A rant while waiting for the sun, By Tim Hazell, Sept 8, 2006

Today the birds can’t cry out. They sit on branches in the park with melodies too languorous to flow. The white egrets have impossible stones in their throats. I watch from beneath the canopy in the only patch of sun, suddenly remembering all the pain we have ever felt.

All the pleasure, all the discomfort, all the flowers we have sung, made visible now as they grow roots and wait for an Indian summer. It is damp everywhere. A season of flint and obsidian knives has begun that runs angrily, hot with fetid breath one moment, standing waiting for us in a chill the next. Gardens and orchards are unfamiliar, distended and strange, with too many dripping leaves and worm-eaten fruit. Listless, we part the green walls, no longer searching for a way out, but moving and daydreaming in hieratic, or in the script that angels use.

Black halos surround the faraway heads of waking volcanos, children of Itzatzihuatl, the sleeping women. Small fires are extinguished in hisses of steam. Electric blue flames take on shapes of feral beasts and apparitions, whispering and sighing. Trees dissolve, seeds burst. This is the beginning of eruptions and lava flowers in bloom, filling our air with detritus. Clouds roll, dark and liquid above.

Flurries chill the buds, a gentle descent of pale hands. Their slender volumes stroke green leaves and the stems and berries of red chile plants. These same red berries incinerate our stews. We look up at the aquatic world that heaves above our heads and breathe underwater. Between the angels and terra firma you and I are suspended. We make believe we can fly, perform miracles, stepping over high olive sierras like smiles on stilts—anything is possible. This is a white magic time. Forget the sodden clergy, forget the machines, cease to cry out and pound or creation itself will stop. Hell is descending, or, rather, jubilation is ascending. This must be the real promise of an afterlife—flutes and bells and a mongol gunpowder assault.

As the thickening twilight gathers, myths and motifs elude gravity. Fire and earth are conceived. Reason demands that air and water provide the counterpoint. A fundamental harmonic interval occurs. Sky mechanics articulate as mind and body electric operate in dynamic tension—a world of being and becoming. A fat, resplendent merchant appears, master of disguise and espionage, the Aztec Potchteca, consummate trader in elite goods. His skin glistens and his chocolate eyes blaze. This earthy prince is our impressive savior and will not let us perish, nor sleep as the spirits erupt, or wander about as lost gluttons sated with his material goods and food. It is September, and all the fireworks ignite and throb.

All the churches ring as if manipulated by one man. Birds rest in the laurel trees of the town square as innocent, primal things, or fall upward, leaving wisps of smoke behind. Crowds throng the stairs. The rooftops, balconies and terraces are jammed.

In another time, drums would have hammered and flutes would have wailed all day and night. Now we must compromise and hang from poles, or watch the castillos destroy themselves in stages. A murder of priests has come and gone, but still course the warren of tunnels beneath the streets as subterranean rivers, or rise to bloom in their dank cellars like stubborn black flowers.

The air is thick as thunder looms again and we put on more layers of clothes, or drape ourselves in makeshift raincoats of plastic bags. We wear the crisscross tracks of our failure and success, bearing the weight of our miracle making as bridges between here and heaven, pricked by a rain of falling fire and needles. This is an end and a beginning. We make a leap of faith into the turbulent calypso of the present, performing the implacable rituals of our coming of age.

You switch off and navigate by instinct. Sister wood and metal sweats. We are excited, unfettered again, like young dogs loose in a thicket of brambles and mesquite. We push on into the labyrinth to try to achieve something out of the ordinary. Our volcano’s children hover in the air, carelessly dressed, pure of heart, in landscapes of desolation. Try to achieve something out of the ordinary. Push on into the labyrinth!

The wind grips my throat with hands of leather. It flings rain upon the pecan and pomegranate trees in front of it like a diviner. They bow their heads and drop their buds. Our decapitated gardens will bear a strange harvest of chiles too red—unwholesome and soft. If the days of thunder persist, this year’s caterpillars will not become butterflies. There will be nothing to incinerate my stews. Dust from distant volcanos scents our house. We dance in the only patch of golden light, waiting for the sun. It has come to a full stop.

Tim Hazell is a multidisciplinary artist in the areas of painting, music, theater, education, writing and research, specializing in Latin America. He may be contacted at hazel@unisono.net.mx or at his website, www.timhazell.com