Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Eisenstein in Mexico

The icons in his blood began to work again,

He had taken leave of Russia and himself.

The Mexican skull beneath his face

Spoke Aztec poems to the east,

Laughing out the Day of the Dead.


Emotions and senses

Were taking him over,

The deliberate atheist

Painted blue for sacrifice.

He wanted to love the crowds,

The faces of strange brothers and sisters,

People without the law.


Once more a child,magicked and seduced

Into wild ecstatic knowledge,

He mounted images and rode them away;

All the centuries were happening at once,

Around him,impossible to take in,

Dreams and nightmares commingling.


Pencil in hand, he sketched

Epiphanies,vivid as the folk tales

And myths in the cradle,-

Everything was preternaturally alive

Yet skeletal, already dead.

This country was whatever he could imagine,

Remember, create.


The torero,blessed before the corrida,

He carried dark saints on his shoulders,

Through the blood-fiesta;

It did not have to be Utopia or Eden.

Just an unofficial communion,

A minute or an hour of pure love.

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