Rarámuri

    by Susan Stevens


Father Juan Fonte, Society
of Jesus, stepped into
1600s Mexico, its barrancas,
and saw men who could run
deer to exhaustion. They must 
have God, he thought. Give them God.
The Jesuits’ gifts of goats, fruit trees,
metal tools failed to wrest an unbroken
song from the Rarámuri, who kept
their tesgüinada, music, scattered fields,
but shrewdly welcomed the god-foil
to sorcery.

Now, the matachines dance
with the dutuburi, mingling of God
with gentile. How long?
How long can you outrun, keep
your planting-stick? In this chronicle
of retreat, only the Jesuits kept plumbing.
Well, God is persistent.

In your sprint against all time, will
the Chihuahua al Pacifico race you
to exhaustion? Can reed flute, rattle, violin
counter what is circling you
in absurd overrefinement?

Father Fonte and his padres
could learn this from their proselytes:
that your nuptial with the land was a shotgun wedding.

And it wasn't the fiestas that rankled
in the Jesuits’ minds—in men who cultivate
austerity like a lover; it was the tesgüino,
mild, sacred beer from corn—sole
deliverance from cave, austerity.

Your children die to become stars;
death is a land of opposites, where souls
move in moon’s day—homage paid backwards
by the living, left-hand, sidelong. You have
no counterpart. No Third-World tryst awaits men
whose poetry is in the running, 
and no mere diastolic measure says it all:
You have run 200 miles without stopping,
400 years steadfast.