Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, NARRATIVE OF THE VISION OF OUR LADY OF ARMEIRO, by NATHANIEL TARN


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

NARRATIVE OF THE VISION OF OUR LADY OF ARMEIRO, by                    
First Line: The photograph of our lady of armeiro has been placed
Last Line: Have we ever known of any death so measured and so rigorous?
Subject(s): Death; Memory; Old Age; Photography & Photographers; United States; Dead, The; America


The photograph of our Lady of Armeiro has been placed
against a model ship which does not leave this desk.
It may be a criminal undertaking to try to speak
about the blindness of this Lady looking up from the mud.
And great care needs exercising in attempting narrative.
Thus: one night, the elements came together and danced:
fire melted ice, ice passed water, water fell down a mountain
taking the color of mud. Mud killed several thousand people:
drowned people outright, swept them away, miles downstream,
or left them stranded on treetops, rooftops, cloudtops,
or in the sun's arms, nursed there by invisible powers.
The live had time to contemplate the disastrous blindness
of man the wolf of man who could have warned them beforehand.
But for one victim: fate kept a special largess in store.
Our Lady of Armeiro was small, very young, mildly pretty,
with some black in her blood, some brown, some white,
and the raven hair for which her continent is renowned.
She was in no way distinguished from other ladies her age,
in no way a special candidate as "ancilla domini."
From the world's birth, however, every time elements danced,
it had been noticed they required a special sacrifice.
Our Lady of Armeiro must attempt to change the color
of this deluge which has blanketed the world like suffering.
She has bled gold, copper, rubies in the mud, but it has
not changed color. Every liquid of her body in the mud,
but it has not changed consistency: it still hugs, sucks,
suffocates whatever lies in its path. The hand in the
photograph is white and wrinkled: you have seen such hands
when lying too long in a bath. An ancient woman's hand.
The other is underwater, invisible. The part of the arm
we can see, upper torso and neck, face itself: brown.
At some point, later than photographs, they must have gone
white. The eyes are either resolved in blindness, or turned,
swollen beyond peace, toward her left—where she looks
at the right hand of whatever power lords it over this scene.
Let us say, for our purpose here, that she is
blind already with the blindness of someone who is hearing
the dead's voices far more clearly than heard in life.
Which is what, in the theory this work proposes,
we do when words come up into the soul
to settle it. We know the paradox of sainted blindness:
it is perceived even in the blindness of the ordinary blind—
that extra sensitivity to sound as if by compensation.
And not just earthly sounds but sounds we might describe,
to stretch a point, as super-natural. Our Lady
has a vision "at this point in time." She is not "having
a good day" nor, indeed, "having a good life." Perhaps
she never has had, or was destined to have?
The substance of the vision is that we are not
living in the true, aboriginal, archeological time
and are not, in fact, living in true space either.
This is something we have here which was once true time
and space, but now no longer so. We have imposed on things
our mental grids, first and foremost: time and space.
Divining this to be a fault, we have then declared
that, in the truth of it, all ours is relative
whereas the absolute: it has no time / no space!
Survive as best we can with this dichotomy, perpetually
trying to get ourselves out of our time into the "timeless."
But the true time flows out there unimpeded, just alongside
our world; the true space, likewise, stretches, boundless,
over the universe—but it does stretch,
it does not vanish in some "no space," "not this/not that,"
some "neither/nor" our teachers sell us.
Take our Lady. The photograph, perhaps the first in her life,
is unnecessarily restrictive, shows only parts of dying,
a portion of her pond, the litter round her.
Concrete edges (of what?); burlap (coffee?); a white shroud (?)
resting on a spar; a patch of red (blood?, a gas can maybe?).
All round the photo, stretches Armeiro's catastrophe.
The further out, the greater the life around our Lady becomes,
the smaller she seems, rounded by ocean, in which she perishes.
Finally, she is like a shrivelled nut in the palm of a hand
so large, no eye down here can compass it. We say "hand."
Stubbornly, we cling to images of saving grace. Even her face
looks up in hope, with the blind eyes: not bent over the chin,
broken, resigned: even the media said "brave face on death."
Is she seeing, as the old republics saw, in times of hope,
a better future for her populace? Or, if not that ambitious,
for her own kind and offspring? Is she looking up (as taught
to do by countless images) at powers have just announced
the earth's salvation? The greatness of this icon: impossible
to guess. But we were saying that the elements down here
had demanded an exclusive sacrifice, as they were used to do
from immemorial times. The volcano held her. With deep roots
in the encircling land, all around Armeiro, the giant held her
pinned to the ground under vast waves of lava.
Together with the voices of the dead, their hands held her;
their arms locked round her legs; whole lineages; families;
all of Armeiro's dead, since things began, around the ankles.
In her dream, she saw what they had wished and never secured;
what they had asked for and never been granted, including
the song of her thirty-third grandfather upriver, who had been
a poet and had asked that his song be allowed in this age.
We know you, Juan Valdez. You are the man with coffee beans,
serape, horse and, false mustaches (waxed), dispensing
the product number one of your country to the world's
gringos. Such a poet swims in the blind eyes of our Lady!
It occurs to us: tears are for those who still hope for hope.
It is not possible, decently, to cry for you, Lady of Armeiro.
The miracle of your blind eyes in the picture before us
is that you have added a drop to the sum of the great world
and the ocean of suffering there is not one jot diminished.
Have we ever known of any death so measured and so rigorous?





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