The Dolls of Chamula

--San Cristobal de las Casas

--for son, Jerry, who was there with us

No, this is not simply a case of the gray
principle, ignorance breeds spirituality. Nor
luxuriant squalor, per se, nor exhausted wonder
either, at what is both unavoidable and unseen.

The hopeiessness surprised is ours to find
them there in a painting a former, opulent time
had ascertained, in a dollhouse basilica
whose blue, childlike designs men guard with guns

to keep what's inside from being exactly free.
The light alters five centuries. Men all in white
have bound their heads in white to cleanse the robes
of the saints. Incense drowns the stench, or it combines

resins of pinetails strewn on the baroque tiled floor,
reek of tobacco and walls of pure must with any man's
offering, chickens, pouches of meal, a famous soda pop.
The floor glows with scattered clusters of thin candles

that mock the same as create the luminous clutter
offered a higher world. For here is no sanctum sanctorum
of an imperial faith. Here, remnant of old winters' fires,
five pews are what's left, stacked at the original doors.

The chancel paintings are dark as saints' sins, forgotten
as well, where now young men dance the walls on puppet swings,
painting away the latest jokes they tell. Unheeding beneath,
a few, in the fashion of their faith, follow the proceedings

from glass case to case, where five, in labored modesty,
do not disclose the dolls, but wind them in sheets
and wave their robes in incense, with never a leer
as a bright ribbon slips from a pure waist.
They dance the dolls most solemnly back into place
to boxharps, guitars, and concertinas trembling languorously
more than they play a tune. There's no need of a priest;
Saturday afternoon in the wet season and a mesmerizing show

of their faraway God's hand-me-down dolls are all there is
to answer the spirits mocking muddy Chamula with eventual
splendor just beyond the smoke of their own fires.
In utter meanness they clothe the dolls in the next world's raiment

they make when the buses don't come out from town
and strangers buy their days for pesos, pare down their hours
to nothing or they wouldn't be there haggling in the rain.
Out in the plaza mayor is one thing; here you pay to get in.

If dressing their saints so insinuates they're dolls, too,
it's less than half the truth, and they wouldn't figure so
to the storied One soiled on the altar and sharing still
with them the intimate disasters of the hours, in purple

they made perfect as they could, if only He'd come down
and suffer them. For they too love in memory of what can't be.
Meanwhile they fix Heaven in the miniature finery of the dolls
as if Heaven were senseless as the dullest work of play.

But they're not lost in some heart of the earth, in a Heaven of
dolls, in the knowledge of dolls, luckless by every light we'd bet on
and no more guile about it than a somber game of extinction.
They live to weave all worlds to one at once,

making change in words scarcely known.
If daily their looms fill with a lost beauty,
it is no falser than our own, and like
our own also, not truer than guns.

First published in "Higginsville Reader"