S****************:
T***************L
ARS IN A BOW
El Paso.
ZE
All summer we set out to make an undocumentary. Rosa Alcalá taught me the word. I introduced myself to her because I love Undocumentaries. Our email messages were brief to one another. Mine were all fanfare, hers, gracious. Shyly in one of my messages I admitted that three years earlier Ricardo, Zé, and I had driven from Corpus Christi to San Diego. Stopping in El Paso, I’d wanted to invite her to have coffee with us. I’d wanted to call her out of the blue—something I never feel or do—without an introduction. Instead, because the night was dark and twinkling, I’d written a concave poem, “Stars in a bowl: El Paso.” The next morning we walked into Ciudad Juárez. It was 2010. We went to a Sunday market that Ricardo had known as a child. Ricardo bought me a necklace of saints. I stumbled with Zé in the street. A nearby pedestrian helped me to my feet, blessed me, and told me to go home. That was six years ago when the Federal Police occupied the city, when the front page of its leading newspaper queried, “¿Qué quieren de nosotros?” This summer is haunted, but indifferent to rememory, as expanded cinema. I want to tell Rosa Alcalá that we filmed a “poet tree.” Hanging from its branches were words like leaves. Fairy houses dotted its roots. Dulce and Zé built environments, dug holes and ditches, sculpted sundials so we’d always be able to tell time what we really think: it was the hour of my defeat but also hours of all things good and sweet, ungendered as our “No Movie” or Zé without his accent.
