Song of a Reformed Headhunter

  The flight from CDMX to Puerto Vallarta took one and a half hours. Our Airbnb is on Pilitas, in Zona Romantica, the gay part of town. Had lunch at Cafe de Angel, walked about in the afternoon, and then a dinner of whole red snapper in Joe Jack's Fish Shack, which was not a shack, but a popular restaurant. The server deboned the snapper expertly in front of me. After dinner, went to a bar called La Noche, recommended by Bench. On the rooftop, talked to a young server who came from Venezuela. On the ground floor, a drag performance dragged out for one and a half hours. We were seeing many older gay men with other older gay men. Guy remarked accurately that PV, with its cheaper rents and drinks, seemed to be a haven for retirees from California.

When we arrived yesterday, the Pyramid of the Sun was covered in fog. The misty cover disappeared in the course of the morning, by the time we took our photo in front of the Pyramid of the Moon. The whole complex was truly impressive. What we did not expect was the colorful murals in the complex and surrounding residential ruins. In the murals, the liquid-shaped things coming out of mouths are speech bubbles. Can you spot the "football player"? Our guide Rogelio from With Locals was excellent. He was informative and skeptical at the same time, very unusual for a tour guide.   Back in the hotel, started watching The Witcher: Blood Origin , with Michelle Yeoh in it. Then found out on IG that Henry Cavill has been dropped from both Superman and The Witcher. When Guy joined me, we watched Glass Onion , with Daniel Craig as the detective and Edward Norton as the Meta-like CEO. Not brilliant by any means, it was worth watching.

  Yesterday, visited a place that I had always wanted to visit since I heard about it: Frida Kahlo's Blue House, or Casa Azul. It was a beautiful compound of house and garden. The great paintings were not there, as they were scattered in the world's museums, but the material remnants of one's life were. The wheelchair in front of the easel in the artist's studio. The mirror above the beds in the day and night bedrooms that enabled the artist to paint while lying down in excruciating pain. The artist's ashes in an urn in the shape of toad, to recall Diego's nickname for himself, the toad-frog. The corsets—medical and decorative—that held the broken body straight. The song written by Patti Smith, painted on the garden wall, inspired by Noguchi's gift of a display case of butterflies to Kahlo. Famously, when Kahlo had to remove her gangrenous foot, she said, "Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?" After Casa Azul, we walked to the lov...

The actions of Pedro (Marco Leonardi) and Tita (Lumi Cavazos), the lovers in this 1992 Mexican movie Like Water for Chocolate , directed by Alfonso Arau, cannot stand up to ethical scrutiny. Unable to marry Tita because in her family the youngest daughter must stay single to look after her parents, Pedro marries her oldest sister Rosaura (Yareli Arizmendi) to be near his true beloved. Tita too is not innocent, as she leads her kind doctor on, finally breaking their engagement to be with Pedro. But the film is not about ethics so much as it is a fable about an all-consuming love. It opens with Tita's great-niece retelling the romantic story as she has heard it from her mother. It is also about the stories that women, across generations, tell each other. The story, for instance, about having a box of matches inside each of us, that must be lighted one at a time. If lit all at once by an overwhelming passion, the conflagration will kill us, as it does to Pedro and Tita when they final...

Translations Of An Unknown Mexican Poet 7. The storm blew out the trees, and night became the night all of the dark crossed the dark. The mountain heaved to stony feet and climbed the straining rope of a track, hand over hand over hand over hand over hand over hand the ground the mind slept on and dreamed of thinking, the water the river fed to generous and gated pipes, the fire the home subdued from lightning and burned, the air the body breathed without breathing. All’s over. The mountain climbed, and we hanged off its back, precipitously, a rope curling from waist to waist to waist to waist to an empty noose that hanged straight by its weight. The storm blew out the trees, and night became the night all of the dark crossed the dark, on Christmas night.

Translations Of An Unknown Mexican Poet 6. Even the light crumples in this city, let alone the restaurant menu thrust from street corners, the river trying forever to straighten its creases, the raveled sleeve of care, the knifing of a king. In some back kitchen the witches are crumbling a bag of ears into the soup. In some back alley the washing machines are muttering at three a.m.. The river tries forever to straighten its creases. The deed is done. But does it smooth the wrinkles or shrivel the dark to a thudding heart, to a skip? Or does the dead, the deed, slip in between the turn and the twin? How can we bear this trying river, this crumpling light in the city, this let alone, if all our heeding doesn’t end with a beheading?

Translations Of An Unknown Mexican Poet 5. This house has not grown too tight for Juan yet, or too last season for a new sense of the world, but the discontented walls provide no pockets for half-chewed gum, a shiny quarter, hands. And the boy is searching for pockets everywhere. Not the room shared with his sister, not the bed which sheds its blue cotton skin without warning, Not even the body turning out its pockets quietly. My son, there is a silver lining in the mind, a seam we follow like a suture, then a scar, and then an igneous ridge on which genius runs, scrambling and scraping some, to the very head and see the chewed-up jungle and the shiny cities kept safe and secret in the pocket of the palm.

Translations Of An Unknown Mexican Poet 4. No one is reporting the mysterious package left in the middle of the packed train platform but everyone round the package must have seen the red gift paper tied up with a thread of string. No one must get hurt, least of all my Rocio, breathing like a newborn in her big new bed, white breast unbuttoned by her pink pajamas and cupped by the night air’s big warm hands. I hear the rush of trains in my head, the screech of brakes that power the new engines, the crowd driving from every direction towards the door— compulsive ecstasy—before getting on and off. Someone has to see the mysterious package. Someone has to say something to the cops.

Translations Of An Unknown Mexican Poet 3. After the dark has leaned in the corner for hours, the corner of the kitchen where I sat to write, the notebook opened like a souvenir matchbook down to its last match, the ashtray on my right; after the dark has looked for hours from the corner of her eye, has looked pale, lovely, almost white under her translucent sheath, her mouth a startling ruby, her ring catching the history of moonlight; after the dark has listened for corners in the hours, has listened for the figure in the formless night, the ranchera in the blood repeating its black plea for an inhabitable country out of human sight; I strike my last match and the dark comes to me. The flame looks and looks, and then it fails to see.