The book of a Poet Laureate

The chapbook comes in a paper enveloped with a golden gummed paper  seal

                                                                             

Wings Press, of San Antonio has published in a beautiful chapbook edition, Begin Here, a collection of ten poems by Rosemary Catacalos, the Poet Laureate of Texas for 2013. 

Don Quixote de la Mesa

Don Quixote de la MesaFlying across West Texas
down country highways
and I-20, I was lost.
I had missed a turn.
Invisible towns flashed above
the dashboard as I floored it,
the odometer spinning
as if my Toyota were cruising
through outer space.

Flying across West Texas,
I cut an unwavering swath
through scorched scrub brush,
blackened trees and grass,
skeletons, souls frozen in hell,
arising from the red furrows,
parched creek beds and draws,
the horizon misty with smoke.

Flying across West Texas
I circled old town squares,
shabby abandoned houses,
barns, and restaurants
boarded up and leaning west,
the cemeteries more populous
than the posted city census,
the lonely wind howling and
my fuel gauge on E.

Flying across West Texas
I saw not a soul, the cotton
bolls all picked and ginned,
and those left behind like
snowballs in briars resisting
the afternoon heat.

Only a trickle of cars
and semis pushing 90,
crystal beads in a rosary
in front, back and side of me,
flew through that desolate
landscape that yearned
to be pitied by mountains
or cradled by green hills.

Buffalos, cattle, goats, llamas,
and sheep sprawled in
sparse knots looking for
shade, indifferent to the
three-second tourist.
Barbed wire enclosed land
as flat as Columbus's
worst nightmare while
dusty roads in straight lines
merged into the sky at the
vanishing point.

Flying across West Texas
suddenly I saw giants erupt
from the earth, towering monsters
all menacing arms and moaning.
First, just a few, then dozens,
hundreds, maybe thousands.
Was this Texas, La Mancha or Mars?


Flying through West Texas,
where the oil rigs buck like metal
broncos, electric bulls or Clavileño,
I wondered where all the knight errants
were to pledge their undying love
to their Dulcineas and tilt at those giants
to save this land and restore harmony.

And where were all those practical
Sanchos, squires to remind those
Don Quixotes this was West Texas
and that evil doers were elsewhere
and those giants merely windmills.

Nancy Membrez

A new review devoted exclusively to poetry, Malpaís, Spanish for badlands, has just appeared at Placitas, New Mexico. It can be obtained from its editor, Gary Brower, P.O. Box 339, Placitas, NM 87043.

The inaugural issue includes, among many poems, these verses from Keneth P. Gurney´s "Before Going Home:"

There is a circle of ash trees

where you go to lighgt fires,

sing songs that call spirits,

elementals, more crows

than I can count.

Horses

Artists in Placitas create beauty from nothing.
These horses who have nothing
but beauty of body their ancestors gave them,
create when they run,
a changing dapple of sun
on their shiny skin.

Gabriela Mistral: A Poet to Keep in Mind

Poetry Foundation has the following article on Gabriela Mistral

  http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=80901

Our Demons

First of all it has to be pointed out that the word “demon”, as used in the title of this blog has very little to do with the view of the demons or Satanic spirits commonly feared by contemporary religious and not so religious people of different theological traditions based on a dualistic opposition of good and evil. It points, mostly, and in a purely metaphorical way, to the old Greek concept of demons or daimons as spirits of lesser power than gods which acted among humans with no malevolent intents.

In a poetic sense we are all inhabited by these demons, which play their tricks, posit their riddles, whisper their desires and demand constant attention in our minds, keeping us busy in trying to deal with their incessant activity and to rein their impish energy.

Poetry is, in this sense, a demonic product–the result of an inner life incessantly active and creative. By writing and reading poetry we keep our demons happy and under relative control.

By no means, though, should poetry be confused with a mental exercise for prophylactic purposes or as a curative treatment for a troubled soul. Nothing farther from poetry than a sane mind.