The Sunday Poem: Valley in Ancash

I look forward to the interpretations of this one from some of the politically inclined among you. 🙂

Valley in Ancash

Yungay

I.
We drove through a valley made out of rocks:
A soup bowl filled with pebbles and boulders.
I was retching with the altitude and staring,
nose squashed to the glass, at the few trees whose
spiky brown tops poked above the avalanche.
You said, “There was a town here once, until ’71
When the earthquake came. Now all that’s left is rocks
And the cemetery, on that rise there, with the trees.”
Oh, the road came over the town square
And past the school and flew heavily, paving
bearing down on the beds and the lunch tables
of the people in the stone. And I swooped
With the buildings, up and down, glaring at the gash
In the mountain that made the smell of decay
In my mouth and made me lurch to the window until
you stopped the car and I lost my dinner, over
the graves of the people in the valley, until in stillness,
I stood shuddering, gulping in the high, frigid air.

II.
There are all those people dead and buried in their graves,
all those people that live killing and are killed by uniforms
with men inside, machine guns, hatchets, university professors.
They have the mountains for their tombstone, every rock,
and each one has an oil-covered hand, a political tract,
an unmarked bundle of ragged clothes under it.
In the middle of the night they all get up and dance
a solemn dance around the burned the broken
the still barely standing palm trees that poke above
the burial dirt. The hands have cracked fingernails
and hangnails filled with sting. The papers
flutter and fool around the wind. The trees stand and stand
solemn as guards, stand over all the little kids
who were in the middle of math. They find these
mass graves each day, no names attached on toes,
no dental addresses to carry caskets to.
And I cannot point any fingers, for the world is full of rocks,
full of rocks, of stones, of boulders, and rocks, and stones
are thrown.

III.
There was a huge boulder along the road.
It stood like the mineral answer to the trees
barely visible across the scrabbled sun-choked
valley. There was no grafitti. There were no leaves

caught in its crevices. There was no moss.
It did not roll. There was only the faint scent
of mountain air, of the mountain looming gross
and unmanageable wherever people went.

IV.
I swore I would come to that valley again.
But I feel ashamed to say I have had no dreams.
Let the mountain come to me, so I can
eat the wind, hug the snow-blessed tip, and fall
the thousand miles down to pillow my head
with its mouth full of long-life bile, rest my head
on a softer bed than grass can offer, rest my mind.
I will be the foundation stone of valleys.
Let my back be a swooping road.

Before

After

Images from Karl V. Steinbrugge Collection,
Earthquake Engineering Research Center,
University of California, Berkeley.

This references the Ancash earthquake that destroyed the village of Yungay. However, it also grew to involve much of my experience of Latin American politics, somehow, catalyzed by a reading I attended by the remarkable poet Carolyn Forché, whose work chronicled much of the political abuses prevalent in the region. And now, it is called to mind both by the events in the Middle East, where the cycle of violence continues, “gross and unmanageable,” as inevitable and incontrollable by the common man as earthquakes are; and by this conversation (start here to follow the saga in its entirety) — simply, I think, because of the gaping chasm between worldviews evidenced there, a chasm that is the sort of gap that leads to violence. Or perhaps I think of this because my kids spent a gleeful weekend at Boy Scout camp learning to throw tomahawks, of all things: just the sort of violent useless thing we teach because it seems inborn in us to enjoy the solid thunk of metal into a yielding target.

There is some sense in which it’s all just shit the universe throws at us. And we’re part of the universe, and vigorously help toss the crap. There is some sense in which the death that comes, well, it comes, regardless of source, and it matters little to those who are dead. “The manner of a death” matters to those who survive; the dead are beyond caring. And the battles fought in the name of the dead to generate more dead… well, everywhere we step is a cemetery, as I have said before.

I wonder which is the more honest acceptance of our history: to carefully tend the bones in shrines and memorials, granting them the respect and dignity of a live lived and then lost; or to accept that they build the very earth beneath us and are nothing but the by-product of history, meant to be discarded.

By that I don’t mean that we should ignore the memories — that’s how we keep perpetuating the cycle. But it sure does seem that we fail to learn from them.

On the other hand — the sterility of these actions, the utter fruitlessness of blowing up yet another building, another bus, another village — that’s also an illusion. Death is not a sterile thing. Death is a ferment of new life, life we don’t expect or want. That boulder I reference in the poem, the one with no leaves, no moss, no nothing but markerhood, probably did harbor life. And every ruin becomes the foundation for a new building. We’re repurposers, and our conception of the past as worth preserving is a spotty and recent one; we prefer to build on the middens and graves of our ancestors, victims, and conquerors. From each of these things comes something new — not better, just new. And to be the source — even involuntarily — of this newness is not necessarily a bad destiny. Each person’s arc in the sweep of history is tragic: we are born to great hopes, we do our work, strive to perpetuate, and then die without passing on all our learning and without apotheosis. We leave things undone and people behind. But the arc of history — ah, a stumbling drunkard sort of progress, but progress, I think, nonetheless.

And in that sense, being the foundation stone of mountains, being the bricks upon which the future road is built, well, that’s no bad thing.