Poet's Choice

By Robert Pinsky
Sunday, February 5, 2006

There's a theory that American poetry resembles jazz. Both arts create innovations that, adapted to tamer forms, enrich popular arts: jazz harmonies in pop music, fragmented narrative structures in the movies that recall modernist poetry.

The speed and daring associated with American cultural mixing can be distilled in a poem with a compression, inwardness and nuance that no movie or song could match. Arizona poet Ofelia Zepeda is a poet who writes in two mother tongues. Some of the poems in her book Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert are in both English and the language of the Tohono O'odham, or Desert People. The sense of cultural mixing can call up a certain longing for home in a way no mere cultural purity could do:

Bury Me with a Band

My mother used to say, "Bury me with a band,"

and I'd say, "I don't think the grave will be big enough."

Instead, we buried her with creosote bushes,

and a few worldly belongings.

The creosote is for brushing her footprints away as she leaves.

It is for keeping the earth away from her sacred remains.

It is for leaving the smell of the desert with her,

to remind her of home one last time.

Here is another poem dealing with death and customs:

Long Hair

On the other side they sing and dance in celebration.

When we get there our hair must be long so that they recognize us.

Our hair is our dress.

It is our adornment.

We make sure it is long so they recognize us.

"Long Hair" is followed in the book by a poem that demonstrates the way culture is always mixed, in motion rather than static. It is part of the poet's art to convey that assured fluidity in a few phrases. The first image epitomizes the compression of poetry, of how much it can do in a breath:

Hairpins

They glitter like broken glass on black asphalt.

Dime store hairpins of clear plastic, rhinestones, glass diamonds, and multi-colored aluminum strips.

Little hairpins, plastic combs all placed at intervals around her hair.

They glisten, sparkle, throwing light all around her,

giving her a halo.

It is the rhythms and textures of human speech that incorporate asphalt, plastic and aluminum into the religious and cultural meaning of the hair. Rhythm and a sexy, casual syncretism of culture are explicit themes in another poem:

Waila Music

It is 1:30 A.M.

Sleep won't come.

She listens to music.

O'odham waila music, San Antonio Rose,

a wild saxophone and accordion.

In her mind she dances.

She dances with a handsome cowboy.

His hat is white, his boots are dusty.

They turn in rhythm together.

They don't miss a beat.

Their hearts beat in sync.

Their sweat is mixed as one.

The earthen dance floor beneath them,

the stars and the moon above them.

That rhythm, that rhythm,

it makes them one.

(The poems by Ofelia Zepeda are from her book "Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert." Univ. of Arizona. Copyright © 1995 by Ofelia Zepeda.)