Artist Showcase – Victoria Edwards Tester
About the Artist
HeroLast night I dreamed a deer in the aisle of the church watching over the little Mexican boy who was afraid to pray for his feet to grow back. They’d been pared away, like my hooves, they’d left just enough to keep us standing. We faced the altar, but the policeman guarding the way back to the garden in the triptych blew his whistle into the small heart we shared. Then, Your sudden presence. A moment of laughter in the mirror of justice. Which has the look of Villa’s bright army, or a multitude of rosebushes breaking through the cold stone of the church floor.
SmokeThere’s a darkness at your shoulders that was here even before the mountain mahogany. Before this cap rock and this old wagon road from Georgetown that scratched its way to the top of the mountain. Before the valley below began to blaze and fade with cattle and the yellow stars of cottonwood and death. This darkness doesn’t offer any wisdom. It doesn’t reprimand, and it has never punished anyone. This darkness only waits. It’s like broad daylight that way. It’s like everything except Revelations. You can pray yourself sick, and it will never be the left hand of God, or a furious angel with a shining trumpet. It will never be anything except a darkness at your shoulders that was here even before the mountain mahogany.
The HistoriesWhen we sleep the deer return for their bones. They drink through the oak leaves floating on the waterhole. They turn towards the naked hearts we hide behind storm windows. They trample us like thunder. Like whisky, and the histories blowing through the verbena at dawn. Midnight when I piss in the blue enamel pot, I know it is useless, they’re not deer at all. They’re an army riding towards us, on the backs of the wrong horses, in the wrong winds. And they will never go back beneath the oaks until we have given them our deep tears for their souls, and all we have ever seen of this earth’s butterflies gathering pollen, for their bones.
Broken GlassOn December 22, 1882, an old newspaper reports a demented woman was sent from Georgetown to the Grant County Jail. Sheriff Whitehill is at a loss, poor creature, New Mexico law makes no provision for paupers or the insane. Her name, where she was born, or if she had a sister who loved flowering dogwood branches are secrets lost among the broken colored glass, the pioneer tears I’ve gathered among fallen mining shacks. I wonder if it was the brothel. If it was one man, or one-hundred. If it was a small crack in a treasured Tiffany lamp that split her like kindling. Or the disease of a season, not too far from midnight singing to the mountain mahogany, maybe taking a small one for a child to forget the one in the cemetery. I wonder if she went to California, on one of those wagonloads of the insane. Someday I’d like to make a stained glass window from these sharp tears I’ve stolen from the earth. But it would never go inside a church. It would hang against the sky, in memory of everyone who broke.
DescentI come from people who would not forgive. They were Spanish Protestants who ran like hell from Cortrai to Holland and New Amsterdam, damning the Inquisition, and they were the Inquisition. They were Puritans who painted their kitchens in Connecticut and Massachusetts the bright blue of angels, and led frail old women to the gallows if their bones creaked against any trespass, and they were also those cursing old women. They were Scots and Welsh who dreamed their iron and arrows like a thousand deaths of San Sebastian into the English army, and they were the English army. They were Indians, Potawatomi and Apache who nearly laughed themselves to death when they were taught to love their enemies, and their enemies were also my people. I too would rather laugh myself to death than die at the hands of an enemy, even if he is my relative. Or forgive anyone who’s truly wronged me or maybe only just slighted me or anyone else in my family, or even a friend, unless they’re on their knees near my front porch for at least one whole winter, and even then, covered with sparrows. And I am also those sparrows and in this year of Nineteen Hundred and Ninety-nine, I beg the Spirit of forgiveness to forgive me.
First Horses, 1519We were thrown into the sea at the Horse Latitudes. Our manes spit foam at the moon, our hooves plowed salt from our lungs until we heard the last syllable of the grieving Arab’s lullaby. Then we rolled like opened wooden chests over the black floor of the Atlantic, we were death looking for a white sail. Those of us who lived went through the green door of a New World where we where slaves. Gentled men and women who’d forgotten their own secrets. We kept what we forgot locked in our eyes and we rode into cornfields, into war, under the heavy thighs of men we wore like silver idols. Among the first laws of New Spain, it was ordained no Indian could ride us. We heard them tell the Indians we were immortal. That we were the lower part of a riding God, and they must build corrals to hold us back from devouring their human flesh. The Indians watched our captors ride us with saddles inlaid with silver and gold, watched as our captors slept with us like silken women, ran their tongues over the lashes of our velvet eyes, made us beds next to their own. The Indians went to war with us. They burned us alive, or filled us with arrows and ate the flesh from our necks and left us among the gramma grasses. When the first Apache chose one of our fastest and rode away into thorns and pink hills, the enemies of our enemies became our friends. We loved those men who spoke into our manes with sounds that had no word for king and many for wind. They sweated on us and rubbed our sweat onto their bodies until we were one. They raced us and cast cords around our necks. When winter weakened us they trapped us in canyons or against bluffs where our eyes rolled with the memory of salt waves. They breathed into our nostrils until our spirits mingled, and we gave them our speed and flesh in exchange for their language of wind. Later, the horse-whisperers stepped forward, they were men who were horses, too, of all colors. We chose them for our healers, we made them forget they were men whose descendants would be born inside fences, hospitals. They almost made us forget the lightless bottom of the sea, where our deaths are still calling like white sails.
The Blue Lady, 1635I, Sister Maria de Jesus de Agreda made five-hundred blessed journeys to New Spain to bring the word of Christ to people brown as Our Lord’s sparrows. On my flights I took them rosaries, gathered splinters in my palms when I planted His crosses near that river that echoed the glory of Our Savior’s body. They called me the Blue Lady because I wore the sackcloth of our Order like a patch of sky that flowed among yellow cottonwoods. The Lord sent me without a horse, without the swords of Toledo. It often happened at this very table. I lifted the bread to my mouth and saw angels. I was standing in that other country speaking in tongues I cannot speak here at the border of Castile and Aragon. I saw my duty sweet as the fold of a dove’s wing. I was martyred many times, my wounds blessed by my angels. I saw you, Fray Alonso, baptize the pueblos of Piro. I saw a bead of sweat sting your eye and join the holy water. I saw Fray Juan de Salas and Fray Diego Lopez and the poor Indians I sent to them from Isleta, the painting in the refectory of our Mother Luisa de Carrión. I turned the Indians towards you desert fathers. Once at the door of the church I administered a gentle shove to a crowd that caused much laughter. They are a joyous people, even stumbling. They weave bright necklaces of winter jasmine for the True Cross that lights the mourning veils of Spain. I have prayed for harmony between the governors and you friars. I have prayed for swords and arrows to return to water. I will say nothing of my three hundred year-old body that refuses to corrupt in this glass coffin. Hear that Spanish and Indian must be one prayer, the two wings of the same Inca dove.
Santa Rita Massacre, 1837They said it would be a feast, they said it would be a massacre. They said it would be friendship, they said it would be a famous lie fit for a play to be performed for the President. They said it would be whisky, sugar, flour and ground corn, they said it would be cannon, nails, metal, muskets, knives. They said the women would stand strong and virtuous in their bean and seed necklaces, they said the fallen cradle boards would run with the blood of Missouri rifles. They said James Johnson of Kentucky was a friend of old Juan Jose. They said Johnson hunted scalps for the gold of Chihuahua. That he would hack that happy drunk Indian to death with two knives. They say twenty fell, they say it was four-hundred. That Mangas Coloradas leapt the wall of the presidio with a baby in his arms. That those who ran away were deer or antelope. I was a fallen seed in a hoof print among the shattered bowls of cornmeal, and I never saw their brown legs touch the ground.
Because They Were HungryMy mother never had a biscuit for any man on a warpath. She loaded a rifle, made me hide in a cold oven. But when they came in peace, she fed the Apache. Because they were hungry. Then, we’re all alike, she explained as she hung our calico dresses like waving meadows of paintbrush on the clothesline. Souls is what we are, and our bodies are like these dresses that are filled with the breath of the wind for a while. Do good while you’re here. Before you’re laid in that pine box. Child, when you’re at the door to Heaven the question the tallest angel will ask you is: did you ever let anyone go hungry? If you did, your heart will weigh too much for those brand new wings that are like a blue heron’s. From then on you’ll have to be one of those lonely catfish, big as a cabin, that lives at the bottom of the lake we left behind in Missouri.
The Return of the RiverIt might be ridiculous that the sweet Mother of God could love us. Or answer a prayer like that, when she does nothing except appear sometimes when the wind blows the horse brush in Skeleton Canyon, holding a cactus wren in her thin brown hands. They say if a river ever flowed here at the foot of the Peloncillos, it’s been dead for a century. There’s no use looking through old campaign maps, or the torn diaries of cavalry officers, or the delicate letters their wives sent back East, like pioneer tears for fringe on those Tiffany lamps. Because you will never resurrect a river from the dust of a library, and Cochise County is a cemetery of rivers. There are days I want to drink glass after glass of this sand. I want to drink to the bottom of this mystery. Down to all of the love, all of the death. Down to the day the Mother of God reappears in a flowing dress that is blue and green and sewn with small gold threads. It’s ridiculous, and maybe it’s wrong, but when she lays down under the thighs of the young cottonwood, the gold threads leap off. They’re river otters and cattails and trout. And that’s how she gives herself back to us. Mine’s a joy that makes no sense. |
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