes of soirées where Mexico City's wild angels
gathered to sing with tequila throats
and raise a glass to the door of fire.
On the terrace Diego, in 20 gallon
white Stetson, Frida in denim workshirt,
slump like rag puppets in wrought-iron chairs.
Indio workmen on scaffolds batter out
street-side window frames with six-pound sledges,
the blows, their echoes, trochaic, unbearable,
rock the walls that stand like an open sarcophagus,
cradling bamboo gardens aflame with Birds of Paradise.
Other workers brick up holes,
turn the hacienda to a fortress to give their guest
the exile asylum from the assassins everyone knows are coming.
She raises her head to ask:—Why clean house for a dead man?
Diego lifts his bulging frog-like eyelids:
—To appease your mother's ghost.
Frida sees a third eye on his forehead, closing.
She hoists herself up with her ivory cane:
—Time to bury the magic of the house.
As she hobbles toward the garden
she is seen through the film of a self-portrait
in a gallería window. In the retablo she sprawls,
naked, her pubic hair scrolled piano wire, the stillborn
she bore Diego orbiting the Detroit Ford factory
in a planetary system with her pelvis,
an orchid, hooked surgical tools, the painting a collision
between her suffering and her instinct for form.
Diego touches her chin:—I must paint you.
Frida brushes his hand away:—Don't.
You have Mexico. All I have is me.
He whistles loudly. Two boys in Communion suits
rush through the gate, filling her arms with blue gardenias.
Mariachis march in, silver trumpets blaring.
She lifts her eyebrow:—Another of your desperate fiestas?
Diego dances like an elegant elephant.
Frida waves off the street-band
with her flower scepter, hobbles back to the terrace.
In the sky above her,
a film in slow-motion: a trolley-car
crashes a bus, an 18 year old Frida spins
like a ballerina from the wreck, one giant fishhook
through her abdomen and out her vagina,
her girlhood prayers to be special answered at last.
She tilts the whiskey back:—I try to drown my sorrows,
but they've learned to swim.
Water spurts from a fountain over a stone Tlaloc:
geraniums sprout from a three-legged pot
shaped like a fetus strangled by its umbilicus:
—I will never love anoth...
What she leaves unsaid brings him to his knees:
—After all we've meant to each other?
—I need a new inspiration, a vortex, a nebula... a divorce...
A clash of metal is workmen
shattering wine bottles, imbedding glass razors
into wet cement to scoop the knees of would-be thieves.
Pulling his head to her breasts, she whispers:—My baby.
He stands, plods up the staircase, stops, turns, looks back.
She is looking into sunset
stropping clouds into blood-wet knives.
What she has done is not the same as tossing away
young men like pinches of spilled salt.
A hummingbird hovers above her shoulder.
Last light glimmers over orange-tiled rooftops.
The workmen are beating the Blue House to death.
With each hammer blow, it moans. |
